THAT AND FIFTEEN BUCKS WILL GET YOU SOME ORIGINS PART 5
Again, I am not even going to lie to you.
Wally West is my favorite Flash.
And again please do not take this as a statement of disrespect towards Jay Garrick, Barry Allen or even Bart Allen1. I have a respectable run of the Barry Allen Flash series and thought that Cary Bates did some fantastic work on that book. I also have much affection for Jay Garrick and I love the fact that he has become one of the elder statesmen of the DC hero community.
At the end of the day though Wally is the fastest man alive, at least for me2.
In all honesty one of the reasons that I like Wally so much is that he is my Flash. He was there when I first started reading comics full time and he was one of the characters I chose to collect when the addiction set in hard around 1994. Never underestimate the power of having a character to call your own. A fan will follow that character into the bowels of Hell if they feel that connection strong enough. Don’t believe me? Check out HEAT. They were a dedicated bunch3.
The main reason I became so fond of Wally is Mark Waid. If there is a Top Five Comic Book Writers of the 1990′s Mark Waid needs to be on that list and he needs to be in the top two. Sure I joke about the fact that every fifty issues or so Waid would have Wally supposedly die, but at the same time it was such a solid run on the character that I was actually upset…sad even when Waid and his eventual writing partner Brian Augustyn took a year off. Mark Waid made Wally real for me and I know that may sound corny or silly or whatever but that doesn’t matter. I didn’t mention this in the Green Lantern installment of this series but Ron Marz on Green Lantern and Chuck Dixon on Robin and Detective and Mark Waid on Flash helped me through a particularly rough period of my life. I was nineteen, living pretty much on my own, my mother had died, eventually the girl I was in love with left me and most of my family lived in another state. I was lonely and depressed and those characters and writers helped me through and because of that they will always mean a great deal to me.
“A Run of Luck” from Flash Secret Files and Origins #14 was written by the previously mentioned Mark Waid and Brian Augustyn with art by Kenny Martinez and Anibal Rodriguez and is narrated by an unknown person who refuses to identity him or herself on the first page. I think its Barry Allen, but that’s just my theory. Call you what you want, a hunch, woman’s intuition…I think this story is told by Barry from the Speed Force. Whatever the case the unknown but probably Barry Allen narrator begins with the history of the first man to be known as the Flash; Jay Garrick.
For a football player Jay Garrick made one heck of a chemistry and physics major at Midwestern University5. One night while performing an experiment with “hard water” a beaker full of the stuff falls out of his hand after he dozed off. So Garrick spends all night breathing the fumes of this “hard water” and ends up in a coma which he miraculously comes out of. After waking up Jay finds that he can run fast. Real fast. Fastest man alive fast and after winning a big game he decides to give up a career in sports in favor of becoming the mystery man known as the Flash. Waid and Augustyn leave a lot of details out of this retelling, but I don’t blame them. They had a limited amount of time with which to tell a story, so skipping over his relationship with Joan and how his first big case was to save his future wife from gangsters were both left out6.
Another reason I don’t hold any ill will towards the brevity of the Jay Garrick section is that just about any Jay Garrick is enough for me. While it took two writers to make me a fan of Alan Scott it only took one to make me like Jay. Mark Waid brought Jay into the series after the golden ager came back from Ragnarok and the mere presence of Garrick in the book is what started my affection for the legacy characters in the DCU. Jay was the grandfather who still had some fight in him and with Jay, Max Mercury, Johnny Quick, Jesse Quick and eventually Bart Allen joining Wally’s side the solo book became a sometimes team book. Waid created a family out of the speedsters and used this concept to good effect.
Next up in “A Run of Luck” is Barry Allen’s story. Again Waid and Augustyn tell a streamlined version of the origin and throws in some homages to Showcase #47 for good measure. One of these homages was the concept that Barry was an avid reader of Jay Garrick’s comic book adventures even into adulthood. Not only did this serve as a great transition device between Jay and Barry’ story it allowed for one of the cooler ideas from Showcase #4 to remain in continuity.
