Originally,
I had envisioned my “On the Run” columns to be standalone pieces that commented
on a particular writer or artist’s extended tenure on a particular title. Grant
Morrison’s
Animal Man, or Alan
Moore’s
W.I.L.D.Cats, or Warren
Ellis’
Stormwatch. Or, to represent
the artists a bit more, Chris Sprouse’s
Supreme
or Frank Quitely’s
New X-Men.
That may still be how the columns end up, but having just finished another go
through the current
The Flash
television series, I was inspired to read through one of my favourite runs on
any superhero comic ever: Mark Waid’s
The
Flash. I’ll add a caveat to that appellation, in that it was certainly not
solely Waid who produced this comic. He’s ably assisted by numerous talented
artists, and joined by Brian Augustyn as a co-writer for a large part of the
series. But Waid is the fulcrum about whom this run rotates. I’ll give credit
where credit is due, of course, when the time comes.
The
problem is that this particular sustained run on The Flash (and, yes, the use of the term “run” is intentionally
punned) is just over eight years long. It stretches from The Flash Annual #4 in 1991 to The
Flash v.2 #159 in 2000, plus a little addendum of six issues in 2007 –
2008. How does one cover such a vast number of comics in a single post? I don’t
even think such a thing would be possible, not if I wanted to do justice to
what has to rank as one of the great stretches of superhero writing in the
genre’s history. Thus, over the course of a number of columns, I’ll look at
discrete portions of the run, at the themes that Waid and company touch upon,
and at the reasons why I think this is one of the great superhero narratives.
That
raises an interesting question. A couple of them actually. First, what is
literature, or what makes writing great? When going over with my supervisor the
changes I wished to make to my major field reading list in American Literature,
we talked about this, about what distinguishes the literary from the
non-literary. It was offered to me that the literary is something that stands
out from the crowd, that does something different, and does it with grace and
facility. I’m not sure I completely buy that that’s all that literature is, but
it is a place to begin thinking about how we can define a literary portion of
an ongoing superhero series. This is the second question. As an academic, I am
trained to look for self-contained imaginative works that can have one or more
theoretical paradigms applied to them, all in the service of saying something
new and novel about the work and what it represents for our culture. How does
one do this with an ongoing comic book series? The answer, I think, is to
isolate particular stretches of those comics and demonstrate how they are literary,
how they stand out from the rest of the series and from the genre they inhabit.
Which is what I hope to do with this particular stretch of The Flash.
That
said, I’m going to start in a strange place. Slightly before finishing his 8
years on the title, Waid and fellow scribe Tom Peyer, along with artists Barry
Kitson and Tom Grindberg produced
Flash
& Green Lantern: The Brave and the Bold. Taking their title from a
Silver Age team-up comic, this six-issue series tells stories of Green Lantern
Hal Jordan and Flash Barry Allen. At the time of its writing, both of these
characters were dead (or evil. I can never get Hal Jordan’s chronology
straight). The series looks back nostalgically to these two seminal characters,
but paints them in the rose-coloured hues of memory. I’ve had conversations
with fellow fans about this, especially following Geoff Johns’ reintroduction
of both characters into the DCU, pre-New 52. Were these characters really the
paragons of virtue and, more importantly, good story-telling that they are
often hailed as? I think the answer is no. I think, really, that these are two
characters who became far more important to their shared universe after they
died, in that they ascended from the incarnated demi-gods that the superheroes
are to revered ancestors that could no longer be faulted. I’ll add yet another
caveat here, in that I can hardly claim to have comprehensively read the 30 or
so years of accumulated tales these characters were a part of before their
deaths in the eighties or nineties. I’ve got the last chunk of the Barry Allen
The Flash, and it’s actually quite
gripping, telling the tale of the Flash being on trial for the murder of the
Reverse-Flash. But the issues I have that predate that story are middling, at
best. I think the same would have to go for most of the pre-
Crisis Green Lantern stories I’ve read.
