Welcome (the return of the sequel to the original 'Welcome')

I had thought for a little while there that the huge bump in page views was due to a particularly insistent bot or something, but the numbers appear to be steady, so I'll chance it, and welcome new readers to the blog!

Hi. I'm really honoured that you've taken some of your time to have a look at what I do. Here's some links that might help:

These social media ones occasionally will have content not on the blog, but mostly link back to the 40 Years project.
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For those just joining the 40 Years of Comics Project, here's the first entry, and an explanation of the project.

If you're curious about where my collection came from (in part), here's some pictures of the store I ran in 2001 - 2002, The Magic Mirror.

I also have some semi-regular features:

On the Run: Mark Waid's The Flash - unfortunately on a bit of a hiatus - life and stuff, y'know?

The Dollar Bin - in which I wax lyrical about the pleasures and pains of cheap comics.

Artists to Check Out - whenever I find a bunch of cool art, I'll give you links to the artists' sites.

And, just occasionally, I venture into actually making comics: Sad Monster Comics.

There's more up here, so much that I've probably lost track. Have a poke about, and drop me a line if you're inclined. I'm always happy to talk about comics!

On the Run: Mark Waid’s The Flash - Part 4 - Pasts and Futures

I've been struggling with this particular section of this series for some time now. As is totally obvious from the horrendous delay between sections. What I've been struggling with is trying to define this particular run of comics. We're coming off Wally's realization that he is every bit as capable as Barry Allen of being a legendary hero, off his having discovered a lineage of speedsters, something that Waid is very carefully setting up in this run. One of the portions of my dissertation is going to deal with the building of a coherent physical and historical universe in DC comics, and though it's not the top of my list, this particular aspect of Waid's run on the title will definitely come into the conversation.

None of which says much about this bit of Waid's run. Wally has his revelation about Barry, and then immediately leaps into action with Nightwing and Starfire, two colleagues from his days on the Teen Titans. The story arc that features these two is called "Back on Track," which I admit I don't really get. I suppose from a psychic perspective, Wally is back on track, but my understanding of the prior storyline was that the track he was on was not necessarily the right one. The previous "Return of Barry Allen" story was all about Wally dealing with self-imposed limitations that come about because of his past relationship with Barry, and then immediately he takes up with old friends who are, through no fault of their own, emblematic of the era he has ostensibly just escaped.

Why would Waid take us immediately into yet another of Wally's cul-de-sac pasts, when he's just spent a fair bit of the preceding issues telling us that, in order that he be the best Flash he possibly can be, Wally needs to escape his past?

Well, perhaps it's because Wally doesn't just have one past he needs to escape. The Barry one is obviously the big one, but Starfire and Nightwing are reminders not of the man that Wally has always measured himself against, but of his time as a sidekick, and as a Titan, reminders of a time when he was not among the A-list heroes of the DCU. Remember, as of this comic's publication date, Barry Allen had only been dead about 6 years. For about 25 years before that, Wally was a B-list sidekick on the Teen Titans. In order that we understand why this adventure comes immediately after the Professor Zoom one, we should take note of the specific characters who are featured. Starfire is from the Wolfman/Perez era of the Teen Titans, a team that transcended their status as B-list and rocketed to popular and critical acclaim during that team's tenure. I remember when these comics were coming out, and it was a big deal that they were matching Marvel's X-Men in terms of sales. So Starfire gives us that notion of the B-list heroes breaking the glass ceiling (note that cover) and moving into territory usually reserved for the Big Three and their hangers-on. Nightwing, on the other hand, represents the earliest of Wally's teammates, and the earliest time as a superhero. The original Teen Titans were Kid Flash, Robin, Wonder Girl, and Aqualad. Of course, Robin grows up and becomes Nightwing. He carries on his mentor's legacy, but is not trapped within it, which is basically the story we've just witnessed in the previous section of comics. So one hero represents transcendence of status, and one represents transcendence of origin, both of which Wally desperately needs to do in order to move forward as a character. Thus, by the end of this storyline, Wally has witnessed what it means to become a hero in one's own right, as well as putting to rest an old love story from the pre-Waid issues. That's the pasts of the title of this post. But what of the futures?

