Flashpoint (or more comic book geekery)

Hi, I'm Perplexio, and I'm a comic book geek.  I started buying comics when I heard that there was going to be a new Batman movie directed by Tim Burton and starring Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson.  As I started delving into the comic world I made several startling (at least for me) discoveries.  The Robin I'd grown up with in reruns of the old 60s show and later the cheesy SuperFriends cartoon from the late 70s/early 80s, Dick Grayson, had moved on and become a new and different costumed hero, Nightwing.  And the mantle of Robin had been assumed by a young orphaned street punk whom Batman caught trying to steal the tires off the Batmobile, Jason Todd.  This had all happened prior to my introduction to the comic book version of Batman.

By the time I started the habit, Jason had been killed by the Joker and Batman had become a bit "unhinged" by the death of his young ward and sidekick.  A rather intuitive young lad, Timothy Drake, had pieced together Batman and Nightwing's true identities and the fact that the 2nd Robin had been killed.  At first Tim was encouraging Nightwing to reunite with Batman.  But Dick had moved on and had no interest in reprising the sidekick role in either his current or former costume.  Rather impressed by Master Tim's detective skills Batman took him under his wing and trained him.  His detective skills were already superior to that of his predecessors but his athletic abilities needed some work... and eventually Tim became the new Robin.

Around this time CBS announced a Flash TV series featuring John Wesley Shipp as Barry Allen.  So I started collecting The Flash as well only to learn The Flash was now Wally West.  Barry had been killed off about 5 years earlier and Wally West/Kid Flash had become the third Flash (the original being Jay Garrick, the guy with the winged WWI army helmet, blue pants, and red shirt with a yellow lightning bolt).  Initially I was a bit annoyed that The Flash I was reading in the comics and The Flash I was watching on TV were 2 different characters so I started hunting down back issues featuring Barry Allen.  Eventually though, Wally West won me over.  I came to prefer him over his predecessor due predominantly to the superb writing of William Messner-Loebs and later Mark Waid.  Where Messner-Loebs had written Wally as a man struggling with his own identity and living perpetually in the shadow of his mentor, Waid pulled him from out of his mentor's shadow and made him a super hero in his own right, some (self included) would argue Wally West ended up transcending his mentor's legacy.

A few years ago, DC decided to shuffle things up and thus started the royal botching of the writing of the Flash comic.  Initially Wally ran off into the sunset with his wife and 2 kids to another world.  He was going into semi-retirement as a super-hero to be more of a family man... Fair enough.  But DC was rather vague as to where he had run off to and what he was up to.  There was no formal passing of the torch.  They just arbitrarily aged his sidekick, Kid Flash/Bart Allen (the grandson of Barry Allen) 4 years (from about age 16 to age 20) and made him the newest Flash. 

This would have been acceptable to readers had there been some semblance of a formal passing of the torch from Wally to Bart.  While this had happened DC never had shown it.  It was just vaguely referenced in the first few issues featuring Bart Allen as the Flash.  The first storyline was written by Bilson and DiMeo two of the writers from the old Flash TV series in the 90s.  It was okay but rather weak-- not really the excitement grabbing intro of a New Flash that it should have been.  Then the title was taken over by Marc Guggenheim (who has also written for television-- among other writing credits he wrote for the short lived ABC Legal Dramedy, Eli Stone).  Guggenheim's writing was far superior, imho, and I started to warm to the idea of Bart Allen as the Flash... and just as I started to warm to Bart Allen-- only 13 issues and a little over a year into his run as The Flash and largely due to sagging sales Bart, who was one of the better written young characters DC had introduced in the 90s, was killed off.

Wally was brought back but only as a stop-gap measure until DC decided to resurrect Barry Allen. 

Despite being generally against the idea of resurrecting a character that had been killed off over 20 years before and the interesting plotholes related to such a resurrection (why did the resurrected Barry Allen suddenly appear younger than his successor, and how/wife did his wife/widow reverse age?  She went from being portrayed as a believable but generally well-preserved grandmother figure-- think Jane Seymour to suddenly looking about 20-30 years younger) I was willing to give writer, Geoff Johns, a chance to win me over. 

Now over a year into Barry's resurrection I have been wowed-- not by Barry Allen... (at least not yet) but by Eobard Thawne, the Reverse Flash.  Thawne has also been resurrected as he had been killed by Barry Allen back in the early 80s.  As he had been written in the 60s-80s, Thawne was a bit 1-dimensional and cardboard.  Geoff Johns resurrected Thawne as a brilliant and well-fleshed out super-villain. 

