Wally West: The Flash Appreciation 2019

[HsssH]

There are many writers in DC who care about Wally, it wasn't hard to find anyone better than Lobdell & Booth.

Weren't there some rumours about FF being a thing only because Lobdell and Booth really wanted to do it?

[Dred]

Weren't there some rumours about FF being a thing only because Lobdell and Booth really wanted to do it?

Yeah, though basically every writer at DC has professed love for Wally. None of them seem particularly gungho to write him, though. Booth and kind of Shaner are the only one who consistently proclaim interest.

[HsssH]

Well, every writer is biggest fan of every character if you read some of their interviews.

[Waterfall]

Weren't there some rumours about FF being a thing only because Lobdell and Booth really wanted to do it?

Pretty sure it's not because of it. Booth learned about the book after they decided to do it, so clearly it wasn't his pitch in the first place. Lobdell also doesn't know much about Wally, he wrote one special because they told him to write it.

Flash Forward is practically a last minute damage control from DC Comics. They threw it to whoever was available.

Yeah, though basically every writer at DC has professed love for Wally. None of them seem particularly gungho to write him, though. Booth and kind of Shaner are the only one who consistently proclaim interest.

People like Nick Spencer, Matt Fraction, Francis Manapul and another writer I can't remember (was a pretty big name though and had a ready pitch) also expressed clear interest. Mitch Gerards was another artist who expressed active desire.

But Snyder gang (+Bendis) has always said they preferred Barry so I don't think they put it on their priority list.

I can understand Scott Snyder not promoting it, but Joshua Williamson has no excuse. He could at the very least retweet the previews.

[Frontier]

People like Nick Spencer, Matt Fraction, Francis Manapul and another writer I can't remember (was a pretty big name though and had a ready pitch) also expressed clear interest. Mitch Gerards was another artist who expressed active desire.

But Snyder gang (+Bendis) has always said they preferred Barry so I don't think they put it on their priority list.

I can understand Scott Snyder not promoting it, but Joshua Williamson has no excuse. He could at the very least retweet the previews.

I can't believe Snyder and Bendis prefer Barry when they basically write Barry like Wally (but Bendis at least has the excuse of his issue writing character voices).

[Spider-Ham]

Actually, I don’t think Snyder prefers Barry :

https://twitter.com/Ssnyder1835/stat...22130945609729

[Waterfall]

Snyder loves JLU Flash, who is Wally. That's why he's writing Barry like Wally because he's channeling DCAU. He clearly doesn't prefer Wally over Barry, otherwise why he went lenghts to ignore Wally in his events?

On the other hand I take back about the generalization i made about "gang". Tynion's a huge 90s fan through and through. But he's got Batman on his plate to deal with.

It doesn't make sense no matter how you look at it: for example, Gail Simone openly loves Wally too but she didn't write for FF and decided to go for non-canon Flash Giant instead.

It could have been ANYONE else. But we are supposed to believe only Lobdell and Booth could do it.

[Spider-Ham]

otherwise why he went lenghts to ignore Wally in his events?

It could have been ANYONE else. But we are supposed to believe only Lobdell and Booth could do it.

I think we all know what/who is the real problem here :/

One day, maybe, things will change ...

You know, when a certain person is retired and Hickman brings back the Fab Five in full glory.

Ah #@%$. This situation is depressing.

[Waterfall]

One writer I think who tried for Wally?

Kyle Higgins.

He put him on an elseworlds book when no one else could. He wrote him very well too.

Another one? Tim Seeley. He sneaked Wally into Nightwing book whenever he had the chance.

Besides these two and Doc Shaner, rest is all words. Even with Didio breathing down your neck, you can do anything if you wanna pay respect to a character.

[Spider-Ham]

Besides these two and Doc Shaner, rest is all words. Even with Didio breathing down your neck, you can do anything if you wanna pay respect to a character.

According to Booth, it’s a very very very complicated thing to pitch a story with Wally West.

But agreed on the rest.

Both New Order and Nightwing Rebirth featured a fantastic Wally West.

[WallyWestFlash]

wally_west_by_dedefox_dd81ls0-fullview.jpg
1char.

[Dred]

Pretty sure it's not because of it. Booth learned about the book after they decided to do it, so clearly it wasn't his pitch in the first place. Lobdell also doesn't know much about Wally, he wrote one special because they told him to write it.

Flash Forward is practically a last minute damage control from DC Comics. They threw it to whoever was available.



People like Nick Spencer, Matt Fraction, Francis Manapul and another writer I can't remember (was a pretty big name though and had a ready pitch) also expressed clear interest. Mitch Gerards was another artist who expressed active desire.

But Snyder gang (+Bendis) has always said they preferred Barry so I don't think they put it on their priority list.

I can understand Scott Snyder not promoting it, but Joshua Williamson has no excuse. He could at the very least retweet the previews.

Snyder can prefer Wally over Barry but, like, not be willing to upset his personal plans and storylines to make way for him. Just because you prefer a character doesn't meant you blow up your personal plans to appease some fans. The thing about these writers is, even though they like Wally, it's not like they don't also like Barry. They're happy to use Barry, even if they write him like Wally, regardless. It's not that big a deal to them.

