Why I Hate the Flash (An Opinion Which Causes Undue Concern Amongst My Peers, But Which Remains Valid, Nonetheless)

Metropolis Is Actually Chicago Proudly Presents a Guest Post by Nick Philpott!

There is a problem in comic books today, and that problem has a face.

And that face is The Flash.

The Scarlet Speedster. If you ask anyone who their favorite Justice Leaguer is, you will probably get either Batman or Superman as an answer (my feminist friends skew toward Wonder Woman hate because "she doesn't wear any damn pants"). You rarely hear someone say, "You know who the baddest motherfucker in the Justice League is? The Flash. That motherfucker is fast." Because while it is valid that he is fast, that is all he ever seems to be.

I'll let you insert your own dirty jokes about what he is fast at. Yes, I ended that last sentence with a preposition.

The only time I can recall being particularly moved by the Flash before sitting down to write this article/retrospective/disorganized ramble was probably the only time 90% of comic book fans have felt strongly connected to him: the one time four years before I was born when he died by running too fast. I'm just gonna let that sink in for a bit. Also, let's remember, that, while noble, Barry Allen's sacrifice happens in like, the third month of twelve in Crisis on Infinite Earths. It was a stumbling block for the Anti-Monitor, but only a stumble.

I think Barry Allen is a good place to start with why I hate the Flash. Every fucking person in those books is related to everyfuckingbody else. Barry Allen and Professor Zoom/Reverse Flash/That Asshole From the Future Who Won't Pick A Name are in-laws, for Christ's sake. Which is not to discount the inherent villainy amongst in-law relationships.

The first independent Flash book I read (independent as in, it was not a Justice League team-up, and I was not under the impression that Batman would show up) was Geoff Johns's The Flash: Rebirth, because I loved what Geoff had done with Green Lantern in the same fashion. Say what you will about him, he is a man who knows what makes a superhero a superhero to everyone and what they need to deal with to come back from the dead after a couple of decades, etc.

ANYWAY, Flash: Rebirth. For the first issue and a half, let's say, I felt like I had gotten lost in some freakish family reunion of the Wests and Allens, with "Aunt Iris Allen" and "Linda Park-West" and "Bart Allen," the grandson that was born to Barry's children that he and Iris had in the 30th century. after he died in the Crisis, somehow (this kind of time-hopping, trip-happy near-paradox is why most people find comic books to be, in a word, retarded).

On the whole, though, I thought Rebirth was fantastic. Seeing the Flash and Reverse Flash explicitly shown as two sides of the same coin in an electrical sense, a temporal sense, etc., was pretty excellent. They're a battery, and one side can't function without the other to function against. The unstoppable force and the immovable object, if you will. And the notion of Barry actually being the Speed Force. Brilliant. It's these kind of humongous gestures that make comic books the most endearing medium to me, because they know no budgetary limitations, there is no derision for bad CGI, it is whatever the artists and the writer can wrangle from their brains. Sometimes, it's incoherent drivel, but sometimes, you get a glimpse of genius.

So I thought, "Hey, a book where I actually cared about the Flash, and the fact that he was pretty fast. Maybe I should do some research." And sure enough, one of the biggest Flash-fans out there , Sarah Bowden (author of this blog!--Ed.), had several volumes on-hand that she wanted me to read. I will not pretend that reading Rebirth and the two books she gave me make me a Flash-factmaster, but they gave me enough to articulate (with evidence!) why I think 98% of Flash stories can die in a fire, and how that is representative of the stagnation endemic to comic books as a larger medium.

The books she loaned me were The Return of Barry Allen by Mark Waid, a saga from the early '90s, which notably pre-dates the Speed Force and therefore the notion that Barry Allen was merely a part of the Speed Force (or the Speed Force itself), and The Human Race by Grant Morrison and Mark Millar, which is actually two smaller stories in one volume. I will go ahead and say that, while in general, I'm a Grant Morrison fanatic, a casual fan of Mark Millar, and a person who would like to see Mark Waid just retire before he be allowed to ruin things any further, but Sarah assured me that I would find Return of Barry Allen (which I have been assured is not only a classic of the Flash canon, but comics in general) enlightening, Flash-wise, so I held my tongue, checked my mental baggage and dove into it headfirst.

