Tag: Flash

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Cover: Flash Comics #90: Nine Empty UniformsSomething I’ve noticed as I read through various Golden-Age Flash Comics is a repeated subgenre in which the Flash plays an entire team. “Nine Empty Uniforms” (Flash Comics #90, 1947) is the first one I read, since it was reprinted in an 80-page Giant. The bad guys cause problems for a baseball team, so the Flash takes the place of every single player in the upcoming game.

flash-hockeyAs I’ve picked up comics from the 1940s, and the new Archive book, I’ve found more. In an untitled story from All-Flash Quarterly #1 (1941, reprinted in The Golden Age Flash Archive Volume 2), racketeers hassle a hockey team.The owner needs the money from the “Manley Cup” for an operation for his daughter, so when the racketeers force the players to sit the game out, the Flash steps in.

Flash Comics #39: stage rehearsal“Play of the Year” (Flash Comics #39, 1943) breaks with tradition a bit and instead of a sports team, the Flash replaces a troupe of actors. A rival producer tries to financially ruin one of Jay’s friends by preventing his play from opening, in this case faking a measles outbreak among the cast and putting them in quarantine. Once again, the Flash steps in and plays every single role, changing costumes and switching places faster than the eye can see.

The weird thing about these stories is that nowhere does anyone suggest that having a super-powered player—who isn’t even on your roster—just might be cheating. It goes all the way back to his first appearance in Flash Comics #1: Back in college, Jay Garrick was a football scrub. After the accident gave him super-speed, he convinced the coach to put him on the field so he could show off in front of his girlfriend, Joan.

Interestingly, later retellings of the Flash’s origin make it a point that he quit the team immediately afterward because staying would have given him an unfair advantage.

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DC has announced their comics for June, and I’m really looking forward to three books.

Cover of The Flash: The Fastest Man Alive #1First, they finally announced a release date for the re-launch of The Flash: The Fastest Man Alive. It was getting to the point where I was in more suspense over when they’d launch it than who was going to be wearing the mask. And at least we know that Wally and Bart are “not dead” (in the words of Infinite Crisis writer Geoff Johns), though that doesn’t necessarily imply we’ll see them anytime soon. Now I only have to worry about who’s going to be “the” Flash, and whether the new book will be any good.

Cover of Solo #11Almost as good was the surprise return of Michael Moorcock & Walter Simonson’s Elric: The Making of a Sorcerer. They got half-way through this mini-series in 2004, and issue #3 just never appeared. It looks like they’re finally going to finish it. Which reminds me, I should look for the final book in the Elric/Von Bek trilogy and see if it’s in paperback.

And then there was the real surprise: An issue of Solo by Sergio Aragonés and Mark Evanier. (Shouldn’t that be Duet?) Need I say more?

Also interesting: Astro City: Samaritan and Fables #50.

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It’s really annoying that the writers and editors on The Flash didn’t see fit to actually tell us the names of Wally and Linda’s children during the final 6 issues of the series. All we know is that one is a boy and the other is a girl.

Even more annoying is the fan speculation that the twins will turn out to be one of two existing pairs of characters:

  1. The Tornado Twins, who first appeared in Legion of Super-Heroes, or
  2. Más y Menos, a pair of speedster twins from the Teen Titans cartoon.

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DVD Box artI picked up the complete Flash TV series on DVD today. It’s been a long wait since it was announced last October, but an even longer wait since the show aired in 1990. I haven’t had time to watch any of it yet, but it turns out that Best Buy is selling an exclusive package with a bundled comic book.

That “exclusive” comic book isn’t anything totally new—it’s an abridged version of 2002’s DC First: Superman/The Flash featuring the first race between Superman and the original Flash, Jay Garrick. The original book is 38 pages, and it’s been cut down to 24 by removing a subplot involving the Pied Piper (which was essentially really early setup for “Rogue War”) and trimming a few pages from the main story in which two Flashes and Superman combat Abra Kadabra.

The funny thing is that the TV show features Barry Allen (more or less), but the comic they chose features the other two Flashes!* If it had been up to me, I would have chosen the Flash TV Special, which used the TV version of the characters, but I guess they wanted something closer to the current version of the character. The whole thing is printed small enough to fit inside the box.

Now if only they’d included the Smallville episode, “Run”, which guest-starred another version of the Flash, the set would really be complete. One of the Smallville DVD sets did include an episode of The Flash as an extra, for no apparent reason.

*There’ve been three Flashes: Jay Garrick from 1940-1951, Barry Allen from 1956-1986, and Wally West from 1986-2006. Rumor has it that Wally will be replaced after Infinite Crisis, with Barry’s grandson Bart Allen—who got to be the Flash in Smallville—the current front runner.