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COMICS 101
By Scott Tipton
June 4, 2003
THE FASTEST MAN ALIVE
By 1940, the rampant success of Superman was blatantly obvious. Publishers were tripping all over themselves to get the next superhero comic out the door. However, people were cautioned by National’s successful legal action against Fox Publishing, which put an end to their clearly (and admittedly) derivative “Wonder Man” feature from Eisner and Iger Studios. So, what to do, what to do? A-ha! Specialize! Soon every superhero wasn’t just generally, well, super, but had their own distinct and legally defensible niche. Timely introduced the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner, while National’s sister company All-American headlined their new series FLASH COMICS with two of their own; Hawkman, who we’ll discuss in a later column, and the first of the “speedster” characters in comic books, the Flash. The Flash has been a remarkably long-running character (no pun intended), with only a five-year gap in publication since 1940, second only to Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, who have remained continually on the stands since their inception. In addition, the Flash concept is one of the best examples of one of DC Comics’s strengths: a sense of legacy, as the tradition and title of the Flash is passed down from generation to generation through the decades. Let’s take a look now at all the men who have carried the lightning …
The first Flash is the dude with the helmet, right?
Correct you are. Coming to us courtesy of writer Gardner Fox and artist Harry Lampert, the original Flash’s first appearance was found in FLASH COMICS #1 (January 1940).
Inside, we met Jay Garrick, an “unknown student at Midwestern University” who’s getting absolutely nowhere with co-ed Joan Williams due to his lack of skills on the gridiron. After all, she says, “a man of your build and brains could be a star…a scrub is just an old washwoman.” Ouch. No love for Jay.
In the lab, however, research student Jay is a brilliant scientist, who’s been studying the gases from “hard water” for three years. Working in the lab late one night, Jay decides to relax with a cigarette. (Comics in the ‘40s were a whole different animal, in case you hadn’t noticed.) Leaning back to take a big drag, Jay knocks over the bottles containing the mysterious “hard water” fumes, which quickly render him unconscious.
After weeks in the hospital, Jay eventually recovers, and the doctors discover that the hard water elements have permanently affected his reflexes. We’ll let the doctor drop some science on you:
If you say so, Doc. Regardless, Jay was now the fastest man alive, and in a burst of self-interest unusual for superhero comics, uses his newfound abilities to win the state football game and score a date with the scrub-hating Joan. After college, Jay finds himself using his new powers to fight crime; no great motivation or anything, just because he felt better about himself using his speed to help humanity.
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The Golden Age Flash stories were primarily written by Gardner Fox, and dealt mostly with Jay Garrick using his speed to fight common criminals and gangsters and the like. Original Flash artist Harry Lampert departed the strip after the first two issues, replaced by E.E. Hibbard, whose rough, basic style became a trademark of the series. Fox and Hibbard stayed with the strip throughout its run, appearing in FLASH COMICS, ALL-FLASH and in the individual chapters of the JSA stories in ALL-STAR COMICS. As discussed in these pages previously, when the superhero trend died out, most of the heroes went with it, with only Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman maintaining respectable sales. After a healthy 11-year race, the Flash’s run came to a sudden stop.
When DC editor Julius Schwartz was looking for a new feature for his new anthology series SHOWCASE, a revival of the Flash seemed to fit the bill. After all, it had been roughly five years since the last FLASH comic in 1951, and the general belief at the time was that kids only read comics for about five years, so therefore, there should be a whole new audience ready once more for the fastest man alive. Schwartz turned the Flash revival over to writer/editor Robert Kanigher and artist Carmine Infantino. Kanigher and Infantino had both worked on the first FLASH series toward the end of its run, but Schwartz instructed them that everything for the new Flash series had to be different: secret identity, origin, costume, the works. In SHOWCASE #4 (October 1956), Kanigher and Infantino delivered.
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“Mystery of the Human Thunderbolt” opens with police scientist Barry Allen chuckling over an old issue of FLASH COMICS. Returning to his lab, Barry is standing in front of a cabinet full of chemicals when a bolt of lightning strikes the cabinet through an open window, drenching him in chemicals.
On the way home, Barry sprints to catch a cab and finds himself hurtling past it. Later, in a diner, when a waitress drops a tray of food, Barry’s newly enhanced reflexes kick in and he’s stunned to see the food appear to be hanging in midair. With his newfound speed Barry easily catches everything in the blink of an eye.
Finally, Barry heads off to meet his girlfriend Iris, and watches in horror as a bullet slowly makes its way toward her head. Barry knocks her out of harm’s way, now fully realizing that the combination of the lightning and the chemicals had granted him unthinkable reflexes and speed. (The bullet heading for Iris? Just a stray bullet from a getaway by the Turtle Man, the criminal known as “The Slowest Man Alive.” He’s a pretty unremarkable villain, so let’s just take for granted that Flash puts him away and move on.)
