Jay Garrick's Costume Revealed

So CW’s Flash, the best live action superhero show on the air right now and possibly of all time, started its second season this past week.  The first season started slow and rocky but picked up incredible speed to turn in an incredibly excellent and jam packed extravaganza of comic weirdness and well written characters.  There was compelling human drama amid all the time travel and psychic apes to say nothing of all the DC Universe shout outs and cameos.  I’ve written about the possibilities of season 2 previously but I wanted to take one more look now that CW has officially revealed Jay Garrick’s costume.

Jay Garrick in the comics was the original Flash, created by Gardner Fox in 1940s during the so-called Golden Age of comics.  He was later reintegrated into the mainstream living in a parallel reality called Earth-2, which was populated with other heroes from the Golden Age DC was no longer publishing.  So far his role has been pretty unclear on the show but this costume speaks volumes about what will be happening with him and even though I know this is old news keep reading because ‘Would You Like To Know More’ isn’t just a column about reporting news, it’s a column about wild speculation and in-depth nerdy explanations. 

That Jay Garrick’s costume was going to change was more or less a given from day 1.  Jay’s costume is one of those unique visual tropes that works perfectly well in illustrations but comes off just a little too unreal when visualized in live action.  Even so I don’t think anyone expected his on screen costume to be as faithful as it is.  He’s more or less been recreated with strict accuracy, the same binary color scheme that identifies Garrick’s design as the byproduct of the ‘40s, and even the lightning bolt decal covering his entire chest.  There’s a lot that his costume tells us about what to expect from Jay and what to expect from his reality.  It’s been more or less confirmed by the show runners at this point that Jay is a traveler from the multiverse coming to Barry’s world seeking his help to save Earth-2, which makes sense given Jay would be the Flash of his world.  So, this costume actually tells us a lot of key things about Earth-2.

Firstly we know Earth-2’s visual palette and character designs will be culled from the classic, pre-New 52 iteration of these characters.  During my JSA piece I mentioned that there was a possibility CW would draw from the very recent visual reinvention of Earth-2 and the JSA for inspiration as the new costumes were thoroughly stripped down and more visually friendly.  They’d already taken from the revamp in terms of Hawkwoman as the reboot re-imagined her character into a black woman, a decision I’m glad CW is keeping with.  However, this costume design more less cements that Earth-2 of the CWniverse are going more or less classic and I couldn’t be happier.  As much as I liked Earth-2: World’s End I have to admit the visual design of their world has always felt very ashamed of itself and less than compelling.  However, I think there’s more than simple aesthetic sensibilities at play with this costume design choice, I think it’s a clue to the nature of Earth-2 and how it’s created in this universe.

As I mentioned this is a very similar visual design for Jay Garrick but not a one-to-one parallel, the key difference is the texturing of the costume.  Where Comic Book Jay’s costume was designed to be essentially clothes he’d thrown together himself as a sort of makeshift costume this TV version has a well tailored and professional looking design.  His belt, gloves, and boots all speak to something created very purposefully and the visual redesign of his leather jacket screams military, it reminds me most of a pilot or airmen’s uniform.  That’s the word I’d most use to describe this costume revision: it’s a uniform more than superhero costume. 

In the comics Earth-2 was usually situated somewhere near the modern era with the only real difference being that the heroes who defended the Earth were the same ones who fought the Nazis in World War 2 but what if that’s not the case here.  My theory is that this Jay Garrick and his Earth-2 are still caught in the grip of World War 2, it’s simply a war that’s dragged on longer into the contemporary era due to the interference of meta-humans.  While that may seem like a bit of far fetched conclusions it’s not as out there as you might think mainly because we already know how parallel realities are created in the CWniverse.  In Flash season 1 ‘Cisco had a subplot where he was plagued by visions of his own murderer at the hands of the Reverse Flash, an event that did happen in a possible timeline that Barry altered.  This subplot was concluded when the Reverse Flash revealed to ‘Cisco that he was actually a metahuman and that his power was being able to see through the boundaries of the multiverse. 

So we know that the dark time line still exists and became its own universe the second Barry altered time.  If altering time results in parallel realities created by the new possibilities forged by our alterations that means someone mucking about in the time stream could create a whole mess of parallel realities and we know there’s a whole group of superheroes and villains about to jump into the time line this winter with Legends of Tomorrow.  I contend that in Legends of Tomorrow the heroes will be forced to fight the immortal Vandal Savage across time and their actions will change the time stream to create the CW Multiverse.  All of that because a costume design happens to look more militaristic than normal, told you this was a column about wild speculations. 


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