Waid takes things in a few different directions to get Wally into the future he needs to be in. The first is to team him with another hero in Central City: Argus. Argus comes from the "Bloodlines" crossover, specifically Flash Annual #6, which would have been part of the previous post had I not become bogged down in Derridean literary theory. Wally does not like Argus, a fact that really demonstrates his movement into being an A-list superhero - they never seem to like having someone else on their turf. It's a problem that Marvel Universe superheroes have made peace with, but it often seems that in the DCU, each superhero stakes out a claim and everyone else respects it. But Argus is also an attempt at the grim and gritty superheroes that were all the rage at the time of his appearance, so we're witnessing a character from the Silver Age of comics moving, ironically, very slowly into the Modern Age. But I don't want anyone to make the mistake of thinking that Waid makes the Flash into a Leifeld-esque angst-machine with poorly-drawn feet. Rather, he takes the character and demonstrates how this sort of superhero can co-exist with the other kind, and that they bring interesting nuances to each others' stories by virtue of the type of superheroes that they are. Waid really lays the groundwork for Morrison's JLA here, in that the stories are unquestionably modern (or postmodern, as the case may be), but not grim purely by dint of their modernity.

However...

The next story line, which runs almost to the end of this particular chunk of the series, is grim. Waid and company do something seldom seen in comics - they show what happens when a superhero is not able to save the day. There's an interesting argument to be made about these particular issues that they demonstrate a sort of post-traumatic stress in Wally's reaction to failing to save a woman from a burning store in a shopping mall. The woman survives, though is quite terribly disfigured, and Wally goes on what can only be termed a rampage of heroic acts, trying to prove to everyone, but mostly to himself, that he's fast enough to save everyone. There is a slight problem here, in that Waid's treatment of Wally's behaviour significantly takes away from the trauma suffered by the young woman he fails to rescue - we can write this off on the fact that the comic is called Flash, but it's still a bit troubling that it is Wally whose pain and suffering we witness, rather than the person who was actually the victim of the accident. There are early shades of the sorts of tropes from which grow "Women in Refrigerators," and while it is certainly problematic, I'm going to have to take the other perspective here, and note that the story is about Wally, and that there are always going to be secondary characters in stories whose sufferings or triumphs are simply not the subject matter of the narrative. Part of Wally's growing up over the course of these comics is realizing that he can't save everyone, and that punishing himself is not going to make him a better hero. We are often told that all we need to do in life is try our best, but it is usually ourselves who are the hardest to convince that we have done. Wally is no exception, though by the end of this story line, he's getting there.

So you'd think that at this point, Waid would cut poor Wally some slack, give the guy a holiday or something. He's just come out from under his mentor's shadow, witnessed the growing up of his childhood compatriots, and come to the realization that, superhero or no, he's still just a fallible human being. But instead, our hero is thrust into yet another "adult" role, and is given a sidekick in the form of Impulse - a speedster from the future, grandson of Barry Allen, and all around obnoxious kid. Almost immediately after having realized that he did not have to be Barry Allen, he takes on a role for which he only has one model - Allen himself. How Wally will deal with Impulse will be the focus of the next few bits of the run, I'd imagine.

One last thing I'll say about Impulse's introduction into the story line is that it casts our perspective in a direction, speedster-wise, that we haven't yet: the future. So far we've seen numerous super-fast heroes from the past in the forms of Jay Garrick, Johnny Quick, and Max Mercury, but here we see where that line goes. The DCU is remarkable for its attention to lineages, and nowhere is that more evident than in Mark Waid's Flash comics. But before we can really get into how Wally deals with Bart Allen, there's another crossover to come. We'll have a quick look at Wally's Zero Hour experience next time, and then jump back into his mentoring, and the shenanigans that ensue.

On the Run: Mark Waid’s The Flash - Part 3 - Ghost Story

If you’ll forgive the appropriation, in the era we’re considering, there is a spectre haunting the DC Universe—the spectre of Barry Allen.

