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lilmatt050's review
4.0
To check out all my reviews http://dancinginth3dark.blogspot.com
Ever since the CW has produced The Flash, I have been hooked on Barry Allen and his friends as they adventure new territory into the unknown when it comes to his superhero abilities. I worship the show and while I do not know his true character history in the comics I have always been open minded towards reading comics about the Flash. My first encounter with Barry Allen was in "The Justice League" cartoon series and all these animated movies that have been released over the years that feature him as either a member of the JLA or his standalone film, Flashpoint. For the most part I felt indifferent when it came to this first volume.
Deep down in my gut I know I should rate this 3 stars with no questions but I have to give credit where credit is due which is the illustrations are phenomenal and I love the effort they put into the colors and the overall vibe of this series and that is why I am giving it 4 stars. I know that I want to read more of the Flash so hopefully this series will improve the further I venture myself into this universe.
My main issue with this comic is lack of introduction and character development. I am no expert when it comes to Superheroes comics regardless whether it is DC and Marvel. As a newbie, you would think if they restarted this series all over again don't you think we should get an introduction to the character and how he got his abilities at least for the first volume or a few pages of flashbacks? Yea well the creators said screw it and jump to the action.
In one sentence they sum up Barry Allen as a Scientist for Central City Police Department who got shot by lightning and with chemicals he got the ability to run fast at the speed of light. Now he is superhero protecting Central City while discovering who is he now that he has a new identity. Oh did I forget that his parents are dead without any info as to how they died?
If you are extremely new to the Flash then I highly don't recommend it because you won't understand who are half of these characters and what are their relation to Barry or the Flash. I am fortunate enough that while the television show may differ from the comics at certain points or storylines it nonetheless stays true to the origin story so it wasn't difficult reading this comic especially after reading Flash: Rebirth.
I won't provide any details about the plot because if you are fans of the show then this feels like a random episode where Barry is saving the day and discovers something new about his powers and the Speed force. You meet Captain Cold, his sister, Grodd, Patty Pivot, Iris, and a new character that I have never heard of before but may know his identity already.
One thing I have to comment and I do not know if it's just me but there were countless homoerotic undertones in this comic that I couldn't help but notice throughout this book. Barry has to help a long time friend who is in danger and sure enough every time they showcase a flashback I get these feelings that they were best friends but easily could pass that boundary of friendship to love. Plus the head of the Police Department is in the closet and is sleeping with Pied Piper and it's extremely clear in this book. I hope the next volume is better than this or I will quickly retire this comic series and focus on Grant Gustin.
Ever since the CW has produced The Flash, I have been hooked on Barry Allen and his friends as they adventure new territory into the unknown when it comes to his superhero abilities. I worship the show and while I do not know his true character history in the comics I have always been open minded towards reading comics about the Flash. My first encounter with Barry Allen was in "The Justice League" cartoon series and all these animated movies that have been released over the years that feature him as either a member of the JLA or his standalone film, Flashpoint. For the most part I felt indifferent when it came to this first volume.
Deep down in my gut I know I should rate this 3 stars with no questions but I have to give credit where credit is due which is the illustrations are phenomenal and I love the effort they put into the colors and the overall vibe of this series and that is why I am giving it 4 stars. I know that I want to read more of the Flash so hopefully this series will improve the further I venture myself into this universe.
My main issue with this comic is lack of introduction and character development. I am no expert when it comes to Superheroes comics regardless whether it is DC and Marvel. As a newbie, you would think if they restarted this series all over again don't you think we should get an introduction to the character and how he got his abilities at least for the first volume or a few pages of flashbacks? Yea well the creators said screw it and jump to the action.
In one sentence they sum up Barry Allen as a Scientist for Central City Police Department who got shot by lightning and with chemicals he got the ability to run fast at the speed of light. Now he is superhero protecting Central City while discovering who is he now that he has a new identity. Oh did I forget that his parents are dead without any info as to how they died?
