I just need to feel the need to vent a little on the Flash's
broke base. Newsrama just posited the "Barry and Wally" question on Facebook for their preview of
The Flash (vol. 4) #11 and the response is the typical firestorm (har har) between both factions, but it seems to be the Wally fans that bother me the most. The typical response is "Barry is boring! Wally all the way!" and I am beginning to think that whatever potential Wally had as a character sputtered out by the end of Geoff Johns' first run. While I admit that bringing back Barry after he died saving the universe in
Crisis on Infinite Earths was not the wisest move DC made, Wally had died (i.e. went to the Speed Force or "elsewhere") three times in
Flash (vol. 2) #100, Flash (vol. 2) #150, and
Infinite Crisis #4. That little detail started to make me wonder why Wally got to escape but Barry Allen/Max Mercury/Johnny Quick could not. The "official" explanation that DC gives us is because of Wally and Linda Park's love for one another but should Barry and Iris's love be as strong? Should Johnny Quick's love for his daughter be enough? Was Mark Waid trying to tell us, albeit indirectly, that Wally was the "chosen one", which I find a big plot contrivance that cheapened Wally and any character progress he made.
There is also the abortive 2007 relaunch of Wally's title after Bart Allen's "death." I get the impression that the fans generally revile the twins for being spotlight thieves but I saw from serious flaws in that run. Notably that Bart's death was never addressed after Wally froze Inertia; they never addressed the Rogues' complicity in the murder; none of the supporting characters from the earlier run returned. Even Johns' used the supporting cast from the Baron and Messner-Loebs' runs to some effect. The whole mess left me wondering if Wally finally hit a dead end as a character in the comics. He's awesome in other media like the DCAU
Justice League and
Young Justice but I cannot bring myself to give a care for him in the comics.
"Team Wally" is a noisy bunch but do they even have a clue of what to do with him after the cluster [tornado fang] that was the 2007 relaunch?
Posted on: July 20, 2012, 12:02:24 PM
I am just wondering, does anyone think that DC and Marvel's attempts to garner attention and spoil story details for a momentary bump in sales is getting annoying? It is not like it will sell a million copies of any given issue. Someone better tell them the speculation market died in the mid 1990s. Just as the poor sap who bought a hundred copies of Rob Liefeld's Youngblood #1.