Comic Rainbow - Flash Family

Welcome back to Comic Rainbow, the show with a pointedly vague brief so I can focus on pretty much whatever I want so long as I’m indulging my color obsession.  In the spirit of undefined focus this week we’re looking at another topical subject: The Flash.  In case you don’t know CW’s The Flash premiered its 2^nd season on Tuesday of this week at the time of writing.  The show had a rocky start but rocketed into the hearts of nerds and common folk alike through its winning combination of comic book craziness and engaging character and story.  I personally love CW’s The Flash, it’s the only DC adaptation of the 2010s to rival the works of Marvel and is the best comic show currently on TV.  This new season is primed to continue the show’s broadening horizons by introducing both the multiverse and a collection of Flash allies such as Wally West, Jay Garrick, and Jesse Quick.  This has got me thinking about the Flash Family, a group of heroes who all draw their power from the speed force, which I discussed previously in “Would You Like To Know More.”  So, this is your full spectrum look at the Flash Family in all its shades, shames, and successes.

Most of the Flash’s defining mythos of the modern era comes from the work of the great Mark Waid.  He wrote the adventures Wally West in the aftermath of Crisis On Infinite Earths and the death of Barry Allen.  Waid is the one who introduced the Speed Force and developed the idea that it could be used to explain a variety of powers beyond simply super speed.  He introduced the idea that the Flash could create his frictionless aura through the speed force, transmit kinetic energy, and vibrate his molecules using this mysterious energy.  Blue Cobalt is the big black stain to come out of that era, a fact even Waid admits.  The adopted son of Charlene and Hugo Thawne Malcolm ‘Cobalt Blue’ Thawne was eventually revealed to be the secret twin brother of Barry Allen who was accidentally swapped at birth.  While the idea of “evil twins” or secret siblings can occasionally yield interesting results like Dr. Hurt or Vulcan Cobalt Blue ends up more like Scott Snyder’s God awful Owlman.  The revelation is pointless and quickly faded from the memory of everyone involved.  Maybe he would’ve stayed around if his powers were more interesting but they never raised above “huh” levels of curiosity.

One of the curious things about DC’s history is that unlike Marvel their roster of characters doesn’t just come from their in-house company.  Because DC tended to buy up their competitors they ended up with a bunch of similar characters like how Plastic Man and Elongated Man are so in tune or Captain Marvel and Superman.  Additionally, DC itself was formed out of a conglomerate of comic publishers from the ‘30s and ‘40s melding together.  As a result they ended up with about 3 super fast characters from World War 2 who fought the Nazis.  We’ll get to the other two later but for right now I’m talking about Johnny Quick real name Johnny Chambers.  Quick discovered a formula that afforded him incredible speed, though this was eventually retconned that the formula was like a mantra that allowed him access to the speed force.  Quick eventually died but his daughter Jesse took up her father’s mantel. 

Jesse is easily my favorite speedster for a ton of reasons but chief among them is that she was allowed to legitimately progress as a character.  When she was first introduced she was reckless and optimistic and a member of the Teen Titans, then simply The Titans.  As her career progressed her reckless streak diminished but never faded and her optimism only increased, what’s more she actually grew as an adult.  She moved on from the teen heroes and joined the Justice Society, got married to a fellow hero, and even altered her costume to celebrate her mother’s heritage after mending the two’s relationship.  She even went through a very grounding an interesting period without powers where she served as curatorof the JSA brownstone and the Flash museum.  She’s had an entire rich history that defies all the standard, dismissive conceptions of comic book character progression. 

This probably won’t win me any favors.  Bart Allen was a ‘90s character introduced through Mark Waid’s run on the Flash.  He was the son of grandson of Barry Allen from the distant future when Barry lived out an entire lifetime in the 31^st century during the split second prior to his death in Crisis on Infinite Earths.  When I first started getting into more mainstream comics in the ‘90s Impulse was both everywhere and insufferable, a hallmark of the last days of the worst ‘90s excesses alongside the Metropolis Kid and Tim Drake’s weird T-shirt costume.  The three were part of an insufferable comic called Young Justice and would later appear on the much better animated series of the same name.  Bart in the animated series was tolerable but comic Bart has always been far too irreverent for my taste.  It’s not that I don’t like that kind of hero, it’s just that the kind of irreverence he was pushing wasn’t actually pushing any envelopes.  He was basically the human version of the ‘90s entire faux anti-authority fetish, like a super powered sentient bubble tape commercial or some kind of super speed Poochie. 