Inspired by the old FLASH COMICS, Barry resolves to carry on the Flash identity. They don’t call Barry a police scientist for nothing. Soon enough, he’s devised a costume for himself made from the same material as Navy life rafts, which can be stored inside a ring, and swells to full size with the touch of a button.
A word about the costume: Carmine Infantino’s re-design of the Flash was truly inspired. Streamlined and slick, the lightning bolts on the costume’s wrists, belt and boots served as the perfect visual cue for Infantino’s illustration of super-speed. As the Flash streaked across the panel, his blurred crimson figure would be highlighted by the yellow streaks indicating his movement.
Infantino’s style became the generic style for illustrating speedster characters in comics, and the Flash’s costume is one of the few Silver Age designs that has remained unchanged for over 60 years.
Kanigher left THE FLASH after the four early appearances in SHOWCASE, and when the new Flash was awarded his own magazine in February 1959 (FLASH #105, picking up where the original series numbering had left off), writer John Broome took over the series. Broome brought a new focus to the series: Flash’s Rogues’ Gallery. Month after month, Broome and Infantino would introduce new supervillains, each more outlandish than the last. Flash’s Rogues’ Gallery was probably the best in comics. To put it in baseball terms, they had a really deep bench. And the genius move in regards to characterization was the fact that the Rogues all hung out together, would have competitions about who could bust out of jail first, have the best heists, devise the best deathtrap for the Flash. Hell, it was even revealed that they all went to the same tailor! Almost a little homicidal family.
Flash’s Rogues’ Gallery consisted of:
Captain Cold, whose cold-gun gave him complete mastery over snow and ice.
Heat Wave, whose heat-gun gave him -- well, you get the idea.
Mirror Master, a criminal whose fiendish use of mirrors kept him one step ahead of the law.
Mr. Element, an evil scientist with total mastery of the periodic table of elements (in a neat twist, Mr. Element would occasionally develop a split personality and fight the Flash as “Dr. Alchemy” with the fabled Philosopher’s Stone).
Captain Boomerang, an Australian boomerang expert who goes from toy-company publicity shill to bank robber extraordinaire.
Weather Wizard, a burglar who utilizes his dead brother’s scientific research to create a wand that allows him to control meteorological conditions.
The Trickster, a former circus aerialist whose invention of “air shoes” allows him to walk through the air.
The Top, who could spin around in circles really fast (hey, they can’t all be winners).
The Pied Piper, master of sonics. Much later in the series, the Piper would turn over a new leaf, and eventually be revealed as one of DC’s first openly gay characters.
Then there were the Rogues who didn’t quite hang out so much at the reunions. Sure, everyone wanted to kill Flash, but these guys were a little more serious about it:
Many of Barry Allen’s adventures involved time travel. In fact, one of John Broome’s greatest concepts was the Cosmic Treadmill. Follow along: Since the Flash can run at near light-speed, what would happen if he were to get on a treadmill and run in place? Well, obviously, he’d begin to time-travel. Pure scientific gibberish, yet it makes perfectly satisfying sense according to comic-book logic. One of Barry Allen’s far-future foes was Abra Kadabra, a miscreant from the 64th century whose technology was so advanced, it looked like magic to us 20th-century types. Not satisfied with merely killing Barry, Kadabra delighted in torturing him, often subjecting his body to bizarre transformations, such as a living marionette.
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In fact, transmutation was something of a running theme in THE FLASH, with Barry Allen being transformed into a mirror, into pure electricity, into a video-game character, and the list goes on and on, so much so that it was eventually explained that Barry Allen had complete control over every molecule in his body, allowing him to survive all of these bodily traumas.
Scarier than Kadabra was Gorilla Grodd. Grodd was a refugee from a colony of super-intelligent gorillas hidden from the world by telepathy. Grodd sought nothing less than world domination, and would utilize his powers of telepathy, telekinesis and hypnotism, or “force of mind,” as he called it, to that end. Flash was the only human who knew about Gorilla City, and every so often Grodd would bust out of prison and head straight for Central City to put a serious hurting on Barry Allen.
But probably the most dreaded of Flash’s foes was Eobard Thawne, the Reverse Flash, a.k.a. “Professor Zoom.” Another resident of the far future, and bearing a centuries-old family grudge against the Allen bloodline, Thawne discovered one of Barry Allen’s Flash costumes, and scientifically treated it so as to extract the residue of Flash’s powers, transferring them to the wearer.