I'm going to skip to the end, without summarizing the book, and say that I hated it, with a fire that I reserve for few things. One of things about the Flash that I found admirable, if not particularly interesting per se, was that when the Flash Family died, they capital-D Died. After Barry Allen outran the Anti-Monitor's gizmo, he was Dead. When Professor Zoom vibrated his hand into Iris' head, she was Dead. That generation was gone, and it was time for Wally and Linda to shine, albeit with an occasional hand from Jay Garrick, who is just too goddamn lovable to keep down (like a grandpa that just will not take a goddamn nap). The Return of Barry Allen came out in 1993, just shy of a decade after Barry's death. Granted, in superhero-time, eights months is an eternity, so the fact that they made it a whole year, much less eight, is laudable. Hell, Superman was only dead for like, seven months and Captain America and Batman were more accurately gone than dead. But regardless, it was only eight years. Infinite Crisis was only six years ago, to put that in perspective.

This isn't to say I was anti-Barry Allen returning. I've got no beef with Barry, mostly because I never knew him. I've got a beef with comic book writers feeling slighted because they never got to tell "their" stories with their favorite superheroes (see also: the return of Jason Todd, people who still write Justice Society of America books), so they resurrect them, usually by cosmic coincidence or convenient amnesia.

I mean, come on, people. There has to be a line between comic books and soap operas, or else, what has this all been about?

So there's Mark Waid, bringing back Barry Allen. The whole point of the arc was a noble one. Making Wally overcome his limitations to be faster than Barry opened up a whole 'nother side of of Wally that was pretty rad to explore, as far as temporal/spatial distortions and faster-than-time-travel. My problem lies with Waid's methods. Because not only did he feel like he needed to bring "Barry" back, but he's made Professor Zoom's hatred of Barry rooted in a fucking time paradox. (Author's note: I fucking hate time paradoxes.)

Summary: basically Zoom grows up in the 25th century (or some fuckin' nonsense) idolizing Barry Allen, has plastic surgery to LOOK like Barry Allen, (this part is fuzzy, it might just be a clever mask), buys the Cosmic Treadmill at a thrift store, makes himself super fast by doing future experiments of some indeterminate but painful sort, runs back in time, but far enough to meet Barry, goes to the Flash museum to mope, finds out that Barry's nemesis Zoom is actually himself and that one day in his future/the Flash's past, Barry Allen will snap Zoom's neck for generally being a complete and total bastard. Wally has a battle of wits with Zoom in the Flash Museum and gets Zoom to run back into the future on the Cosmic Treadmill, which somehow erases his memory because that's convenient. Oh, and Zoom read all about Barry's biography in a book called THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE FLASH by -- wait for it -- Iris Allen.

This summary seems like it is haphazard , but I assure you, it was written less than a week after reading the book.

ANYWAYS, The Return of Barry Allen. Aside from the fact that Zoom hates the Flash because Zoom hates the Flash (metaphysics, people, it's not hard), the endgame of the whole saga is (a) yes, Barry is gone, (b) yes, Professor Zoom is still a dick, (c) Wally had the power all along, he just had to believe in himself (gag), (d) I don't think Johnny Quick's "Speed Formula" makes any goddamn sense, mathematically or otherwise, (e) even I was shocked at the rampant objectification of women in the book [Come on, Linda, no one cooks things at the stove for dinner in just their panties {especially not bacon. That grease will spatter and it will burn you.}], and (f) I have no idea why Mark Waid keeps getting work, but I also know exactly why he keeps getting work. He only deals with the familiar, which is the gateway to my larger thesis.