At the time that this series was published, Wally West was, of course, the
Flash, and Kyle Rayner had taken over as Green Lantern. They lived in the
shadows of the “giants” that came before them, but that shadow is cast solely
as a narrative device. My feeling is that Wally and Kyle were far better at
their superheroic roles than either of their predecessors.
This
is, of course, a matter of taste, and if the history of philosophy has taught
us anything, it’s that taste is virtually impossible to quantify. As such, feel
free to completely disagree with what I’ve written above. However, the
preference of Barry over Wally, or vice versa, has little to do with the
presentation of The Brave and the Bold
series, which is absolutely presented as a series of memories of times gone by.
Issue six even features a narrative frame from Hal Jordan’s mechanic Pie, and
the use of this device begs the question of the reliability of the narrative
voice of the whole series, be it Waid and Peyer’s, or the unseen narrative
construction that exists within the shared universe. The series acts as a foil
to the reverence with which Allen and Jordan are held in their successors’
series, a demonstration of how these characters are remembered in the shared
universe, if not in the reality that we call home.
Before
moving on to The Flash series proper,
there are two more brief things to mention about The Brave and the Bold. First, it makes a lovely companion to the
Waid/Augustyn/Kitson JLA: Year One
series from a few years prior. Year One
is a brilliant retelling of the Justice League’s origins, and is well worth a
read. Waid’s JLA work may well show
up in an “On the Run” one of these days, and Year One is definitely its high point. The second thing is the
reason that I placed this series at the beginning of my read-through: Barry
Allen haunts the Wally West Flash
palpably. A shadow, a ghost, a reminder, an inspiration, barely two or three
issues go by without a mention of the revered second Flash. This is one of the
major themes of Waid’s run on the title, the ways in which we acknowledge and
integrate the past into our present identities, and the ways that those
integrations can go well or ill. Of course, because this is The Flash, there’s a lot of work on how
we integrate our futures as well. Case in point is Waid’s earliest work on The Flash volume 2, the 1991 “Armageddon
2001” crossover annual.
(Note:
this next section draws heavily from my “40 Years of Comics Project” review of
the annual.)
The Flash Annual #4 is the earliest Flash
story in Waid's run, as far as I know. Anyone who knows better, please let me
know. I'm always excited to add something to my hunting list. It's a part of
the "Armageddon 2001" crossover, a story about a time traveller
trying to uncover which of Earth's greatest heroes becomes the deadly despot Monarch
in the futuristic time of...2001. Apparently the whole thing was supposed to
(SPOILER ALERT) culminate in Captain Atom being the big bad, but they decided
against that at the last minute and made it Hawk. Of Hawk and Dove? Angry red
and white guy? My understanding is that this was a last-minute decision, flew
in the face of everything that had been set up, and basically made the whole
crossover a bit silly.
But let's leave that behind, and consider it in
the context of Waid's run on
The Flash. What's remarkable about this
story, though in many ways it's a pretty unremarkable tale, is that it presages
so many of the themes Waid would take on in his run, about a year later, on
Wally West's life. Alternate timelines, the Flash's children, his future
spouse, the ramifications of his public identity. The framing sequence is
frankly quite sinister, ending with a young lady probably about to be rubbed
out by organized crime, and the Flash standing oblivious. The story of the year
2001 is a pretty standard piece, a bit sentimental, about a future that the
Flash could have had (married to said soon-to-be-no more young lady, and hiding
in witness protection), one seemingly averted on the very last page by the
interference of the time travelling Waverider. From a particular perspective,
this makes the whole story seem a bit pointless, as the timeline ceases to
exist.
Or does it?