Bart’s bounced through a number of more likable personas since that initial debut including a long running (pun intended) time as Kid Flash with the Teen Titans and even a brief stint as the Flash in the aftermath of Infinite Crisis.  None of those appearances ever really worked for me, Bart was a passable Kid Flash but he never felt like more than costume filler while his Flash run was a little too undefined to be truly engaging.  He died for a time only to return during the events of the incredibly awful and disappointing series Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds, a book so bad I may need to review it one day.  Since then Impulse has been decidedly absent from most DC media and I couldn’t be happier, the Flash Family really didn’t need superhuman go-gurt. 

When I was growing up Wally West WAS the Flash.  Sure I knew Barry Allen existed or was at least aware the character I was reading in old silver age comics was not the same wisecracking super speedster I knew from Grant Morrison’s awesome JLA comic or the animated shows but to me Barry Allen was just another Flash like Jay Garrick.  No, as far as I was concerned Wally West was the Flash, the fastest man alive and the true air to the name.  Now, as an adult, I still pretty much hold that exact same belief.  As great as the Barry Allen comics were Wally’s stuff is just more well informed by modern conventions of storytelling and character, and at the end of the day that’s why he comes out the superior Flash: character.

Prior to very, very recently Barry Allen basically had no identity, that’s just sort of how comics worked during his tenure.  Unless you were a really important hero like Batman or Superman or DC was really trying to push the envelope with your book like Green Lantern/Green Arrow you didn’t get that much development.  That was especially true for the Flash because it was sort of common knowledge that what brought readers to the Flash comics wasn’t deep and engaging characters, it was the whacky insanity of the universe and the adventures.  That’s part of why, even though Flash has one of the best rogues galleries in comics almost none of them had good identities prior to the modern era. 

With Wally though, he spent his formative years in that vaguery but the second he hit adulthood comics were starting to really care about character and development and identity and he had Mark Waid, Grant Morrison, and Geoff Johns all contribute to defining his character.  Those three men are titans of comics, not just that they’re some of the best writers out there as far as digging deep into character and definition.  Under their work Wally developed as this uniquely fun and optimistic and capable hero who stands tall as one of the only major heroes not defined by personal tragedy.  That alone cements his place at the top of this list, what’s more, just like Jesse Quick, he’s a hero who was allowed to grow and age and change.  He moved through identities, got married, had kids and none of it interfered with his career as the Flash, it was all wonderfully integrated to only enhance the story at hand.  There’s a reason that even now with Barry back in the driver’s seat for the Flash authors are still pulling from Wally attributes and story points to inform the character. 

Strap in folks, this is a weird one.  The Black Flash is an incredibly weird and decidedly minor aspect of the Flash cannon who is so amazingly cool it’s an absolute shame he does not appear in more comics.  The Black Flash is essentially the grim reaper, only manifested through the speed force.  In the DC Universe it’s sort of a well regarded idea that fundamental forces like death, evil, wisdom, that kind of thing, will incarnate across all forms of bizarre cosmology.  As a result the DC Universe is lousy with grim reapers and humanoid embodiments of the idea of death, each one personifying death through a different spectrum of universal cosmology.  There’s Nekron, lord of Death from its place on the emotional spectrum, the Black Racer, the platonic ideal of death, Lady Death, a member of the Endless, supernatural living ideas, and then there’s the Black Flash.  It’s been shown before that those connected to the speed force don’t so much die as the Black Flash catches them and simply subsumed into it. 

It’s a weird idea to be sure but it’s the perfect kind of weirdness to compliment the Flash universe overall.  At the height of Flash’s creativity the comic was like a weird kind of 3^rd Doctor era Doctor Who with crazy adventures through parallel realities and alternate dimensions and hidden cities of sentient apes, or the Flash would get caught up fighting sentient weather or future magicians.  The Flash universe has always been about taking completely ludicrous ideas completely seriously and finding a legitimately threatening nature within that seriousness.  That’s the Black Flash, this completely dopey idea of a corpse in a black Flash costume animated out of a cosmic force to consume those connected to it but executed with terrifying seriousness.  The Black Flash is like this mindless, unstoppable thing that is coming not just for you, but for your loved ones, and the real threat is that he’s so quick you’ll never see him coming. 