Each person who has to write an ongoing comic series essentially agrees to two things: (1) I have this cast of characters who do these set things, and within that framework, I will do as I please, and (2) I will not fuck with that which has come before, unless it can be fixed before the end of the arc. Everyone who signed on to write Green Lantern Pre-Rebirth knew that he could make anything he willed out of his ring, he had an oath to say to recharge his ring in a battery, and his ring did not work on things that were yellow. Good writers, like Geoff Johns and Grant Morrison, take these parameters, figure out a reason why they're there, and subvert them into something new, i.e., Parallax, the yellow impurity, Superboy-Prime escaping the pocket universe to "fix" ours.

Sub-par writers, like Mark Waid, Tony S. Daniel, and Judd Winick (to name a few, and risk burning some bridges), take those confines and do what they can without stepping on any tails. People have said that Mark Waid is too nostalgic for Silver-Age comics to be writing a current ongoing series, and I'm hard-pressed to come up with evidence to the contrary.

Therein lies my problem with the Flash: writers who are willing to go different places with the Flash are few and far between. For example, it shouldn't be groundbreaking to me that because Wally West can run at the speed of light, he can time travel, because that is basic relativistic physics. But it is groundbreaking for me, and that's exactly what I loved about the Grant Morrison/Mark Millar Flash arcs.

In the second arc in the book (I think the arc itself is called "The Black Flash" or "Death Comes to Wally West" or something in that vein. Regardless, it was self-explanatory), Mark Millar takes Wally to his limits by killing Linda in the first issue and making him literally beat Death in a race.

Sidebar: I think it's fair to say that the Black Flash is one of my favorite comic book characters and I have literally no idea why. That's a whole other article, honestly. Double sidebar: why is there no Flash/Black Flash The Seventh Seal parody?

ANYWAY, in this arc, instead of having it revealed that a character is still alive (and somehow in the 30th century, setting the stage for a really awkward reunion), the removal of Linda forces Wally to redefine himself as a person and as the Flash. All the growth of character in The Return of Barry Allen happens in the last issue in about five pages while Zoom relishes how evil he is and how soundly he has beaten Wally (even though that was a Mark Waid story, where the good guys can't lose). In the Black Flash arc, Wally grows a little bit in each issue, until it builds to a very satisfying conclusion where, (HERE THERE BE SPOILERS) he races Death to the end of time and then voluntarily runs into the Speed Force to retrieve Linda (END OF SPOILERS).

This is remarkable on several levels. Beating Death is impressive, but depending on how fast you define Wally to be, it's something that could easily be written. In this case, it's a measure of Wally's tactical skill and not his speed. He knows he can't just keep running from the Black Flash forever, so he runs to the end of time, when there IS no forever, and where there can be no Death because there is no Life by which to measure it.

Also, before this issue, the speedsters had discovered the Speed Force, but it was still largely foreign to them, with Max Mercury hyper-meditating and getting even closer to it, but never entering it fully. Wally, who several issues before was wallowing about being powerless and alone forever, about being a useless, overgrown child with more in common with a track team than the Justice League, has gained such confidence in himself and his abilities that he runs in to the Speed Force to retrieve Linda, because he knows he can run back out.

In the final analysis, what I'm saying here is this: there is an ever-expanding group of writers who are afraid to tackle comics for what they can be, to touch on fresh, and frankly, mature ideas. The industry is at a similar place to the early '80s, where by and large, the books have no depth, and are there merely to continue to grind on sworn fans. It is time for another revolution, now that Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore have sort of fallen off the radar.

What makes writers so afraid of the unknown? What better place is there for narrative experimentation than a comic book? Hell, Grant Morrison's Final Crisis was about the entire universe realizing that they were all fictional characters and fighting against the enemy, which was a blank page.

How fucking rad is that?