If you are extremely new to the Flash then I highly don't recommend it because you won't understand who are half of these characters and what are their relation to Barry or the Flash. I am fortunate enough that while the television show may differ from the comics at certain points or storylines it nonetheless stays true to the origin story so it wasn't difficult reading this comic especially after reading Flash: Rebirth.
I won't provide any details about the plot because if you are fans of the show then this feels like a random episode where Barry is saving the day and discovers something new about his powers and the Speed force. You meet Captain Cold, his sister, Grodd, Patty Pivot, Iris, and a new character that I have never heard of before but may know his identity already.
One thing I have to comment and I do not know if it's just me but there were countless homoerotic undertones in this comic that I couldn't help but notice throughout this book. Barry has to help a long time friend who is in danger and sure enough every time they showcase a flashback I get these feelings that they were best friends but easily could pass that boundary of friendship to love. Plus the head of the Police Department is in the closet and is sleeping with Pied Piper and it's extremely clear in this book. I hope the next volume is better than this or I will quickly retire this comic series and focus on Grant Gustin.
apageinthestacks's review
4.0
This was a lot better than I was expecting. I've never been a huge Flash fan, but I do really enjoy the TV show and so I wanted to read more of him. I was hoping this would be a sort of detective story, and when it wasn't I was a little disappointed. But they did their story well, and ultimately, I'm excited to read further volumes.
The most fantastic part of this book, though, is the art. I've never encountered Manapul's art before, but from this alone he's already one of my favorite comic artists.
The most fantastic part of this book, though, is the art. I've never encountered Manapul's art before, but from this alone he's already one of my favorite comic artists.
trike's review
1.0
This is the second DC title where I've asked myself in my best Clara Peller voice, "Where's the reboot?"
I don't really pay attention to the goings-on of the various comic book universes, but of course I had heard that DC had thrown away 70+ years of continuity and revamped their entire line, starting over with new number ones. But after reading this book and the dreadful Batman "Court of Owls" collection I wondered if I missed something. So I looked it up and, sure enough, it's a "soft reboot", meaning DC changed some things but kept others. Didn't they do this with some sort of "Crisis" 20 years ago? (My memory wants to say it was Crisis on Infinite Earths, but I'm too annoyed to look it up. With all the annual events these days, who can muster up the energy to care?)
Marvel did a spectacular job with their new Ultimate Universe back in 2000, particularly with Ultimate Spider-man. Starting an entirely new universe from scratch with the same characters meant you could just jump in and start reading comics again, and the blurbs plastered all over this "Vol. 1" of the "Flash reboot" promise that, too.
It's all lies.
Or marketing, which amounts to the same thing. I also looked up how this reboot did for DC. Turns out that after a small bump in sales, interest quickly dropped off again and their intent of securing new readers failed, with more than 90% of readers of "The New 52" being the same ones who were reading it before.
Is that in part because you guys didn't actually deliver the complete reboot your marketing advertised? Probably. It's also probably because of books like Batman and now The Flash, which simply aren't good.
Let's talk about this book:
Flash has been flashing around for 5 years now. (He actually says that in the story.) So as non-fan of The Flash from back in the 1970s who stopped reading DC entirely by the 1980s, there wasn't much different here. Barry is dating Patty instead of being married to Iris, but it's clear the marriage is one of those things lost in the so-called "soft reboot." Everything else looks pretty much the same. Costume hidden in a ring, fastest man alive, super treadmills, the whole shebang.
One of the reasons I was a non-fan of The Flash is because he's like Superman: too powerful. How do you fight a guy who can literally disarm you and deposit you in a jail cell faster than you can blink? The only way to do that is the same way you defeat Superman: namely by doing two things at once, forcing him to choose between two evils.
So for stories to have any kind of tension, the bad guys have to do a "hey look over here!" gambit while actually pulling off something else somewhere else. Which is fine, but it gets old quick. It looked like writer/artist Manapul was going to do that but then he uses the cheapest of all tactics when he randomly depowers the Flash.
Sometimes Flash can beat you up in between eyeblinks. Sometimes he can't. It just depends on whether the author is done with you.