I’m going to be a little more academic this time around than in the last couple of articles, and probably more so than in any of the ones that will follow. I suggested in my first Flash article that Barry Allen is a nostalgically-relevant character. Derrida calls it, in Spectres of Marx, “this first paternal character, as powerful as it is unreal, a hallucination or simulacrum that is virtually more actual than what is so blithely called a living presence.” There’s a lot to unpack there. The use of the term “simulacrum” immediately calls to mind Baudrillard and his musings on the postmodern, but I’m not sure that’s a line of questioning that is necessarily fruitful in thinking Barry Allen as spectre. Derrida notes, early in the text, that he makes a mistake in calling on the “spectres” of Marx, in the plural, as the first line of The Communist Manifesto, which I borrowed to open this piece, invokes a spectre in the singular. But this mistake is propitious, in that there are varied spectres of Marx, those that haunt his ideological children and those that haunt his ideological opposites. He calls this the “haunting obsession that seems…to organize the dominant influence on discourse today,” that “no disavowal [of Socialist thought] has managed to rid itself of all of Marx’s ghosts.” From this perspective, Marx, or his spectre, haunts the neo-liberal organizings of society and culture, haunts the hegemonic and the repressive. In some ways, too, this spectre haunts the Marxists, the Socialists, of the world. Derrida calls the “Marxist inheritance…absolutely and thoroughly determinate…We live in a world, some would say a culture, that still bears…the mark of this inheritance.” What Marx (and Engels, to be fair) have to say to us is still being said to us, still fundamentally describes a situation within which we all exist, regardless of whether we celebrate that situation or not.

But let’s move on from that. The notion of this haunting, of hauntology, is taken up in popular culture by thinkers of electronic music. Mark Fisher restates some of Derrida’s more impenetrable prose by describing hauntology as the “restatement of the key deconstructive claim that ‘being’ is not equivalent to presence.” By this point, if you’re still reading, you’re wondering what this has to do with the Flash. It’s this: Flash is a comic that is haunted by Barry Allen. Fisher phrases it thus, while discussing the hiss and crackle of a phonograph recording being redeployed in a contemporary piece of electronic music: “The surface noise of the sample unsettles the illusion of presence in at least two ways: first, temporally, by alerting us to the fact that what we are listening to is a phonographic revenant; and second, ontologically, by introducing the technical frame, the material pre-condition of the recording, on the level of content.” What I’ll argue here is that the costume that Wally wears is the equivalent of this crackle. We see Wally/Flash as present, as a character in and of himself. This is just not true, however.  Even Wally himself admits that he lives in the shadow of Barry Allen, that Barry Allen taught him everything, made him everything that he is. The costume is evidence. As with the crackle, it unsettles our illusion of presence by temporally constantly hearkening back to Barry Allen. Yes, there are slight variations, whether due to artistic license or to the active changing by Wally of the costume, but it is still fundamentally the costume that Barry Allen wore in comics for 30 years. As such, though we read a comic set, ostensibly, in the present, the costume is the crackle that reminds us that what we are reading is in some ways a “visual revenant.” From an ontological stance, what we might consider as the metatextual level of the costume’s unsettling nature, the “material condition” of the artwork, the concealment beneath the crimson cowl of an individual makes that individual virtually indistinguishable from any other piece of art featuring that character, past, present, or future. (For the record, later into the title’s publication history, Bart Allen dons the scarlet costume and, again, becomes indistinguishable from Barry or Wally.) Fisher says of this crackle effect “[w]e are suddenly made aware again of what the first listeners to phonograph recordings were acutely conscious: that we are witnessing a captured slice of the past irrupting into the present.” And is this not what we are seeing each and every time Wally puts on his Flash costume, a captured slice of the past irrupting, at high speed, into the present?