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Now just as fast as Barry Allen, Zoom used his historical knowledge of Barry Allen’s life to come to torment Barry, appearing at the happiest moments of his life and trying to snatch that happiness away. After numerous tries, Zoom finally succeeded, murdering Iris, Barry Allen’s wife. (Yes, the Flash was a happily married super-hero, another of John Broome’s innovations.) Barry Allen mourned, grieved and moved on, eventually meeting someone else, a young woman named Fiona Webb. Barry and Fiona’s relationship grew over time, and on their wedding day, you can probably imagine who showed up. Only this time, Barry was playing for keeps as well:
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Flash’s murder of Professor Zoom set off a lengthy storyline in which Flash stood trial for manslaughter. Written by Cary Bates, the story was well-thought-out and compelling, but did run a little too long. The end of the storyline coincided with the end of the series, as Barry Allen left the 20th century forever, to live with his miraculously resurrected wife Iris in the 30th century, where, it turned out, she was born. According to later accounts, Barry and Iris only enjoyed a few weeks of renewed marital bliss before the Crisis on Infinite Earths hit, and, well, if you read the column a few weeks back, you know it didn’t end well for the second Flash. After 29 years of publication, Barry Allen was dead. The Flash, however, was destined to keep running.
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Way back in 1960, Broome and Infantino had introduced readers to Wally West, Iris’ nephew and the world’s biggest Flash fan. While on a tour of his “friend” Barry Allen’s laboratory, Flash shows Wally how he got his powers, even rearranging the contents of the chemical cabinet exactly as it was when the lightning struck it. By blind sheer stinking plot-device coincidence, another lightning bolt hurtled through the window and struck the cabinet exactly as it had two years prior, drenching Wally in the same chemical mixture. (All this the despite the fact that it wasn’t even raining.) With that, Wally had the same super-speed powers as Barry, who quickly gave the youngster his own costume and ring and dubbed him “Kid Flash.”
Kid Flash was active throughout the next three decades (eventually changing from a copy of Barry’s uniform to his own unique and much cooler costume), appearing both in the pages of THE FLASH and with other teen sidekicks Robin, Wonder Girl, Aqualad and Speedy in various TEEN TITANS series.
With the death of Barry Allen in CRISIS, Wally gave up his Kid Flash identity and took on the costume and name of his departed mentor. With the first issue of his own book, FLASH #1, writer Mike Baron and artist Jackson Guice explored Wally’s struggle to fill Barry’s shoes, a process further delineated in writer William Messner-Loebs’ run on the book. But by far, the defining period in the career of Wally West as the Flash is Mark Waid’s lengthy run as writer.
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Waid clearly had an affinity for the Wally West character, and focused the series on the legacy of the Flash. In Waid’s mind, Wally was the first of the teen sidekicks to “fulfill the promise,” to actually replace their mentor. Over the course of his tenure as writer, Waid slowly assembled every major speedster character in the DC Universe and added them to Wally’s supporting cast, including the semi-retired Jay Garrick, Golden Ager Johnny Quick and his daughter Jesse, and Max Mercury, a mysterious speed guru who introduces Wally to the “Speed Force,” an energy field beyond the speed of light that all speedsters tap into, knowingly or not. As Wally began to tap into the Speed Force, his speed increased dramatically, reaching levels of velocity previously only matched by Barry Allen. Waid also introduced Impulse, a.k.a. Bart Allen, Barry Allen’s grandson from the 30th century.
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Waid’s Flash run lasted nearly a hundred issues, starting with #62, and stands as the best treatment of the Wally West character, and is second only to Broome/Infantino as far as FLASH comics go. I highly recommend checking them out. Several of the story arcs are available in trade paperback, including Waid’s retelling of Wally’s origin and early career, “Born to Run,” as well as “The Return of Barry Allen,” which is almost what it sounds like, and “Terminal Velocity,” the introduction of the Speed Force.
The “Terminal Velocity” trade also includes the story “Flashing Back,” a touching time-travel tale of 10-year-old Wally West and his meeting with a stranger from the future. Very good stuff.
Since Waid’s departure, FLASH has been in the hands of writer Geoff Johns, who has changed the emphasis slightly, but without invalidating any of Waid’s fine work. Flash’s company of fellow speedsters appears far less frequently, and Johns and artist Scott Kolins have spent considerable time and effort in revitalizing and adding to Flash’s Rogue’s Gallery, with much success. The Rogues were never in the forefront in Waid’s run, but nowadays they’re as much a part of the series as Flash, which is making for some exciting and occasionally downright scary comics.
So, any FLASH movie on the horizon?
Not to my knowledge. I’m sure someone has optioned it, but there hasn’t been any big announcements. I think the fairly poor ‘80s CBS FLASH TV series has put the stink on any big movie plans.
Still, if you’re starving for a video FLASH fix, tune in to the Cartoon Network JUSTICE LEAGUE animated series, which features healthy doses of the Scarlet Speedster every week, as voiced by none other than SMALLVILLE’S Lex Luthor, Michael Rosenbaum.
Got a question about comics? Send it to stipton99x@moviepoopshoot.com. One line, no waiting.
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