Fastest Man Alive

The Flash

After a couple titles where I basically said "keep doing what you're doing," The Flash is where I really start to deviate from post-Blackest Night canon.  If you read my BN#8 rewrite, then you already know one of the biggest turns I'm taking.

As much as I like Barry Allen as the Flash, I think his role in the Flash legacy is more important than seeing him in the tights again.  He made the ultimate sacrifice in Crisis on Infinite Earths, and the decades since saw a lot of growth and development in his replacement, Wally West. Bringing Barry back isn't just a Silver Age Revival moment, it's almost like an undoing of 20+ years of Flash comics.

Okay, they didn't exactly undo it, as these seven Flash characters prove.

I guess "sidelined" is the more accurate word.

But while, per my My52 rules, I can't retcon away Barry's return, I can turn it into a momentary blip before getting back to continuing the Flash story. 

Y'see, 25 years after his sacrifice in CoIE, someone thought it'd be clever to book-end the DC Crisis events with Barry's return at the start of Final Crisis in 2008.  Unfortunately, as far as Blackest Night was concerned, this was just the latest hero resurrection which left the door to the afterlife wide open for Nekron to make his entry into the living world.  While the official mini-series saw a different solution to closing that door, my Blackest Night rewrite ended with Barry again making the ultimate sacrifice and returning to the afterlife in order to close that door. Apologies to anyone who read and enjoyed Flash: Rebirth earlier that year.  It didn't take.

Which leaves us with Wally back in the Flash suit.

The unique thing about Wally is that he's spent almost his entire life as a superhero, and readers got to watch him grow up as Kid Flash, take on his mentor's mantel, get married, and have kids.  Some might argue that maybe it's time to let Wally enjoy his success and retire to spend time with his family while the next generation Kid Flash fleets up, but they already tried that once.

It didn't end well for everyone involved.

Wally's weakness, though, as far as I'm concerned, is that I don't actually know what he does when he's not superheroing.  I guess maybe he's a stay-at-home dad?  Nothing wrong with that, but I do want to steal a bit from Barry and reintroduce the forensic detective aspect to the character.  I'm a bit of a fan of forensics and police procedural shows like CSI and wouldn't mind seeing that play a role in Flash's comics. Story-wise, I can say that Wally's (brief) experience with Barry during his (brief) return to the living could inspire him to pursue forensic sciences.

His wife, Linda, however, hews a little too close to Superman's Lois Lane, the *other* trouble-attracting news reporter who married a super-hero.  I'm hoping that my choice in Adventures of Superman to move Lois to a TV news anchor's desk will create enough difference between the two characters that they'll play out a bit differently from each other. The big retcon here, though, is saved for Flash’s kids.  I’m not sure why, but at some point one of Flash’s writers decided that his twin children should become different ages and get different superpowers.  (Maybe someone said "Eight superspeed characters?!?  That'd be rediculous!") If Wikipedia is to be believed, there was some imbalance because the twins had to share their connection to the Speed Force.  To which I say "two kids had to share a superpower?  That's awesome!"

So expect further imbalances to show up requiring the West's to once-and-for-all link the kids through the Speed Force even stronger, and coincidentally evening out their ages.  While I'm tempted to steal from Mas y Menos from the Teen Titans cartoon, I think it's enough to have superspeed kids who can gain extra boosts of speed but only by stealing it from his/her sibling and slowing them down.  There are so many "teaching your kids to share" parallels here to pass up for a father of two like myself.  This title will have to feature an occasional back-up story concerning the pre-teen adventures of these Tornado Twins.

Personality-wise, I want to be clear that Wally is not comic relief.  He got a bit of that reputation from his animated counterpart in the Justice League cartoon, but even going back to his earliest published days as Kid Flash he had a strong sense of responsibility and living up to the Flash legacy.  In fact, I'm prepared to argue that he's the hardest working hero in the DCU. Sure Superman can lift a battleship, and Batman knows 17 forms of karate, but when Flash runs 2,000 miles, he actually has to run 2,000 miles.  When he punches someone 20 times in a second, he still has to throw 20 punches.  Being superfast doesn't take any of the work away, it just makes it *look* easier.