Throughout his run as the Flash, Barry Allen was able to travel through time using a "cosmic treadmill."  Although he repeatedly refused to change events that would alter the future.  His only reason for traveling through time was to prevent some of his rogues from altering the past as a means to change the future or to chase down some of his rogues that were trying to escape into the future.  Eobard Thawne had and has no such reservations about changing the past-- going so far as to change the past to remove from existence people he doesn't like from the present.  Thawne is obsessed with Barry Allen so the last thing he wants to do is erase the existence of the object of his obsession... Instead he changes the past to remove from existence or drastically alter the existence of those Barry loves and cares about.  He releases the catch on a screen door so Barry's childhood dog runs out into traffic and gets killed, he kills Barry's mother and frames Barry's father for the murder and generally just about any and every misfortune in Barry's life is due to Thawne's meddling in Barry's past....

Which brings us to the present... Not content to merely mess with Barry's past.  Thawne has decided to remove many of Earth's other heroes from existence.  He prevents the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne by Joe Chill so Bruce Wayne grows up to be a billionaire playboy casino owner instead of the Batman; and he prevents the crash of the spaceship of the alien that bestowed upon Hal Jordan his Green Lantern and his GL ring, and DC is being rather mum on the other changes to the past Professor Zoom invokes to erase from existence some of the most cherished figures in DC's stable of super heroes.

This major DC story event will be starting this summer.  Barry passes out and wakes up to find that many of his fellow super heroes no longer exist (although their alter-egos exist as civilians) and there are several new heroes that didn't exist before that have now been around for quite awhile.  And its up to Barry to figure out how and when Professor Zoom changed the past and fix it.

There is something delightfully and brilliantly evil about a character who rather than kill those he doesn't like, goes back in time either to prevent that person's parents from meeting or somehow changing the circumstances of a person's existence to remove their threat to him.  It's also considerably more malicious than a brilliant but unhinged madman with green hair and a white face messing with your head and killing your sidekick.

Currently Marc Guggenheim is working on a film script for a Flash movie tentatively scheduled for a late summer 2013 release.  I'm really hoping that Eobard Thawne/Professor Zoom is in the script.  He's just too rich of a character to go to waste.  Considering the script isn't complete, the film hasn't yet been cast, there is considerable speculation and casting wish lists by fellow comic geeks for who should play The Flash.  Rather than weigh in on that, I'd like to put on the table-- if Professor Zoom IS in the script for the Flash movie the perfect casting choice to play him, Paul Bettany.

I'm Perplexio and....

I'm a comic book geek. When I first saw Michael Keaton as the Batman in 1988 I rushed out and bought the trade paperback of Batman: A Death In the Family. I quickly learned that this "Robin" whom had been killed off was not the Dick Grayson I was familiar with from reruns of the cheesy 60s TV show, but a new fellow-- Jason Todd.

My curiousity compelled me to find out what ever happened to Dick. The Robin I knew and was more familiar with... Oh he was still very very much alive. Sick of living in the Batman's shadow he'd quit as Robin and become Nightwing. More on that later.

Anyway, for about a year or two I collected the various different Batman comics with some intensity. But I noticed my interest was waning. There was something that was just a little TOO dark about the Batman. I watched as he took on yet another new ward. A rather insightful youth that had been smart enough to figure out the real identity of not only Batman, but also BOTH of the Robins. This young lad, Timothy Drake, knew that the Batman needed a Robin. Robin was more than just a sidekick. He gave Batman balance. So he tried to talk Dick Grayson into re-joining Batman as a sidekick... rather unsuccessfully. Instead, Bruce Wayne-- impressed with Master Timothy's superlative detective skills-- decided to start training Tim to be the new Robin.

Around this time, CBS started airing a TV series based on the exploits of The Flash. I was hooked. The acting was atrocious, but the special effects were awesome and I was hooked. There was a lightness to The Flash that I'd been missing with Batman. But again, I was taken aback. On the TV series we had police forensic scientist, Barry Allen, as The Flash. But in the comics was some young upstart named Wally West. That being said the Barry from the TV series did exhibit some of the traits of Wally in the comics... But it left me wondering what the heck had happened to Barry.

Apparently, I'd missed the boat... by about 5 years!

Barry was dead. I felt like I'd missed all the best parts. But over time the more I read The Flash, the more this young upstart, Wally West, won me over. To the point where, as far as I was concerned, he was the Flash. He'd more than filled his mentor's shoes.

But the thing with comics is-- no one ever stays dead:

Not Jason Todd

And not even Barry Allen.