I think the reason Booth and Lobdell are doing it is because Lobdell is their go to whoever to fill in for any rando book they need at a given moment. QED, the shitty Nightwing stuff. And he's also friends with Booth. Booth is the only one who cared enough to actively fight for it, so he got his pitch. And he wasn't going to turn down Lobdell because they go back a ways.

[BohemiaDrinker]

Flash has never sold that much. At least not since the Silver Age.

I imagine a slightly more reasonable, but still unreasonable, sales goal would've been outselling the current Flash comic but who knows. It was never going to happen with a bad team on a mini about a character so badly handled.

Actually FF sells better than Barry's book. The one higher was a conclusion to arc. (remember, main book is bi-weekly) and in the previous month, the issue above FF was the one we got Zolomon's reveal. So FF basically sells on par with Flash book, which means it performs pretty darn well. I'm assuming everyone who is getting Flash is also getting the Flash Forward as well.

Yeah. I havent looked at the numbers closely the last months, but I believe both books were basically in the same range, with Flash having one issue above one bellow FF, right?

Thinking again, Booth has little to no access to powerful clique of DC so his words on the matter doesn't mean a squat. If you are following Joshua on twitter, you can see that he doesn't promote FF at ALL. Instead he promotes Tom Taylor's book & King's Batman run. It's very disturbing for me because Williamson, that's essentially your spin-off. If you care about Wally and don't like the creative team, then you should have fought harder to give him to a better one. There are many writers in DC who care about Wally, it wasn't hard to find anyone better than Lobdell & Booth.

Booth is the one guy who actually fights for Wally at DC, though. Everyone tried at some point, but Booth kept trying. Which is good on one hand because he does have a dedicated fandom and rallied some support and etc, and bad on another because he became the go-to guy for anything Wally related. That said, those of you with a better memory may recall that shortly before HiC he was complaining about hitting a "wall of silence" from the big 2, DC especially.

About Williamson, though, I understand his position. He is clearly in the Scott Snyder cell of writers, and, if I may conjecture a little bit, not happy about the whole thing. He tried to use Wally for 2 years before they let him. When he finally could, he propped Flash War like a mad man and wrote the hell out of Wally because, according to him, he knew about HiC for a year in advance. He did not prop HiC very much, though, and has been really evasive about any Wally question since. He did use the something like the phrase "at the end of the day is not my story to tell". It seems clear to me that he has no control over this and is just steering clear of it.

It's possible the 80k number was something thrown at Booth to shut him up. And it's possible that it's true entirely because it was impossible to happen. If the idea was this series needed to do 80k to be considered successful then that is the same as saying we have no interest in this series regardless of the sales. Setting an impossible goal is just synonymous with damning it.

Yeah, if they actually said this (I didn't catch the original Booth comment about 80k, so I can't say) they were just trying to shut him up, probably. The original Flash Rebirth, with Geoff Johns at his peak and Ethan Van Sciver before he became the comics version of Chernobyl, all the publicity that DC could push, no competing Flash book on the shelves and in a healthier market than today's sold 102k. There is just no way that a book stitched together at the last possible minute and coming out of the disaster that was HiC, like FF was was gonna hit that, and everyone knows it. Hell, Im surprised with the numbers it's getting even.

In the end guys, and I've been saying this things for a while, it probably goes like this:

• HiC was planned at a time when Tom King was the golden boy that could do no-wrong. Dan Didio probably believed that it would be a critical darling, a Vision or a Mister Miracle, something that would resonate enough so he could clear Wally of his claim for "Flash". The Suicide Squad rumor was probably true at this point.
• In turn, what HiC was was one of the biggest ****-shows I've seen.Let me say, I've been reading comics for a little over 34 years, I've been following the ins and outs and all since the early internet (and what I could before), and the only time I've seen such an uniform, disastrous reaction to a decision was back at Emerald Twilight. Thing is, DC right now is in no position of having an Emerald Twilight on their hands.
• At this point, whatever fallout they had planned for Wally after HiC was probably scrapped. They had to shut fans off, and had to do it fast.
• Now, Booth is "Wally guy". Lobdell is both a yes-man and a workhorse (and I say this not in a derogatory way at all). A new plan was probably made, but it had to be one that still kept Wally out of everything else* because other writers and artists were already working on their projects. So, it's multiverse-hopping with an editorially decided conclusion.
• The reason Lobdell is in this is because he can and will work editorial mandates to a T. No other writer probably had the will or the chops to polish a turd like this one, let alone constrained by editorial mandates and on such fast notice.
* Now, Lobdell is an X-Men guy. He knows how this is gonna sound to fans. Not only he really tries to get Wally right, he basically spoiled 90% of the book before #1 it even came out to try and reassure readers, but make no mistake, it will still follow whatever editorial decided to take and/or keep Wally off the board for a while.
• Maybe (and this is a strong maybe) Dan Didio had something planned for Wally in the upcoming DC event, but because of the shitshow HiC was, he couldn't keep him on the shelf till then. (When BC leaked that this book was coming, they specifically mentioned DC trying to cool off retailers, even). So, this book is what we get.