I'm sorry for singling out Mark Waid and naming other names, but honestly, they're going to get a paycheck this week for writing comics, and I'm not, so I don't feel too bad. It'd just be nice if this blog reminds writers at large that there's no reason to run the book into the unknown. Because you know you can always run back.

Nick Philpott is a playwright and comic book fan/sometimes author living in Athens, Ohio. His best time for the mile is 12m 36s, and he's fucking proud of it.

POST SCRIPT: For the other side of the debate coin, re: The Flash, check out Siskoid's blog about The Return of Barry Allen (8/1/07) ...

Seeing the Strings

Hello, friends and lovers!

Sorry for the long hiatus from this blog. I'm currently in graduate school and several projects have taken precedence over my comic book musings this quarter. Plus, I'm in the process of courting a guest writer to join Metropolis Is Actually Chicago for at least one post -- and courting takes time ... not to mention flowers, copious text messaging and pleading over beers. In short, I've been otherwise disposed these past few weeks and I apologize. I'm going to make it up to my two followers (and potential visitors) by doing a long post now, one concerned with comics' relationship to theatrical performance. Hope it proves fun for you guys!

I am in school for playwriting, but my obsessive relationship with comic book heroes started about the same time my love of theatre popped up. I attribute this to my glorious joint discovery of MGM musicals and "Batman: The Animated Series." (Age eight was a great year for Sarah Bowden.) In both outlets, I saw miraculous things happening. On "Batman," guys made out of clay and men with literally frozen hearts were constantly trying to take over Gotham City with giant robots, somehow fueled onward by the walking drug addiction metaphors and morality tales their masters represented. And only Batman had smarts enough to stop their schemes! In "Singin' In the Rain," we got to see a speech therapy lesson turn into a show-stopping musical number. Heck, I got to see a guy ask a girl out through a ten-minute romp in a make-believe meadow, complete with fog! I could not believe how much fun dancing and beating people up looked like. And I wanted to be a part of both.

My parents quickly took me to see all the great musicals available in the local theatre scene: Guys and Dolls, South Pacific, Oklahoma!, My Fair Lady, etc. Meanwhile, every afternoon I would park it in front of the TV to see what adventures lay in store for Batman; my parents even shucked out the cash to let me buy "Batman: The Animated Series" comic books. This gateway drug led to the purchase of regular Batman books, along with Spider-man, the X-Men and New Kids On the Block comics (which mostly involved Danny, Joey, Jordan and ... uh, the other one being chased by girls). I think my mom supported my interest in theatre more than my fascination with the Caped Crusader and his print pals. But at heart, I think both things were fulfilling the same need in me, so she needn't have worried.

Let me explain by way of giving an example:

This past weekend, I saw a theatrical adaptation of the graphic novel Skyscrapers of the Midwest in Columbus, Ohio. Now I've never read the novel, but a colleague thought I might be interested in seeing its stage counterpart because I'm my program's resident comic nerd. It's not something I'm particularly proud of for a lot of reasons (primarily because I love Shakespeare and Maria Fornes, too, and nobody ever seems to talk with that side of my personality these days), but I can't hide my love for comic artwork and stories, or what I view as the important cultural contribution comics affect under the guise of "trash reading."

Anyway, I went to the play and found it to be maybe too close an adaptation of the graphic novel, i.e., there wasn't much in it that was inherently dramatic. By dramatic, I mean, there was little in the way of onstage conflict between characters (conflict being set up in the following example: A wants a grapefruit, but B's blocking the kitchen door; A needs to get B out of the way to get what A wants, and so uses a series of tactics to get around the obstacle B is presenting). There was not much of a plot or consequences for what was going on in Skyscrapers. And not many of the scenes were tied together in a narrative way. The play was more like a series of graphic short stories or vignettes. Which is fine, but it means very little happened that I could understand or describe in a tangible way to someone who hadn't seen it. Everything just felt important with a capital I, as opposed to engrossing or enlightening. (Basically, I felt stupid for just not getting how the images onstage stacked up.) And in my book, that's the hallmark of deadly theatre; theatre that doesn't let me know what it means by telling a good story is excluding me as an audience member. That condescension and withholding is a large part of the reason the general public doesn't like theatre or only goes to musicals, which entertain them and give them an obvious story to follow. I say all this not to slam Skyscrapers, which is an original work (rare to see these days), and should be applauded its excellent production elements and solid ensemble cast. I say all the above to prepare readers for what was actually special about the play: its brief translations of comic booky-ness into something that lived onstage.