So we are clumsily introduced to Barry's BFF from childhood, someone we've never, ever met before, and we're supposed to care about him. We did not. In the movie Captain America: The First Avenger they carefully build up the relationship between Cap and his best friend Bucky for the entire first half of the movie, so you get a sense of the stakes they face when they start fighting Nazis in WWII together. Here I had that feeling when a friend you've known for fifteen years casually mentions his best bud from college for the first time. "Oh yeah? You guys don't keep in touch, huh?" "Nah. He went one way and I went another. I hadn't thought about him for years until he friended me on Facebook yesterday."
This is not someone for whom you drop everything and put your mortgage on the line in order to bail him out of jail. Or in the world of superheroes, jeopardize your girlfriend's life as well as the lives of 3.5 million citizens. (They say "3.5 million" a lot, too.) You don't do it without laying some groundwork first, anyway.
Another way to beat someone with godlike powers is to simply depower them across the board. Manapul goes the other way and harkens back to the bad old days of Superman when every issue saw him come up with some ridiculous new ability. Super-ventriloquism! Super-hypnosis! Super-shapeshifting! (Not making those up, Superman had those and probably a hundred other stupid superpowers when I was a kid.) I guess Manapul thought that was a great idea, so here he lets Barry tap into the "Speed Force" with his brain. So now Barry can literally see the future. The first time he does this, he muses that he can see all potential outcomes of a situation and then choose the most appropriate one before anyone notices he's moved.
Which he then demonstrates on an imminent car crash that's about to set off a cascade of destruction, right in front of Patty, yet they continue their conversation as if the Rube Goldberg-like series of preposterous events that just transpired in front of them never happened. Also, from her point of view, Barry suddenly materializes an apple to eat.
This Patty chick is a dimwit. Manapul keeps saying she's smart, but she never actually acts that way. Neither does Iris. Neither does Barry, actually. Everyone runs around yelling and fighting until someone comes along to drop an infodump into the scene, generally in the most ham-handed way possible.
The Flash we see here has no limitations. He can move faster than anyone can perceive and now he can see the future and pick the best possible outcome from any situation. How is this an interesting character? Manapul apparently realizes he has written himself into a corner with this and has Barry freeze as he considers all the ways he can solve a situation, giving the bad guys enough time to shoot him in the face. When just a few pages earlier he was able to assess the situation, see all the possible paths he could follow and solve the situation with no one being the wiser -- his first time!
Now suddenly his brain operates slower than normal? Plot device. And then it's used in the dumbest way possible: "Oh no! Barry Allen is dead!" No he's not. He's the goddamn star. All you're doing is sticking us with an uninteresting, heretofore unknown bestie dropping an infodump while we wait for the Flash to show up.
Superhero comics are silly. I get that. I read them to escape, for a bit of fun. But you have to read books like this while extraordinarily drunk or just after taking a life-threatening blow to the head in order not to be insulted by them. Silly is fine; stupid is not.
Set up your world's internal rules and then FOLLOW THEM. Don't randomly change the rules every couple of pages in order to serve your plot. Literally every single character in this book functions purely as a plot device. No one has believable motivations or emotions and, worst of all, the story makes no sense. This shows up in little ways, too. Sometimes when the Flash leaves a scene, there's a gust of wind. Other times there's nothing. Why? Plot demands. Is it important for someone to notice that Barry is no longer there? If so, he leaves no trace of his sudden disappearance, nevermind his existence. If it's not important, then any loose papers get swooshed around by the thunderclap of his exit.
In those dumb Superman stories of yore, at least the writers had a grounding in mystery stories and they had fun with coming up with brand-new superpowers in order for Superman to defeat the bad guy of the day. Here it's just a bunch of stuff thrown into a blender by someone who has apparently never thought about how to properly construct a story.
I don't really pay attention to the goings-on of the various comic book universes, but of course I had heard that DC had thrown away 70+ years of continuity and revamped their entire line, starting over with new number ones. But after reading this book and the dreadful Batman "Court of Owls" collection I wondered if I missed something. So I looked it up and, sure enough, it's a "soft reboot", meaning DC changed some things but kept others. Didn't they do this with some sort of "Crisis" 20 years ago? (My memory wants to say it was Crisis on Infinite Earths, but I'm too annoyed to look it up. With all the annual events these days, who can muster up the energy to care?)
