Remember that? Yeah, that was The Flash #50, where Wally West finally came out of Barry Allen’s shadow and became his own hero…he got a new suit rather than a hand me down, and could out-race lasers. The Flash has been, for years, my all time favorite super hero. Right alongside him stands Iceman and Hal Jordan’s Green Lantern.
I grew up on Wally West. My neighbor, Veronica, was a bit of recluse who my parents would always like to say that I was the only one allowed into her house. She had a skinned bear rug in her living room, and posters of the original Sun Also Rises cover and quite a few bullfight posters. She was a huge fan, and later in life—when I was reading virtually everything with Hemingway’s name on it, I drilled her as to what it was like to be at a bullfight. She was from Germany and was friends with Albert Einstein when he lived in Saranac Lake. She would let me in and dust-off books and she knew somehow…knew that I would like comics and gave me my first: The Flash vol. 2 #1. You know the one I’m talking about, the one where he’s racing the fighter jets. I was six years old and from there I was off to the races (sorry, pun not intended but just my own ineptitude at picking a better phrase).
Two days ago, I saw a kid on the subway reading the Superman/Wally West Flash race and I realized what had just happened in the recent issue of The Flash: Fastest Man Alive. I started to think about a retrospective on how The Flash ran his course through my life.
I would have nightmares as a nine year old when Wally West went up against the Kilg%re (I still have no idea how to pronounce that) in that Night of the Living Dead-type homage. I went on a tear of Zombie nightmares afterwards. Later on in life, about when we got our first computer, a Gateway 2000—which I begged for because there was going to be no way that I could write my papers in high school on a typewriter the way I did in middle school. It was so frustrating in seventh grade, when I would have to revise papers having to rewrite the whole thing on a typewriter, but it helped me: learning to write on a type writer, and I think there is still something lost on my little brother’s generation that have no concept of learning to write on a typewriter. I still consider computers nothing more than a glorified typewriter with neat little doo-dads (though you’d never see me give up my iBook for anything.) My first attempt at writing was writing characters that already existed, I started a novel about the X-Men and Generation X, with an amazing scene years before X2 of the mansion being raided by Sentinels rather than soldiers and Professor Xavier being taken. I also read the novelizations of the Death of Superman and Batman: Knightfall; and decided that Terminal Velocity would be as big a story for The Flash as it was for those characters, I started novelizing that arc. This all started about the tail end of eighth grade. Already, at such a young age, I was obsessed with writing that by sophomore year of high school, I became upset that I couldn’t create my own characters. I wrote a short story about the Jack Knight Starman for my Advanced English Literature class. (I would take AP English my senior year. The only real subject I excelled at in any level.)
The arc previous to Terminal Velocity introduced one of my favorite comic characters that I could identify with: Bart Allen, the grandson of the second Flash, Barry Allen. As his namesake had been given, he was impulsive, brash and always in need of being entertained. Sound like your typical thirteen year old? Yeah. He and I entered high school together, and I was still working away at novelizing the Terminal Velocity arc but I don’t think I made to finish it past the sixth issue, and we were already into the Dead Heat arc, and the Savitar story (which still kicks my ass a lot). I went into my Gavin Rossdale phase and began to identify more and more with Bart—if anything was bothering me, I could just go for a run and leave it behind me. This idea became evident when I was sixteen in Florida when my grandmother was very sick, that year was probably the roughest year of my life (a lot of people close to me passed away, some being their time and some not). I loved my family through this whole ordeal, wanting to be close with the whole family and Impulse #12 dropped at the right time for me during this ordeal. I wanted to be that close to my family as Bart was with his cousin XS in that issue, which probably is still one of my favorite single issues of all time. But that issue also brought to the forefront the idea of running to get away from my problems. This was hardly a original concept as I’m sure many teenagers of my comic book reading generation did this for similar reasons. The issue had Bart and XS run around the world and go do various things like: make fun of why the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was in Cleveland and not in Tennessee. (Or was that in another issue with Jesse Quick for Bart’s birthday? Not sure, and don’t have those back issues on hand to double check.) After reading this issue and being in Florida at my Grandmother’s house and having a altercation with my Uncle speaking to him in a very threatening manner and meaning every word of it during a disagreement with my Mom, I ran out the door and ran around the condominium compound in Fort Lauderdale, Florida; and ran and ran until I couldn’t anymore. And then walked back to the condo where the DiTraglia family was gathered, and realized that I couldn’t run anymore. That running to work out my fears was no way of dealing with things.