Comic books are inherently theatrical. Like in good dramatic writing, comics use your mind to complete pictures. They take you places you've never been before; they show you one thing and then turn that thing into something else entirely -- right before your very eyes. And they do all this through a unique combination of style and substance we playwrights term the "artist's voice." This is more or less my program's definition of theatricality, and comic books play with perspective, conflict, dialogue and philosophy in a similar manner. Comic books are inherently theatrical.

I've been saying this for years, but had yet to find a good drama proving this, until halfway through watching this play. "Watchmen" made an okay movie, but it didn't transport me as easily as it did Dr. Manhattan. Spider-man: Turn Off the Dark is a mess of stage show, from what I hear. It assumes that rigging people to fly and then flashing them in front of audiences' faces will make up for lackluster storytelling and match the visual delight of impossible web-slinging acrobatics on the page. (Newsflash: it won't. Look at Peter Parker fly through the Manhattan skyline in his books. His anatomy and movements make no sense half the time; if you think artists are depicting his movements realistically, then you need to get your eyes checked. Or get a refund from Julie Taymor, who really sold you some shit. Because I cannot see the value in taking the cartoony zip of Spider-man and planting it dead onstage; seems to suck all the life out of the character to me if he can't do the impossible and bend like a graceful pretzel. Frankly, it takes some of the strange wonder out of his spider powers for me. If you can't find a way to translate that wonder to the stage, count me out of ever seeing your musical.)

In comic book art, you never see the strings. Onstage or in spectacle-obsessed amusement park rides, you ALWAYS see the strings, and they will NEVER BE ANYTHING BUT STRINGS. That's what makes such fare less enjoyable than the comic-reading experience -- you're never fully in it, there's no magical transformation of the spectacle. Unlike in the wonderful world of superheroes, where people are resurrected from the dead every five minutes, everything is what it appears to be. Unless theatre artists use those strings I mentioned to their advantage. If they allow those strings to ignite your imagination, engage you in filling in the blanks and learn something while you do it, they've achieved good theatricality.

Skyscrapers showed me two good theatricality moments, and proved itself worthy of my time:

1. The first time we the protagonist's little brother (Randy, I think?), he was carrying a stuffed animal Tyrannosaurus Rex. He held it out and asked his older brother, "Do you think Rex could beat He-Man in a fight?" The protagonist wouldn't answer, and so Randy went on to spin a tale of what the fight looked like and how Rex triumphed. End scene. The next time we saw Randy, he was taking a bath before services on Sunday morning. And with him was Rex, whom he again complimented for his imagined feats of derring-do. Only this time Rex was a man in a man in a T-Rex mascot head and claws, gussied up in a pair of sweatpants, tail sticking out the back, and a Team Adidas jacket from the 1980s. And he was washing Randy's hair. And as Randy plotted to blow up church by carpet-bombing the building, Rex climbed into the bathtub, turned it into an airplane, by extending his arms out like wings, and threw invisible dino bombs out the side window. A nearby Foley artists provided the whistling sounds for the bombs and ridiculous action movie explosions projected onto a screen provided context for what Randy imagined the destruction of the church, the elementary school and the house of "that kid Kirby I hate" to be.The audience LOVED every single second of this sequence. Not just because it was ridiculous, but because it showed us how Randy viewed the world, after exposing us to what the world actually looked like, in his conversation with his brother. In the boy's mind, Rex is a kung-fu king who beats up wolves and Satan and blowws up buildings. To the rest of the world, Rex is a doll, and Randy's running around the house, screaming about his fighting prowess. In the span of two scenes, we see one reality replaced by another, magical one. The carpet-bombing scene wouldn't be nearly as sweet if we didn't see Randy's aspiration to it in the He-Man scene. Without that first scene, we wouldn't understand what the second scene means to Randy. And that context is what makes good theatre. Images are built on top of one another to help an audience draw a conclusion about a person's perspective or goal (here, proving Rex can fight).