Max Mercury is the only character I was a little hesitant about putting on this list because he’s not really flawed, just misused.  He’s another one of the golden age speedsters DC ended up with after their incorporation so he wound up dormant just the longest time.  Johnny Quick at least got to be resurrected as part of DC’s bizarre All-Star Squadron comic in the ‘80s but Max Mercury didn’t re-enter the DC cannon till the later ‘90s.  When he did return from his long exile it was in the twin roles of super speed scientist and guardian to the previously mentioned Impulse.  Mercury was always the most tolerable part of any Impulse comic as he actually balanced his role as guardian pretty well.  Jay Garrick also worked as Bart’s caretaker and while Jay picked up the slack in the legitimate parent department of setting down rules and boundaries Max was more like a cool teacher.  His speed may have allowed him to meet Impulse on equal footing but he always exuded this aura of genuine appreciation and faith in Bart, like he believed Bart really did have the potential to be more than just a super fast smart aleck.  However, as good as Max Mercury was a guardian he would be infinitely better as a super fast scientific yogi.

It’s slowly been established Max was the speedster most in tune with the speed force.  However, more than simply charting the speed force in a clinical and scientific way he actually meditates to sort of commune with it.  This was in the days when the Speed Force was basically just the Flash universe equivalent of the Force from Star Wars, it’s where the name comes from if that’s not clear.  What was cool about this was that Max could actually manipulate the speed force in a ton of unique and weird ways like sensing other speedsters by their movement or creating speed force duplicates of himself like astral-kinetic projection.  It’s a great idea that really needs to be fleshed out with how much it adds to the Flash mythos.  I especially like the sense of cosmic level mysticism inherent to this interpretation of the speed force, like the science is still there it’s just less foundational. 

Even though Wally West is the man I most considered to be the Flash there’s no denying the incredible imagination and coolness inherent to the Barry Allen classic years. Flash comics are where we got gorilla city and the Multiverse for the first time to say nothing of the incredible roster of villains.  Even after the silver age had given way to the bronze age in the ‘70s and early ‘80s Barry Allen Flash was still brimming with creativity and weirdness.  Flash is actually kind of unique in that respect in that his stories preserved their element of childlike wonder and completely unrestrained creativity for the longest time.  A lot of that has to do with Flash’s origin point.  While the original Flash appeared in the ‘40s under the golden age era the character of Barry Allen who revived the title popped up in the mid ‘50s.  This was the time when weird science and insane fantasy ruled the comic book landscape and superheroes were only just starting to rediscover their place at the head of the pack.  As a result Barry’s adventures did the most to incorporate the out there, unrestrained sci-fi of the era. 

That’s why so many classic Flash covers are drawn in the style of Weird Tales or Tales to Astonish.  The basic idea with a lot of Flash villains was simply an excuse to create thoroughly bizarre visual fights like Mirror Master’s powers.  In a big way Flash comics of the silver age worked even better than Batman comics because Flash himself was already perfectly situated to combat these weird science threats as a product of weird science himself.  Whatever the era lacked in definitive character it more than made up for imagination and limitlessness.

While Black may represent the dumbest ideas imaginable White is more about showcasing awesome stuff I couldn’t fit into the other colors for one reason or another.  In this case it’s Jay Garrick, the original Flash created by Gardner Fox.  Jay Garrick was the original fastest man alive and technically the only Flash whose powers don’t wholly derive from the speed force.  The idea was that a chemical experiment granted him superhuman speed, which he used to tap into the speed force, though it’s never really explained why Superman couldn’t pull the same trick (I assume it’s cause he’s not human.)  In any event Jay used his speed to fight the Nazis alongside the Justice Society of America during World War 2.  After a brief stint fighting the Norse apocalyptic fire demon Surtur in Limbo (yes, really) Jay and a handful of other Society members returned to the present resolved to reform the society with an emphasis on helping the successors of previous heroes find their place.  It’s a great idea and a smart way to reintegrate the world war 2 heroes into the modern continuity without getting too Captain America about it.  While Wild Cat was the gritty, down to Earth old timer and Alan Scott was the hard as nails moral compass of the team Jay always served as the kindly mentor of the group and it’s a role he plays very well.  He’s sort of like the superhero version of the saintly grandfathers at the end of Saving Private Ryan, he’s certainly not as iron-jawed and moralistic as Captain America but he embodies Cap’s sense of respect, optimism, and virtue better than most other heroes. 

And so we reach the end of the Flash Family’s rainbow, next time; something spookier. 


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