Marvel did a spectacular job with their new Ultimate Universe back in 2000, particularly with Ultimate Spider-man. Starting an entirely new universe from scratch with the same characters meant you could just jump in and start reading comics again, and the blurbs plastered all over this "Vol. 1" of the "Flash reboot" promise that, too.
It's all lies.
Or marketing, which amounts to the same thing. I also looked up how this reboot did for DC. Turns out that after a small bump in sales, interest quickly dropped off again and their intent of securing new readers failed, with more than 90% of readers of "The New 52" being the same ones who were reading it before.
Is that in part because you guys didn't actually deliver the complete reboot your marketing advertised? Probably. It's also probably because of books like Batman and now The Flash, which simply aren't good.
Let's talk about this book:
Flash has been flashing around for 5 years now. (He actually says that in the story.) So as non-fan of The Flash from back in the 1970s who stopped reading DC entirely by the 1980s, there wasn't much different here. Barry is dating Patty instead of being married to Iris, but it's clear the marriage is one of those things lost in the so-called "soft reboot." Everything else looks pretty much the same. Costume hidden in a ring, fastest man alive, super treadmills, the whole shebang.
One of the reasons I was a non-fan of The Flash is because he's like Superman: too powerful. How do you fight a guy who can literally disarm you and deposit you in a jail cell faster than you can blink? The only way to do that is the same way you defeat Superman: namely by doing two things at once, forcing him to choose between two evils.
So for stories to have any kind of tension, the bad guys have to do a "hey look over here!" gambit while actually pulling off something else somewhere else. Which is fine, but it gets old quick. It looked like writer/artist Manapul was going to do that but then he uses the cheapest of all tactics when he randomly depowers the Flash.
Sometimes Flash can beat you up in between eyeblinks. Sometimes he can't. It just depends on whether the author is done with you.
So we are clumsily introduced to Barry's BFF from childhood, someone we've never, ever met before, and we're supposed to care about him. We did not. In the movie Captain America: The First Avenger they carefully build up the relationship between Cap and his best friend Bucky for the entire first half of the movie, so you get a sense of the stakes they face when they start fighting Nazis in WWII together. Here I had that feeling when a friend you've known for fifteen years casually mentions his best bud from college for the first time. "Oh yeah? You guys don't keep in touch, huh?" "Nah. He went one way and I went another. I hadn't thought about him for years until he friended me on Facebook yesterday."
This is not someone for whom you drop everything and put your mortgage on the line in order to bail him out of jail. Or in the world of superheroes, jeopardize your girlfriend's life as well as the lives of 3.5 million citizens. (They say "3.5 million" a lot, too.) You don't do it without laying some groundwork first, anyway.
Another way to beat someone with godlike powers is to simply depower them across the board. Manapul goes the other way and harkens back to the bad old days of Superman when every issue saw him come up with some ridiculous new ability. Super-ventriloquism! Super-hypnosis! Super-shapeshifting! (Not making those up, Superman had those and probably a hundred other stupid superpowers when I was a kid.) I guess Manapul thought that was a great idea, so here he lets Barry tap into the "Speed Force" with his brain. So now Barry can literally see the future. The first time he does this, he muses that he can see all potential outcomes of a situation and then choose the most appropriate one before anyone notices he's moved.
Which he then demonstrates on an imminent car crash that's about to set off a cascade of destruction, right in front of Patty, yet they continue their conversation as if the Rube Goldberg-like series of preposterous events that just transpired in front of them never happened. Also, from her point of view, Barry suddenly materializes an apple to eat.
This Patty chick is a dimwit. Manapul keeps saying she's smart, but she never actually acts that way. Neither does Iris. Neither does Barry, actually. Everyone runs around yelling and fighting until someone comes along to drop an infodump into the scene, generally in the most ham-handed way possible.