But so what? Comics have always had, or at least for a very long time now have had, this generational aspect to them, so what does it matter to note that this costume reminds us of a character long dead? Well, it’s not just us who are reminded. As I’ve just said, Wally is constantly reminded, and reminding himself, of all that he owes to Barry Allen. This legacy, as Derrida notes for Marx, is absolute and determinate. Be a hero, help as many people as you can. Be good. Be like me. Barry does not have presence in the comic, but he has being, and it is a being, a set of expectations laid down not only by the character but by the writers who have invoked him after death, that Wally, but certainly not only Wally, constantly struggle to live up to. What we, and Wally, wait for is the moment of fulfillment, either of the failure to live up to the being of expectation, or of the achievement of those things that we perceive as the fundamentalities of that being. These are two of the spectres of Allen that haunt us. And they do haunt us. We read The Flash are we’re intrinsically aware that there is this paragon, ghostly but a paragon nonetheless, to which our focal character, and we by association, must live up to. Wally tries. So do we. But how can we live up to something that simply has being? Is not presence, actuality, fundamentally influenced and changed by existence in a material realm? Being can exist outside of time, outside of causality. Presence is the manifestation of being in time. And time changes all things. If we are truly to exist as presences in this actuality, we must, to a certain extent, and to a greater extent than Wally has to this point, lay this spectral being aside, or manifest it and see what changes.

So we come to the section of the series I’ve called a ghost story. I think of it this way because we get to witness, sort of, the coalescence of the being into presence. Barry Allen returns. Imagine, for a moment, the celebration the world over if somehow Marx emerged unscathed from the clutches of death. Imagine every Marxist clamouring to study with him, to sit at his feet and hear his wisdom. Imagine his disappointment in how it’s all turned out. This is exactly what happens when Barry Allen returns to Central City and is confronted by what Wally has become, and by what has become of the world he left behind. We have seen, repeatedly, that one of the impetuses of Wally West’s life, of his time as the Flash, is to live up to the lessons he was taught, to make the world a better, safer place, just like his uncle did. He reacts exactly as one might expect when told that his efforts have been in vain, that he has failed, that the ghost he has carried around with him for years is disappointed not only in his performance, but in his appropriation of the ghost’s identity. Again, imagine Marx returning and telling every Marxist on the planet that they weren’t Marxists, that he was the only true Marxist.  It is, unsurprisingly, devastating. Now, because this is a superhero comic, and because to sully the name of Barry Allen in the DC Universe is tantamount to heresy, it of course turns out to not be Barry Allen. Professor Zoom, the Reverse Flash who plagued the younger version of Barry in the recent Flash television show, has travelled in time, taken on Barry’s appearance and persona, and is wreaking insane havoc on Central City. It’s up to Wally to stop him. But this is a Wally broken, a Wally who has been told that he has failed to live up to the being that has accompanied him throughout his superheroic career. There is only one way he can defeat this villain, and that is to understand that the ghost he carries is one of his own making, that the pressures of the spectre of Barry Allen are illusory and that Allen was never the paragon that Wally has made him into; all he ever was was a man. With this realization, Wally takes his first steps to becoming something more.

It may seem silly, even ridiculous, to try to apply this Derridean notion of the hauntological to a superhero comic. What’s important to take away from the theoretical base is the idea of the being versus the presence. The being, the ghost, is never what was the original, but what we carry with us as our perception of the original. What this part of The Flash allows us to theorize is the way in which the present, the “presencing” of the being demonstrates this fact. When Derrida read his book, the neo-liberal machine may well have feared the spectre of Marx, but it was a spectre of their own conception, not anything intrinsically linked to the man himself, much as the revered spectre of the Socialists and the Communists is a spectre of their own conception. What is important, then, what Wally’s experience teaches us, is that it is in our own best interests to acknowledge that the ghost we carry is the ghost we made, and is not the person whose presence creates a shell around the being.