I’ll get to my point, it’s obvious that Bart Allen meant a lot to me in those teen years and when they gave him the mantle of The Flash a year ago I was more than elated. My sticking with the character through the years had finally been fulfilled.
Though in last week’s issue of Bart’s Flash: Fastest Man Alive #13, they killed him off. There was a lot of dissent in the comic book community from old timers and haters when Wally West and family vanished in a blast of lightning and Bart got the mantle. I’m pretty upset with the handling of the death of Bart and the return of Wally and family. Ooo, stick some Benjamin Franklin lightning rods in the sky and poof! Wally West and family with the twins aged! Yay! Does that make sense? No, but why should it?
The audience that I was specifically in tune with was the people over at the Comic Bloc, who cried to Holy Heaven about Bart being the new Flash, and whined and complained about the writing and piss poor characterization. I’ll admit they weren’t as good as they could have been, but I couldn’t get myself to agree with them that Bart didn’t deserve to be The Flash. For me, I had taken this long journey with Bart from when he first appeared as a hyperspeed aging infant to teenager, to getting his knee caps shot out by Slade to now being The Flash. I felt it was his destiny and his time to be The Flash and I had followed him along this journey for a long time. I was fired up with the fact that Mark Waid was returning to The Flash and would be writing Bart Allen again since the early days of his own series Impulse. I had such fond memories from high school and earlier of the Waid penned stories regarding Bart. So, for me, Waid writing Bart Allen as The Flash was a fulfilling prophecy, the character had finally come full circle as he was written right off the bat to do, by his creator–Waid. It would only be destiny that the creator writes the creation fulfilling the destiny he had written for him. But no, they had to kill Bart to bring back Wally. I feel like creative’s hand was forced (not Waid’s) because of the vocal crowd of traditionalist fanboys over at the Bloc couldn’t stand the fact that Wally was no longer The Flash, or wanted Barry back, and I frankly felt that would be caving on DC’s part. For a company and a industry where the stereotype is death means nothing (which I think is a brash generalization)–bringing Barry back would allow the whole universe to fall apart. DC is a place where everyone who eventually dies will come back, and I think that’s why they keep Barry dead because they want his death to mean something.
In the end, I think they caved to some 40-year-old construction workers who want their Wally back without giving Bart a chance as The Flash. Thirteen issues? Come on, that’s giving in to some people who don’t like change. First it was the excellent artist Ken Lashley plagued for reasons I fail to understand, then the writers DeMeo and Bilson and now the character. And I think the entire situation that went down in the last year of this character is a very sad state of affairs for creative people in general. They let the peanut gallery get to them.
Just before Veronica’s death last winter, I brought her The Flash: Fastest Man Alive #1, and her knowing how much I loved the character as part of who I am as a person and identifying with Bart she asked me: “Did you write this?” I told her no. She smiled and nodded, and touched my hand and looked at the comic book. I told her Bart had finally become The Flash. She asked me again if I wrote this, because she was losing her mind and forgetting things but not me and The Flash, she identified me and the character so much that she couldn’t get it out of her mind. For her the character and me were joined at the hip. This is what struck a cord with me, my imagination went wild: Veronica believed that it was my destiny to write The Flash and I took that as being destiny for Bart to be The Flash, but because of some old crotchety people who don’t like change on Geoff Johns’ message board—it doesn’t matter. Because if that day comes and if I get a chance to write The Flash I think its pretty obvious what I will do.
1 Comment
October 18, 2008 at 4:30 pm
[...] me. The justifiable execution of a character who facilitated the killing of a character that was pretty close to my heart. So, sorry for the image and naturally, copyright DC. [...]