Good comics do this, too. I could toss off a million examples (Batwoman: Elegy and Blankets are the first two that spring to mind), but I'd prefer to stay in the realm of theatre and demonstrate how, unequivocally, Skyscrapers moved from creating one nice bit of theatricality, to PROVING why comic books on the page have all the theatricality a person could ask for ...

2. During the first act of the play, a storyline was told in comic panels on the projection screen. An abusive deadbeat (who looked like a cat) bedded and abandoned a casual hook-up, who then followed him to his house, where he was working on his truck. As a series of panels appeared parallel to one another onscreen, actors offstage provided the voices of the boy and girl (theatrical in itself because we had to match their voices with what was happening onscreen without explanation). The girl begged him to forgive her for being needy in the wee hours of the morning and the boy shrugged her off. She touched his arm, and then the screen went completely white-blank. The male actor offstage screamed in pain. The panels returned. The boy was holding his hand. The actor yelled that the girl had broken his fingers. The actress apologized. The screen flashed blank again. The actress screamed in pain. Then the panels returned, showing the girl holding her head and running to her car so she could escape the maniac who just socked her in the head with a wrench.

It was in watching this sequence that I was able to define EXACTLY WHAT it is that makes comics theatrical. The play demonstrated it in those white flashes. What makes comics theatrical on the page, and therefore useful on the stage as drama, is that little strip of white space between each panel. That little strip allows your mind to create the images that move you from one panel to the next. We didn't need to see the boy hitting the girl; we created that image in our heads, we found the meaning of the white space ourselves and didn't need it spoon-fed to us. We understood what was going on between the panels because the artists gave us just enough clues to participate in the work. I can't think of another reading medium that asks for that level of engagement and participation from its audience. And that involvement is why I'm mad about comics.

But how does that realization relate to my love of theatre and the old-timey musicals which ignited that love, you may ask. I think it has everything to do with the white space translation I just talked about. Every song in a musical stands in for dialogue. In "Singin' In the Rain," Gene Kelly doesn't just announce he's in love after dropping Debbie Reynolds at her front door in a rainstorm. No, dammit, he sings about it! He dances about it! And he never, ever flat-out announces he's in love. He allows us to draw that conclusion. He talks about being ready for love and having the sun in his heart. He commands the rain to keep pouring because he's in the middle of a happy refrain, all relating to love. And we learn something about him because we're smart enough to see the guy's besotted in more ways than one.

Even as a kid, I never thought what made musicals special was all the flashy tap numbers and eye-popping costumes. What made musicals special was the fact that I could imagine what the characters were supposed to be doing while they were singing and dancing. The songs were the white space between the panels, the getting from point A to B; they moved the story and expressed the unspoken, but they weren't what was literally happening to the characters in the moment. I liked that in-between space. And I liked translating the emotions depicted in song on my own, then running to my parents to discuss my observations. Soon that led us to seeing straight plays together, and led to my long love affair with subtext and staging techniques.

Because theatre's always been a vehicle for getting me to think about what's in front of me, and expressing myself. It's my chosen field because theatre empowers me to think, respond and act in relation to the world around me. So does the white space.

See? Mom didn't need to worry about my brain rotting from comic book violence and ridiculousness. Like those MGM classics, comics books helped me get to where I am today, questioning the value of art and the world surrounding me.