The Flash we see here has no limitations. He can move faster than anyone can perceive and now he can see the future and pick the best possible outcome from any situation. How is this an interesting character? Manapul apparently realizes he has written himself into a corner with this and has Barry freeze as he considers all the ways he can solve a situation, giving the bad guys enough time to shoot him in the face. When just a few pages earlier he was able to assess the situation, see all the possible paths he could follow and solve the situation with no one being the wiser -- his first time!
Now suddenly his brain operates slower than normal? Plot device. And then it's used in the dumbest way possible: "Oh no! Barry Allen is dead!" No he's not. He's the goddamn star. All you're doing is sticking us with an uninteresting, heretofore unknown bestie dropping an infodump while we wait for the Flash to show up.
Superhero comics are silly. I get that. I read them to escape, for a bit of fun. But you have to read books like this while extraordinarily drunk or just after taking a life-threatening blow to the head in order not to be insulted by them. Silly is fine; stupid is not.
Set up your world's internal rules and then FOLLOW THEM. Don't randomly change the rules every couple of pages in order to serve your plot. Literally every single character in this book functions purely as a plot device. No one has believable motivations or emotions and, worst of all, the story makes no sense. This shows up in little ways, too. Sometimes when the Flash leaves a scene, there's a gust of wind. Other times there's nothing. Why? Plot demands. Is it important for someone to notice that Barry is no longer there? If so, he leaves no trace of his sudden disappearance, nevermind his existence. If it's not important, then any loose papers get swooshed around by the thunderclap of his exit.
In those dumb Superman stories of yore, at least the writers had a grounding in mystery stories and they had fun with coming up with brand-new superpowers in order for Superman to defeat the bad guy of the day. Here it's just a bunch of stuff thrown into a blender by someone who has apparently never thought about how to properly construct a story.
delaneybull's review
5.0
Loved seeing the familiar characters from the TV show, but it didn't feel formulaic or predictable. Loved the art style, and all the characters and humor. It was a bummer that a bunch of people of color from the show are white in the comics, so hopefully future adaptations of The Flash will interpret these characters more diversely. I also really enjoyed the double-page spreads, it worked really well with the Mob Rule storyline, but was very evocative every time it was used. Captain Cold was cutthroat, he's so great. I ship it.
19lindsey89's review
3.0
Why does the first volume of the New 52 start mid story arc? This volume jumped around a lot, and it was confusing.
clitchmore's review
adventurous
lighthearted
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
kbelcher1992's review
3.0
I enjoyed it and it was interesting to see some of the concepts. Definitely fascinating that Barry is with Patty in this rendition so far.
vkm13's review
3.0
First off, the art in this book is amazing. Not surprising, given that the book is written by the artists but still very noteworthy, it's definitely some of the best art of the new 52, at least in what I've read.
I wasn't too familiar with the characters going in but this volume has definitely made me a fan of Barry Allan. He's pretty adorable and decent and all the stuff a good hero should be.
The thing that really holds this volume back for me is the fact that I found it difficult to follow exactly what was going on at times. The last issues collected also had some rather exposition-heavy points as well. But the characters are there and it's clear that the creative team has some big ideas for the series, so I'm definitely going to be reading more when it comes out.
I wasn't too familiar with the characters going in but this volume has definitely made me a fan of Barry Allan. He's pretty adorable and decent and all the stuff a good hero should be.
The thing that really holds this volume back for me is the fact that I found it difficult to follow exactly what was going on at times. The last issues collected also had some rather exposition-heavy points as well. But the characters are there and it's clear that the creative team has some big ideas for the series, so I'm definitely going to be reading more when it comes out.
lberestecki's review
2.0
From other things I had read/seen, I got the impression that Barry was generally a funny character, and I didn't see that here. In fact, I didn't even think any of the characters were all that likable. The book was pretty dark, and it was too science-y for my tastes (even though the science is all probably inaccurate). I'm not a big fan of stories that jump back and forth in time either, so that probably hurt my enjoyment of the book. I did like the art though!
yazminnaa's review
adventurous
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.5