As I noted earlier this week, I checked in on the DC universe over the weekend. It looked like Barry Allen (that’s the most famous version of the Flash, for you non-fanboys) was still dead…but, as my brother informed me in the comments on that post, he’s actually been recently resurrected.
I can’t really get worked up one way or another about this. It’s not like Barry Allen ever really had a stable personality to begin with; like any super-hero, he went through numberless iterations. If I remember correctly, his only distinguishing trait in his first issue was that he was always late (which is ironic, because then he gained super-speed! Get it?) In the classic Silver Age issues from the 60s, he picked up a pretty goofy rogues gallery (Mirror Master! Boomerang!) and a penchant for bizarre bodily transformation — growing immensely fat, having his head swell to fifteen times normal size, etc. Somewhere in there he got married, which was unusual, and then his wife got killed, so he had a tragic backstory. Then he got killed off in Crisis and was retroactively made into a hero’s hero — the best of us all, etc. etc. Now that he’s back I understand that he was a brutal vigilante for three issues before getting a Grant Morrison dadaesque revamp where, after briefly studying with an Indian guru, he proceeded to have tantric sex with everyone in the world at super-speed, bringing about a universe-wide bachanal and disco dance until the Justice League atomized him with Captain Puritan’s deadly Continence Ray. Party poopers.
Okay, so maybe that didn’t exactly happen. The point is that seeing the Flash’s return as some sort of desecration is pointless; what’s there to desecrate, anyway? With a couple of minor exceptions (Green Arrow’s mild irascibility; Elongated Man’s mild goofiness) they were all interchangeable, with personality quirks that varied as with the needs of the story. “Barry Allen” as a continuous, coherent fiction never existed anyway; the Flash stories with Wally West could as well have been done with Barry Allen, really.
This is part of the reason why I’m very skeptical of the “let’s go back to the time when comics were fun!” school of thought (propounded, for example, in this message board response to Tom Crippen’s essay on Marvel’s Civil War). In the first place, a lot of those silver age, goofy DC comics were pretty well unreadable. But in the second, a lot of what made those stories what they were was an overwhelming and aggressive aphasia. Characters and plots existed in a kind of eternally stupid present; a repetitious formula made all the more vacuous by the constant sops thrown to continuity (Batman and Superman referring to each other as “old chum” for example; or the JLA narrating to Snapper Carr their “first adventure ever!”
It is possible to recapture that; the Batman animated series, for example, is simple goofiness for kids — and pretty entertaining at that. But comics fans aren’t kids; what they want is not the dumb stories of their youth, but a tribute to those stories, which makes them coherent enough to function as objects of nostalgia. That’s the trick in Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman, for example; the impending death of the hero gives the goofy silver-age tropes a reason for being that they never had in the original.
That may make Morrison’s version better than the originals, depending on how you look at it. But it isn’t any *truer* to the originals than the “people are actually getting killed now” pseudo-adultificiation that Tom identifies in Marvel’s Civil War. Calculated nostalgia or calculated maturity; both are ways of reacting to a comic-book audience which has gotten older while remaining obsessed with a bunch of characters from their youth — characters who weren’t, even, so much characters as icons with random appelations attached. Barry Allen wasn’t ever anything but a name. You can’t kill that, or resurrect it. The real question is, why you’d want to bother pretending to do either.
UPDATE: Just a note that the blog has been (relatively) hopping this week; besides some of the posts mentioned above, I’ve got a post on the rock and roll manga soap-opera Nana and new Hooded blogger Tom Crippen has a tussle with Tom Spurgeon over the relative merits of Pat Oliphant.
I disagree with you about on some aspects of your Flash analysis. Barry Allen and Wally West are not interchangeable. I also disagree with you that there is nothing of quality to desecrate.
I was a big fan of the Flash title Post-Crisis and the whole thrust of the story for the first 120 issues or so was Wally West trying to live in the shadow of Barry Allen. Among the cross-overs and battles, there was a deliberate character arc, with Wally slowly transforming from a selfish brooding womanizer to loving husband and hero. It was well done and one of the reasons the book was successful. The Flash was something unique: a quality ongoing super-hero book that told a complete story about growing up.
The reason some people are up in arms is that by bringing back Barry Allen, DC is saying that the Wally West story they felt passionate about is officially finished. They are upset that an ongoing story that some have followed for fifteen years is over. How would you feel if the last trade of Nana you read was the last one published?
That being said, I am not that upset. :) Wally’s transformation into a responsible adult was complete and the stories had become pedestrian. After a failed attempt at a new Flash starring Bart Allen, DC brought back Wally as a harried father attempting to raise super-powered children, the comic book equivalent of jumping the shark.
For the foreseeable future, the Flash comic will be a re-hash of what has gone before. Given the current regime at DC, they are capable of little else. Barry Allen is back until his relaunch loses steam and somebody starts a movement to bring back Wally West.
Your point about Barry Allen only being a name is certainly true. There is a reason why the Flash was chosen to bite the dust in Crisis: he was boring and nobody really cared about the character.
But Barry Allen did not have an unstable personality. The problem was that he had no personality at all. His Rouges Gallery, one of the best group of villains in comics, were far more interesting and often dominated the book.
DC now thinks it is a big event that they are bringing back a character very few cared about in the first place.
Barry Allen only became interesting once he died, where he was the poster child for the notion that comic publishers no longer respected the status quo and anything can happen. I guess now he represents the exact opposite.
I liked the early Wally West Flash comics too. And, yes, my point was that Barry Allen wasn’t much of a personality…though I don’t know that any of those Silver Age heroes were, were they?
…oh, and I’m happy to think that Nana will end eventually, actually. I’ll read the last one, find out how the story ends and what happens to everybody…and then Yazawa will go on to something else, and I’ll get that new title, and it’ll probably be great to. Even if not, I’ll be able to go back and reread the series and have a sense of it as a completed work. Endings are good. Super-hero fans shouldn’t fear them.
Silver Age heroes with personality: How about your buddy Snapper Carr?
The DC heroes starting getting distinct personalities around the time Roy Thomas and Denny O’Neil starting writing for DC in the early 70’s. I think the lone exception was the Barry Allen Flash, who maintained his generic personality until his death in the 80’s.
My point about Nana hypothetically ending at volume 12 was not that you would be upset because it is ending, but because the ending would be mid-story and unsatisfying.
I don’t think most comic fans are upset at endings. I think they are upset at bad endings. For many Flash fans, the abrupt return of Barry Allen means a quick and dirty end to Wally West. Hardly a fair return for years of loyal readership. You can debate whether or not this should come as a surprise to long time comic readers, but their feelings are certainly valid.