Wally West: The Flash Appreciation 2019

[Nine Crocodile]

It's just that he also has memories of the pre-Flashpoint timeline.

Memories of his pre-Flashpoint life anyway. I would not be surprised if Editorial hand-waved anything else.

[Frontier]

i do like that wallys identity is public again.

but it does raise the question, what wallys parents are thinking? not knowing they have a son then suddenly finding out they have one and he's in prision for killed a bunch of people.

Or what Iris is going to be doing, but I doubt they'll follow up with her.

[Jekyll]

We can’t have Barry and Wally interact. That would be a threat to Barry.

[Dataweaver]

Soooo Linda implied the fact that those deaths were an accident means they can sway the public to his side...which would be logical if it weren't for the small detail of him defiling the bodies in order to frame two innocent people. You know...the main reason he should be behind bars...

While they don't mention the defiled bodies, they do mention the framing of innocent people, saying (direct quote) “how crazy was I that it all made sense at the time?”

They're definitely going for an insanity plea here, with the extenuating circumstance most likely being that the Dark Multiverse had infected him. If that's where they're going, I can buy that. Heck, it's not too far off from my own suggestion back when the final issue of HiC came out:

My knowledge of what HiC did is strictly secondhand. But with that said: I could see salvaging something from it by way of saying that the release of Speed Force energy that killed everyone also warped Wally's mind in unnatural ways. In effect, it's the Parallax fix, but without needing to invent an alien entity: Wally didn't deliberately cause the massacre, and wasn't in his right mind in the aftermath; so all of the out-of-character things he did there aren't his fault. As the effects of the Speed Force Explosion recede, he can return to sanity and then work through the sense of guilt he's bound to have until he comes to terms with it. Frankly, it would help immensely if he could at least get Linda back to help him through it.

It's still a salvage operation; it would be better if HiC never happened at all. There's damage that can't be repaired (all those bodies…) and while Wally could potentially be redeemed, he now has a scar that's not going away any time soon.

But he can be redeemed — assuming that someone who respects the character is put in charge of writing him ASAP.

In fact, this is better than what I was contemplating, because it also potentially addresses the fact that the Speed Force has never behaved that way before: even the explosion wasn't really Wally's doing.

There's no guarantee that I'm going to like how this ends; but I'm cautiously optimistic for the time being. Emphasis on “cautiously”.

So, as I suspected, they're aiming at giving Wally a "Cosmic" mission statement,l so they can avoid anyone opn the main universe ever having to deal with him or mention his name.

Possible. Fuginaut said to Wally, “you have only glimpsed the power you wield since you've become… unmoored.” My guess is that it will be revealed (sooner or later) that Wally has achieved another power upgrade, albeit a minor one, which I would personally phrase as “tapping into the Imaginary Speed Force*”: the ability to reach out laterally from the timeline through Hypertime to other realities. Not just Barry's trick of “vibrating at the right frequency” to cross over to Earth 2, but a more general ability to travel to other realities — be they part of the Local Multiverse, the Dark Multiverse, or even beyond — and perhaps even to be able to manipulate the connections between these alternate universes. Something like that might be instrumental in resolving the anomaly that's causing the Dark Multiverse to “back up” and bleed into the Local Multiverse.

Where he ends up at the end of the series remains to be seen. I can see several possibilities, some that I like and others that I don't.

* I'm an amateur mathematician, and I can't help notice that we now have a (positive) Speed Force, a Negative Speed Force, and a Still Force (i.e., a “Zero Speed” Force). In math, we also have the square root of negative one, also known as an Imaginary number, that exists “sideways” from the Real numbers and lets you access a whole new dimension of possibilities.

[andersonh1]

I thought it was a good start, honestly. If this book can undo a lot of the damage that HiC did to Wally, I don't really care how they get there.

Nice to see Brett Booth drawing him again.

[Dred]

Yeah this wasn't worth picking up.

spoilers:

Wally is in Blackgate and known as a former flash. He has clear suicidal tendencies to die from the inmates at Blackgate. Linda meets with him but her words prob did more harm than good. That fungus guy comes to force Wally for help and gives him his Flash suit. Wally literally says this about the Flash suit...."These clothes, everything they represent...I never wanted to see them again!"

end of spoilers

I did not like this at all

OK, yeah. That's probably the LEAST Wally West sentence ever put to paper.
Geez....

While that doesn't sound like Wally, I'm going to go ahead and chalk this up to needing to reaffirm he's at his lowest so he'll rise above by the end. Having everyone remind him he's a hero and then throw his legacy in his face to try and motivate him only to see him doubt is storytelling 101 for "this will turn around before the end."

I'm not expecting this book to absolutely fix Wally, but it sounds like pretty transparent setup for to pay off later.