Over the past few years DC has been making a lot of changes. As a result the DC Universe has gotten a bit more crowded. There are 3 Flashes and 3 Robins. To clean things up with Robin... Bruce Wayne was "apparently" killed. So there was a bit of a battle between Dick Grayson (the original Robin), Jason Todd (the resurrected 2nd Robin), Tim Drake (the 3rd Robin), and even 10 year old Damian Wayne (son of Bruce Wayne) to determine who would become the new Batman. In the end Dick Grayson became Batman and started training Damian Wayne to become Robin. He conceded that he considered Tim Drake to be too much his equal to ever be his sidekick. And Jason Todd. Well he's pissed off and has gone a bit rogue. He's very much like Bruce Wayne in every way but one... He's willing to kill criminals. Which makes him very dangerous indeed. Tim is the only member of the Batman "family" to believe Bruce Wayne is still alive.

So he's become "Red Robin" and taken it upon himself to find Bruce Wayne.

The Flash is a little different. He's always been more of a legacy character. Even as fast as the Flash is-- whether it's Jay Garrick, Barry Allen, or Wally West. He's not fast enough to be in multiple places at once. There's enough room for more than one Flash... But what about those pesky costumes. Barry's and Wally's costumes were just too similar which could lead to confusion over how to tell the two apart....

Problem solved-- new costume for Wally! For those who are curious (From L to R: Jesse Quick/Liberty Belle II, Max Mercury, Bart Allen/Kid Flash II, Barry Allen/Flash II, Wally West/Flash III, Impulse II/Iris West, and Jay Garrick/Flash I) .

The funny thing about comics is that the largest demographic of comic readers is 18-35 year old males. It's those of us who grew up with a lot of these characters. The artwork and writing have gotten considerably better over the years so the comics have held our interest when previous generations likely would have grown out of the hobby long before now.

We Need Another Hero

I'm a comic book geek. I relish the recent spike in comic-related movies and TV series and the announcements of those yet to come. A few months back I read an interesting editorial column stating that maybe the popularity of these super hero movies is due to the circumstances in which we live.

A war that fewer and fewer people support with each passing day, school shootings, suicide bombings—there's a whole plethora of circumstances beyond our control that can/could make the idea of superheroes that much more appealing. We don't really have the "heroes" that previous generations did. Prior to the recent glut of super hero movies, the last time such movies were anywhere near as popular was the late seventies with the Superman movies, live action Spiderman and Sha-zam/Captain Marvel TV series, the Super Friends cartoon… All of that came about during or almost immediately following the Vietnam War and later the hostage crisis in Iran.

And if you look at the super-hero movies of the eighties (of which there really weren't too many) they either were incredibly campy or dated today. Supernman III and IV were abysmal, the original Batman movie while enjoyable in the eighties has not aged well at all and seems/feels incredibly dated. The short-lived Flash TV series from the early nineties is similarly campy and falls flat when viewed through a 21^st century lens.

So what do those original Superman
films and the current glut of super-hero films and TV series have in common? Maybe it's a quiet desperation, a wish for someone to come and put a giant band-aid on the world's problems because, God knows, our governments are far too corrupt to be capable of solving those problems for us. Our elected leaders are more interested in serving themselves, their careers, their legacies and their bank accounts than in serving their "bosses"—we the people who elected them into the very stations which allow them to rape, pillage, plunder, and steal from our bank accounts to pad their own.

With this lack of tangible heroes, we turn to the fiction of the pulp converted to the silver screen. Strong men and women in leotards or tights kicking the living snot out of those who would do us wrong, bringing justice to a world that is altogether lacking in it. And as unusual as it may seem, there is something delightfully and quirkily heroic about a billionaire dressed as a bat using his billionaire toys to solve crimes, about a man from another planet who can fly around the Earth so quickly he can reverse its rotation and turn back time, an Amazon woman with questionable fashion sense (those wrist gauntlets may have worked in the seventies, but I don't know how they're going to pull them off in the 21^st century without giggles from the audience) an invisible jet and a magic lasso (a Wonder Woman movie has been announced), or about a man who takes a bit of a chemical bath in a thunderstorm and emerges able to run faster than the speed of sound (a Flash movie has been announced for 2008 or 2009, a script has been written, and casting rumors abound).

Maybe the appeal of these fictional heroes is that in the power they're given or the power they take, they use it for good. They aren't self-serving, there's altruism behind their actions. Whereas the reality, the elected officials whom we give power during every election cycle, no matter how noble their intentions may initially be, become corrupted by the very system they try to reform… They become self-serving and forget the very people who put them in their positions of power.

Once upon a time we had a sense of hope... maybe that hope was merely an illusion, but it was there. It was better than what we have now, films about men in tights with special powers they use to fight crime. But until that hope is restored, until we get another real life "hero", I guess the men in tights will have to do.