There’s a good chance that none of that made even remotely any sense, and a blog post is not necessarily the best place to try to work out the ins and outs of Derridean hauntology and its application to the superhero comic. As I was writing up one of my 40 Years of Comics posts this week, it occurred to me that Charles Xavier is a haunting presence in the Age of Apocalypse storyline. I likened his presence to that of the “Third Man” than numerous explorers into isolated parts of our planet have reported, a presence that is both individual and gestalt, a companion and another self. Perhaps that is what I’m trying to get at with my contention of the hauntological in The Flash, that the being is a companion and another self, but that we often forget that it is another self, and gift it with autonomy. But a ghost can’t have autonomy, only nostalgia, only construction. A ghost is a memory, all in our heads.

Wally moves on next time. He comes back to the world, runs into old friends, old lovers, and old enemies. Waid has told us a big story here, one that has forced both the readers and the character to rethink everything they thought they knew. He tells us some little stories next, the small steps Wally needs to take to come back from the shock of Barry’s return, and to come out from beneath the shadow he has been casting upon himself.

On the Run: Mark Waid’s The Flash - Part 2 - Finding His Footing

It rarely fails that when one builds up a particular thing in memory, the reality of that thing cannot live up to the building. We call this nostalgia. I’ll admit that part of my love for Waid’s Flash is nostalgic. The early parts of his run are not quite the superlative superhero comics that I fondly cast them as in memory. What we’re seeing here is a writer beginning his first immersive, ongoing title, his first extended take on what it means to be a superhero. We give much credit to comics writers like Kurt Busiek and Grant Morrison for their explorations (though in very different directions) of what it means to be superhuman, and unfortunately not much to Mark Waid. Where Busiek tries to find the human in the superhuman, and Morrison the god, Waid does something different yet again, though something also intrinsically connected to those two other vectors: he tries to find the person in the superhuman. By the end of the run, we don’t think of the character as “The Flash,” we think of him as Wally West. Or more properly, we cease to see a divide between the two. Waid explores the impact of superherodom on a person, and also the impact on a person of having a public identity. Where Clark and Superman, Bruce and Batman, are treated, by the characters themselves, as separate, Wally and the Flash never have that divide. An illustration of the progression of that amalgamation can be seen in the opening lines of this run of comics, the earlier of which read "I'm the Flash, and I'm the fastest man alive," and later which say ""I'm Wally West, and I'm the fastest man alive."

But it takes a while for us to get there. I start off this second part of my analysis with Flash Annual #5, a part of the “Eclipso: The Darkness Within” crossover. It was fashionable, both at DC and Marvel, during this era to have extended storylines run through the annuals published each year. In some ways this was a good idea, in that it kept crossovers from impacting too much on the ongoing series, something that can be frustrating when a crossover interrupts a writer’s flow. However, it seems that the crossovers in the annuals, at least in the nineties, were places where substandard storylines were utilized. Far from something intriguing and sinister like “Secret Invasion,” or universe-spanning like Marvel’s 2015 “Secret Wars,” the annual storylines were bland, lacking in suspense or intrigue. The reason for this is simple: much as the stories did not impact the main series, the stories did not impact the main series. I’m not just repeating myself there. Since the ongoing titles were, well, ongoing, it was fairly obvious that any repercussions of the annual crossover were going to be temporary at best, and completely non-invasive to the main series. This annual is a perfect example. Eclipso is a strange god/demi-god character in the DCU who possesses people through a black gem within which he is trapped. Every now and again he’ll somehow break free and jump from character to character for some nefarious purpose. For example, at the end of this issue, he jumps into the Flash and speeds away into the subsequent issues of the crossover. But as far as I can tell, this incident is completely unacknowledged in the main title. At the same time that this crossover was going on in the annuals, Wally is also facing Abra Kadabra in the main title. While this is not an uncommon occurrence, nor would it be a problem if the story had simply taken place in a regular issue and continued either in the next issue or elsewhere, the fact of its being presented in an annual, as part of a major crossover, intimates that it is an important, perhaps even fundamental, moment in the character’s life. Surely that’s the point of large-scale crossovers, to shake things up. Well, that’s the theory, at least. The troubles with non-impacting crossover series is something we’ll have to consider elsewhere, another time.