Rather famously, about a decade after this
story, Waid and a number of co-conspirators introduced the concept of
"Hypertime" to the DCU, a concept that restored, in some ways, what
were perceived as the losses that surrounded the demolishing of the Multiverse
in Crisis on Infinite Earths. In essence, Waid et al suggested a
framework in which all possibilities happened, from thrown out continuities to
Elseworlds stories, possibilities that made up the fabric of a
far-less-traversable extra-dimensional medium called Hypertime. Waid explored Hypertime in some detail in the
end days of his Flash run, which we’ll come to eventually. The concept
is now pretty standard in superhero universes, as evidenced in Wildstorm’s
“Bleed,” and Marvel’s (now-deceased) Multiverse. Yet 10 years earlier, here's
an alternate timeline flaring briefly into existence, offering the possibility
of an array of futures, pasts, and presents. The story is a bit sloppy, in
terms of the crossover. Waverider nullifies the future he glimpses, the future
that apparently convinces him that the Flash does not become Monarch in the
future. But if that future no longer exists, doesn’t the possibility still
stand that Wally becomes a despot? Again, though, this brings us back to
another of the major themes of the Waid years: possibility and probability.
I'm not claiming Waid had a giant master plan
before embarking on The Flash. But I've had it suggested to me that all
great writers pick a theme, or a story, and come at it from every possible
angle, figuring out all the possible ways to ask a single question. I think
Waid's a writer who does this. What he writes in one Annual here he dissects
completely over the course of eight years on the main title. But before we get
to that masterful dissection, there’s the little matter of an origin to
address. Issues 62 – 65, cover-dated May and June of 1992, represent the real
first steps in Waid’s run, a retelling of Wally’s origins that will resonate
through the entirety of the series: “Year One.”
I don’t think I’m going to say a lot about the
four issue origin story. It’s well done, covers all the pertinent details of
Wally’s back story, the kind-of-insane coincidence of his gaining his powers
(Flash Barry Allen arranges the chemicals in his lab to precisely mirror how
they were when he got his powers, and then lightning coincidentally strikes
Wally), and his first days as Kid Flash. It’s a competent superhero origin
story, and out of context of the rest of the run would be fairly unremarkable.
In context, however, the story lays the same kind of groundwork that Waid’s
earlier annual does. We are introduced to Wally’s family, both those he likes
and those he doesn’t, a family that plays a fundamental role in the development
of the character over the course of Waid’s tenure. We’re shown Wally’s origin,
its, even in a superhero story, highly unlikely nature, an origin that Waid
explores fully through this run. And, as with most of the series, we’re given
the spectre of Barry Allen. Please forgive a Wikipedia quotation now, but with
Barry Allen in this run, I’m put in mind of Derrida’s notion of hauntology, in
which "the priority of being and presence [is replaced by] the figure of
the ghost as that which is neither present, nor absent, neither dead nor alive"
(
Gallix,
2011). I’ll be looking more closely at this idea as we move further through
the series. It’s a smart move on Waid’s part to retell the origin, not simply
to remind people or to start, literally, at the beginning, but also to point
out, albeit subtly, the aspects of Wally’s story that trouble him, that have
been present from the very beginning, and that are going to overwhelmingly
inform the superheroic tales he’ll be telling with this character.
Which brings us to the final issue I’ll look at
this time around, #66, “Fish Story.” This is a weird issue. After the promise
of the origin retelling, this one is a fairly typical, and perhaps even subpar,
team-up story between the Flash and Aquaman. Revolving around a telepathic
villain whose powers work on Aquaman, the story tells, quite simply, of the
Flash’s triumph over the villain. What I think we can take from this issue is
that it’s a reminder that the Flash exists in a superheroic universe, in which
he works with other heroes and in which ridiculous things often happen.
Ridiculous to we readers, that is. The situation in this comic is quite serious
for the characters involved, so it reminds us that Wally inhabits a world very
different from ours. This counterpoints the angst presented in the origin
issues with regard to family and one’s place in it, a feeling and problem that
many of us in “the real world” deal with frequently. Wally, at the same time,
deals with telepathic aquatic villains searching for magical ocean control
crowns.
I did not make that up.
So that concludes the first section of
The
Flash, the Mark Waid era. I’m excited to get into the meat of the series,
and I hope you’ll follow along. Fair warning, though, I’ll be moving at a
slightly slower pace than the titular character.