Finally we have Wally’s origin, which starts even before he received his powers. If memory serves Wally was presented in the Silver Age as the president of the Blue Valley chapter of the Flash Fan Club. Waid added the wrinkle that he was also the only member, which I like. I’m not sure if there was an actual Flash Fan Club in the DCU and Wally was the only one who bothered to start a chapter or that there was no Flash Fan Club and Wally just started one and called it the Blue Valley chapter to make it sound legitimate. In either case Wally is characterized as someone who feels trapped in his own life and the Flash was a way to escape that reality.
Luckily for Wally he had an ace in the hole. His Aunt Iris was the fiancé of Barry Allen and on a trip to Central City Barry “arranged” for a meeting only to have the accident that gave him powers repeat itself and give those same powers to Wally. The two became partners and shared a close friendship until Barry died. Wally decided to carry on Barry’s name and costume, though he made a few slight cosmetic changes to it over the years. Eventually Wally even crossed over into the source of all of the speedsters’ abilities, the Speed Force and truly became the fastest man alive.
On the last page Waid and Augustyn hint at the future by mentioning Bart and showing the Flashes yet to come and it is here that they reveal the heart of their work with the character. Sure the then-current series was about Wally and while Wally was definitely his own man we never forgot what a rich history he came from and as I mentioned that is one of the main reasons I was so fond of this book. To me a character with a legacy is fascinating and if it is done right can make for an interesting read. As I mentioned in the Green Lantern installment of this series DC was doing this across the board throughout the nineties. Whether it was on purpose or not I don’t know. I kind of like the concept that it was just a happy accident because when a grand plan is drawn up things tend to fall apart. Countdown is a good example of how to do this wrong. I mean it can work. The build up to Infinite Crisis is a good example of to do it right, but over a period of time the center cannot hold. I’m of the opinion that allowing the editors and writers to develop a character without having to overly worry about how it fits into the big picture is the better way to produce a fictional universe. Have an overall universe and continuity, but it shouldn’t matter how the Teen Titans fit with Wonder Woman fit with Countdown fit with Amazons Attack8.
In any case this was a solid retelling of the various Flashes origins and is a good reminder of why Mark Waid and eventually Brian Augustyn were so good on this title. Was the run fantastically awesome from beginning to end? No. There were some rough parts, but that’s going to happen when you stay with a character for nearly eight years. The only reason I didn’t stick with Waid when he came back to the series was that it just wasn’t the same. Sometimes you just need to move on and for me and the Flash this was that time9. Sad, but true. It wasn’t that Waid wasn’t doing a good job writing the character. I just realized that there was a time and a place and the old saying of not being able to go home again has a lot of truth to it.
Still, I have the back issues and the memories and sometimes that’s all a fan needs.
Tomorrow…Wonder Woman. Surprisingly I have something to say, which I didn’t think was going to happen.
More to follow…
Fortress Footnotes
- Because I think DC was disrespectful enough towards Bart Allen for a thousand online pundits. I have been trying to remain fairly positive on this blog but of the many mistakes DC has made over the past few years Bart Allen is the biggest. How can you screw up something that badly? Seriously. I know that at the end of the day the powers at be at DC Comics are doing the best they can to produce comics that will entertain and be financially successful, but holy crap that was a cluster @#$% from beginning to end. ↩
- Seriously. I have proof. He “said” it for years at the top of every issue. I’m not lying. I promise. ↩
- A group, I might add, that eventually got their way, so power to the fanboy. ↩
- November 1997 ↩
- Which I assume is in the Midwest. Call it another one of those hunches. ↩
- They also left out the fact that in his very first appearance in Flash Comics #1 (January 1940) Jay was grabbing a cigarette when he accidentally knocked over the beaker full of hard water. I have always found this fact hilarious. Not only does it make smokers look clumsy but it also seems to indicate that if you are working into the small hours that all you need for a pick me up is a quick smoke. This is something that would never be put in an origin today, especially over at Marvel. ↩
- September-October 1956. ↩
- I cannot adequately describe my contempt for Amazons Attack. As much as I have tried to be more positive that series brings up the bile like I was Linda Blair. ↩
- Which my change with Flash: Rebirth, but I am playing that one by ear. ↩
Nice summary!
Regarding footnote #6, did you ever see Comic Coverage’s post on smoking superheroes? It’s done as an parody of an endorsement by the Flash, all about how cigarettes contributed to his gaining super-speed.
Thanks for the link! That was really funny. And thanks for turning me on to that blog. It seems keen.