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A review by trike
The Flash, Vol. 1: Move Forward by Francis Manapul
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.