 

What this annual does do well is give us Waid’s first look at the Rogues, the villains of Central City who have antagonized the Flash, both Barry and Wally, for years. There are some nice moments where the rogues (Trickster, Weather Wizard, and Captain Boomerang, in this case) discuss the differences between Wally and Barry, an interesting perspective to have on these heroes. The inclusion of these characters also reinforces the hauntedness of the title by Barry Allen. These criminals all debuted during his tenure as the Flash, and though their opinion may matter little to Wally, they still hold him up and contrast him to Barry. The criminals wax nostalgic for a simpler time, a simpler hero. Thus this annual, though a bit of a throwaway, engages nicely with the nostalgia and haunting that is coming to be a major motif in Waid’s work.

The subsequent issues, numbers 67 and 68, continue the trend of re-introducing canonical, and traditional, Flash villains, with the reappearance of Abra Kadabra. The typical superheroic fisticuffs are an interesting backdrop to a couple of far more interesting things that go on in these comics. First and foremost, in issue 67, faced with the prospect that he cannot stop Kadabra from killing a stadium full of people, Wally ponders whether he has it in him to kill the mad magician. This is a moral conundrum that we often see explored in superhero comics, but for the thoughts to come to someone who is, traditionally, as light-hearted as Wally West throws into sharp relief the kinds of thought processes that a superhero, be they grim or merry, must deal with on a regular basis. He is fortunately saved the choice by the last minute appearance of a Peregrine, a hunter, from the future from which Kadabra hails. As is usual with The Flash (as we’ll see), Wally is sent hurtling, along with Kadabra, into the 64^th century, a time when the movements and activities of all human beings are regulated by the “central clockworks.” Here we see two of the fundamental themes of the series being played out. Of all of the major DC heroes, Wally West, specifically in this era of the title, is the most likely to have time travel adventures. Really, it comes of his powers. Theories about time travel revolve around the ability to move faster than light, so a character who channels the universal force of speed is a likely candidate for these sorts of adventures. In this one he’s a little unsettled, but, trust me, Wally will become accustomed to such travels. However, while he’s here, he commits a crime, though from his relative moral standpoint, it’s an act of liberation. 2400 years into the future, the Flash decides that the way society is running is wrong, and goes out of his way to upset things completely. In doing so he realizes that Abra Kadabra, in his own context, is a hero, fighting against a mechanized clockworks that controls all of humanity. This kind of relativity with regard to temporal morals will be explored further down the line in this run, but here it offers us a couple of interesting perspectives on the superhero. From one point of view, there is an arrogance attached to this character, in that he believes his way is the better way, regardless of how society has evolved over the course of almost 2.5 millennia. It’s kind of a reverse of the ways in which colonial powers considered the “primitives” that they tried to “civilize” from the 17^th to early 20^th centuries. As such, Wally engages in an act of colonialism, in that he privileges the way he sees things over the way the natives of the era see things. From another perspective, however, Wally engages in the kind of decision that these demi-gods of the twentieth century are often expected to make. If we consider the superheroes from the Morrisonian stance taken in the JLA series, these characters, both as characters we read about and as people inhabiting a fictional world, are avatars of the big ideas we crystallize in our gods. And this, in some ways, places them on a moral level that is neither place nor time dependent. We could consider this as Wally utilizing the eternal morality of the divine. Though I’m not sure he’d necessarily see it that way.

