I’ve never been able to keep up with the Flash, pun intended. My enthusiasm for his escapades is sporadic at best. So what drew me to this much-anticipated miniseries then? I can narrow it down to three things: Geoff Johns, Andy Kubert and time traveling mischief with big consequences. The combination promises barrels of fun. Does the first issue deliver? Yes, for the most part.
With little introduction we are thrown into a Twilight Zone style scene of a powerless Barry Allen waking up in a world very different from his own. There is a wonderful build up here as a few small differences lead into some more significant revelations, (‘Super-Man?) Any comparisons to Marvel’s House of M won’t hold up for long since this alternate reality is a tad more dystopian. As befits the hero of the title, Johns keeps the pace zipping along, teasing the reader with curious details about this new world until roughly half way though issue when…things…slow…down. In fact they almost come to a crashing halt.
When a gathering of faintly familiar superheroes confronts a red-eyed Batman, the storytelling tactics shift from showing to telling. For example, it would have been great to actually see something of the war in Europe between Aquaman and Wonder Woman but instead we hear about it from Cyborg. Perhaps I demand too much spectacle from a first issue but it felt like a cop out. This is not helped by an overload of exposition about this world and the underwhelming supporting cast that doesn’t feel very necessary. Of course once the focus turned to a hilarious sequence of the Flash stuck in a traffic jam this was all forgiven and forgotten. Congratulations must also go to Messer’s Johns and Kubert for turning the already child friendly concept of Captain Marvel into more of a Saturday morning cartoon than ever before.
There is more than enough here to keep any fan of the DC Universe coming back for the next issue but I hope by then that less will be more.
Joe Read.