I have no idea what you guys are talking about. And this is coming from someone who's spent his life growing up with Wally.

While I do harbor other criticisms about this issue, Wally has been willing to give up being a hero no less than 4 times. Once early on when his powers were hurting him in Wolfman's NTT, once during ROBA, once at the end of Blitz, and once during The Black Flash Arc. It is VERY in character with Wally, in times of crisis or depression, to consider giving it all up and throwing away his hero life because he can't do it anymore and the toll has been too great.

The thing that makes Wally Wally is that, in spite of that, he always put the suit back on when people needed him. Every time. All of his significant writers besides Morrison have done it. Lobdell and Booth are just blatantly reusing one of Wally's more well used character struggles.


That aside, my biggest criticism of this issue was that it was all exposition. All flash, no bang. It could've cut to the premise and engaged the premise 10 pages earlier and instead it did the Lobdellian nonsense of hammering us with exposition boxes that could've been much more condensed. There's a couple of other, weird nitpicks (no fucking way the JL would've put Wally in a prison with all his villains just waiting to kill him, what the heck) but I can see the purpose it serves to frame Wally's pitiful situation. Linda was wasted in this issue, but I suppose they might be saving the mending of their life for the finale and they need to reintroduce her early to set up that throughline. I just wish there was a better writer to handle what should be a very, very significant conversation.

Issue 2, when they actually start exploring the premise of the book, will probably be where I drop my yay or nay on. This book was a lot of air.

[Godlike13]

Ya, the issue even wasted pages repeating itself. Giving us two villains jump him scenes that accomplish pretty the same things and get across the same point.

[Supermutant2099]

This was not good. He had no business being in blackgate. I don't mean because he didn't anything. Because the fact how dangerous it is with all criminals who want to kill him. Character who already suicidal. This was just bad start that is follow one of the worst comics dc ever published. The only way this should ever end wally finds out somehow that he wasn't real killer and reunited with linda like he should have been. No i'm not giving up on this. Will not stop fighting dumb character assassination that makes no sense

[Dred]

Wally being put in Blackgate isn't character assassination of Wally. It's dumb, even if it serves a point, but that shouldn't really be the issue here.

It seems the point of this comic is to use the Dark Multiverse to hand-waive Wally's actions in HiC.

[Dataweaver]

Wally being put in Blackgate isn't character assassination of Wally. It's dumb, even if it serves a point, but that shouldn't really be the issue here.

It seems the point of this comic is to use the Dark Multiverse to hand-waive Wally's actions in HiC.

Considering how fundamentally out of character those actions were, I consider that to be a good thing.

[Cmbmool]

Yeah this wasn't worth picking up.

spoilers:

Wally is in Blackgate and known as a former flash. He has clear suicidal tendencies to die from the inmates at Blackgate. Linda meets with him but her words prob did more harm than good. That fungus guy comes to force Wally for help and gives him his Flash suit. Wally literally says this about the Flash suit...."These clothes, everything they represent...I never wanted to see them again!"

end of spoilers

I did not like this at all

Question: spoilers:

Does Linda Park remember it all ? Is she real or are we getting another Cry for Justice/ Roy Harper moment ?

end of spoilers

[Supermutant2099]

Wally being put in Blackgate isn't character assassination of Wally. It's dumb, even if it serves a point, but that shouldn't really be the issue here.

It seems the point of this comic is to use the Dark Multiverse to hand-waive Wally's actions in HiC.

I didn't mean him being in blackgate was character assassination. I was talking about this awful dumb stuff that started with flash war. That continued to Heroes In Crap, I mean Criris. Then to this. Thinking back to everything since rebirth the only good thing DC done with wally was bringing him back and well mostly the titans book (we don't take about the mess with donna).

[Dataweaver]

(we also don't talk about the heart attack.)

[Dred]

I didn't mean him being in blackgate was character assassination. I was talking about this awful dumb stuff that started with flash war. That continued to Heroes In Crap, I mean Criris. Then to this. Thinking back to everything since rebirth the only good thing DC done with wally was bringing him back and well mostly the titans book (we don't take about the mess with donna).

I agree. I just don't get how Flash Forward, which necessarily has to address those things to fix them, is bad for acknowledging them.

Feel free to **** on it when/if it fails to do a good job of it, but being upset that it's following up on the things we want it to fix seems like a bit of a kneejerk.

[Supermutant2099]

I agree. I just don't get how Flash Forward, which necessarily has to address those things to fix them, is bad for acknowledging them.

Feel free to **** on it when/if it fails to do a good job of it, but being upset that it's following up on the things we want it to fix seems like a bit of a kneejerk.

Maybe but at same point I want to show "hey we haven't forget or letting go what you did." Honestly I just wish heroes in crisis never happen.