Here’s the part where I have to make a bit of a confession. There are two comics that I am missing that constitute a re-reading of the Waid era. They are both issues of Green Lantern, numbers 31 and 96. It’s 31 we’ll unfortunately be missing today, though with the early nineties propensity for recaps at the issue’s beginning, we’re not missing that much. Green Lantern 30 and 31 and Flash 69 and 70 constitute the “Gorilla Warfare” crossover, in which Gorilla Grodd and Hector Hammond team up to destroy humanity. It’s best not to ask why. It’s just a thing supervillains do. There’s a few interesting moments in these crossovers. We really begin to see Waid’s take on the idea of the DCU as a generational place in these issues. Green Lantern Hal Jordan was Barry Allen’s “best friend...both noble...brave...and hopelessly, tragically unhip.” In an interesting assessment, even Wally notes how uncool the two were, perhaps a nod by Waid toward the nostalgia with which we view these characters. Jordan is portrayed here with silver hair at his temples, and is probably in his early forties (take it from someone in his early 40s – the silver hair is there). Wally, by contrast, is in his mid-twenties, representative of the coming new wave of heroes exemplified by Kyle Rayner Green Lantern and Jack Knight Starman. Further resonances to Allen’s pervasive presence come in the history Grodd shares with the Flashes. In fact, since the beginning of this run of Flash, I don’t think Wally has faced anyone his Uncle didn’t face before him. With the return of each of these villains, we see that Wally doesn’t simply live in the shadow of Barry’s successes, but also his failures.

As a bit of a call back to the series that began this read through, Flash and Green Lantern: The Brave and the Bold, the “Gorilla Warfare” storyline functions to show the allegiances that can surmount generational divides in superhero storytelling. Wally, simply by being The Flash, has an ally in Green Lantern. And when Hal is no longer Green Lantern, Kyle Rayner, simply by being Green Lantern, has an ally in The Flash. Well. Almost. It takes them a bit of time.

So just when it seems that poor Wally West is doomed to simply face Barry Allen’s prodigious rogues gallery, a brand new one shows up. Well. Sort of. A villain sharing all the hallmarks of classic Flash villain Dr. Alchemy shows up and the Flash is tasked with protecting a state’s witness from him. Interestingly, on the cover the new villain is called “Doctor Alchemy,” but inside the comic he himself calls himself “The Alchemist.” It’s something that I wondered about in the first season of The Flash television shows, the nicknames that Cisco gives to each of the metahumans. Who claims the right to name a hero or a villain? Lois Lane is famous for having coined the term “Superman.” In the TV series, Barry Allen names himself, via Iris West. What happens in the case of a villain? Do we accept what they call themselves, afford them the respect of acknowledging their choice of names, or do we name them, in order to demonstrate how they stand outside of “civilized” society?

This story doesn’t answer any of those questions, but it does give yet another perspective on the generations of metahumans that populate this universe. Here we have a descendant of an old Flash villain, rather than Wally, the descendant of a hero.

The final issue of today’s column, #73, is the first one that starts to read and feel like the Flash comics I associate with the Mark Waid years. Wally and Linda sit down for a Christmas celebration with Jay and Joan Garrick. Jay “the original Flash” Garrick, that is. With Hal Jordan, we saw the generation of heroes that emerge in the Silver Age, the father and mother-figures, so to speak, of the latter generation of which Wally is something of a herald. The heroes of the Modern Age, perhaps. Jay Garrick, however, represents the “grandparent-ly” generation, the ones who, ostensibly, did it all before anyone else. This generational framework places Waid’s story into an interesting position with regard to its consideration of families. As we’ve been introduced to Wally’s biological family in the Year One stories, over the course of the last few issues we’ve been introduced to his “superherological” family. There are generations of Flashes, stretching back into history, generations of Green Lanterns, the bachelor uncles of the Flash family. There are wives in the persons of Joan Garrick and Iris Allen, who haunts the series only slightly-less than Barry. The clashes, both between and within these families, provide Waid and his co-writers with a way of considering the families we are born into and those that we choose. That this particular story also involves the Flashes saving a family from making a terrible mistake simply underlines the focus of the issue, and in many ways the series.

I should have mentioned earlier that one of the “The (Dr.) Alchem(y)ist” stories featured another Waid-esque moment, as a mysterious figure appears in the background in a flash of electricity caused by the storm through which the Flash fights his elemental foe. The figure is given two panels and then staggers off into the shadows. We’re not sure who he is, yet, but a massive clue appears at the end of this issue, just as everything is wrapping up in a Christmas-y moment to rival the end of It’s A Wonderful Life, in the person of Barry Allen.

What happens when a ghost ceases to be a ghost, ceases to haunt a location or a person, and comes back to resume life instead? We’ll find out next time.