Make no mistake, FF was never something done to "test the waters". No one ever even thought it could hate 80k (only 2 DC books sold 80k in October) and, even if it did, it wouldn't become a monthly either. This book was never anything other than a very rushed attempt at buying time and Damage Control for what is probably the most hated story of the last 25 years, and the fact that it is somehow an enjoyable story with characterization that ranges from "respectful" to "spot-on" is to Lobdell's credit. He may not be on the pantheon of greatest comic writers, but he can really polish a turd to diamond-like shine when he needs to.

*If you guys pay attention to these things, we recently had a Batman Beyond issue where the Flash is... Barry. Pay a little more attention, and look at the current Snyder Justice League: right now they have camos from different Earths and several different futures. Some Flashes appear. We have Danica, we have John Fox, we have a previously unseen version of Bart, but we have no Wally at all. There are some futures where Wally is specifically the Flash, like the Earth-22/Kingdom Come one, and he's just not there along with everybody else. Now, these issues were illustrated by at least 3 different artists (Redondo, Porter and Manapul). I don't know about Redondo, but Porter is a Wally fan, and a Manapul is a big one 2 (he tried to sneak Wally at the beggining of the New52, editorial made him remove it. His pitch for him never saw the light of day, etc). So, the fact that we se no Wally here in panels where at least an alternate of him would make sense, and the fact that there are 3 different artists drew this tell me this is no coincidence.

NO Wally West is still a mandate.

Don't get your hopes up. Don't expect anything to change. Don't expect his friends to ask where he is or the rest of the DCU to interact with him. Enjoy the mini for the next 3 months. As of right now, jack-**** has changed and functionally, we have no Wally West on the DCU.

[Dataweaver]

Yeah; I think the best we can hope for at the end of this mini is for Wally to be cleared of the crimes in HiC, reunited with Linda and his kids… and stuck somewhere out in the Multiverse the way Didio's Superman and the Titans of Tomorrow Tim Drake are. I can live with that for the time being — though honestly, I wouldn't mind getting an Exiles-like series that teams these characters up.

And frankly, I don't need Wally to be on Primary Earth; I just need him to be in publication, with a writing team that understands and respects him. And as long as he isn't dead or insane, there's hope.

[married guy]

[QUOTE=BohemiaDrinker;4704219]

Actually FF sells better than Barry's book. The one higher was a conclusion to arc. (remember, main book is bi-weekly) and in the previous month, the issue above FF was the one we got Zolomon's reveal. So FF basically sells on par with Flash book, which means it performs pretty darn well. I'm assuming everyone who is getting Flash is also getting the Flash Forward as well.

Yeah. I havent looked at the numbers closely the last months, but I believe both books were basically in the same range, with Flash having one issue above one bellow FF, right?



Booth is the one guy who actually fights for Wally at DC, though. Everyone tried at some point, but Booth kept trying. Which is good on one hand because he does have a dedicated fandom and rallied some support and etc, and bad on another because he became the go-to guy for anything Wally related. That said, those of you with a better memory may recall that shortly before HiC he was complaining about hitting a "wall of silence" from the big 2, DC especially.

About Williamson, though, I understand his position. He is clearly in the Scott Snyder cell of writers, and, if I may conjecture a little bit, not happy about the whole thing. He tried to use Wally for 2 years before they let him. When he finally could, he propped Flash War like a mad man and wrote the hell out of Wally because, according to him, he knew about HiC for a year in advance. He did not prop HiC very much, though, and has been really evasive about any Wally question since. He did use the something like the phrase "at the end of the day is not my story to tell". It seems clear to me that he has no control over this and is just steering clear of it.



Yeah, if they actually said this (I didn't catch the original Booth comment about 80k, so I can't say) they were just trying to shut him up, probably. The original Flash Rebirth, with Geoff Johns at his peak and Ethan Van Sciver before he became the comics version of Chernobyl, all the publicity that DC could push, no competing Flash book on the shelves and in a healthier market than today's sold 102k. There is just no way that a book stitched together at the last possible minute and coming out of the disaster that was HiC, like FF was was gonna hit that, and everyone knows it. Hell, Im surprised with the numbers it's getting even.

In the end guys, and I've been saying this things for a while, it probably goes like this:

• HiC was planned at a time when Tom King was the golden boy that could do no-wrong. Dan Didio probably believed that it would be a critical darling, a Vision or a Mister Miracle, something that would resonate enough so he could clear Wally of his claim for "Flash". The Suicide Squad rumor was probably true at this point.
• In turn, what HiC was was one of the biggest ****-shows I've seen.Let me say, I've been reading comics for a little over 34 years, I've been following the ins and outs and all since the early internet (and what I could before), and the only time I've seen such an uniform, disastrous reaction to a decision was back at Emerald Twilight. Thing is, DC right now is in no position of having an Emerald Twilight on their hands.
• At this point, whatever fallout they had planned for Wally after HiC was probably scrapped. They had to shut fans off, and had to do it fast.
• Now, Booth is "Wally guy". Lobdell is both a yes-man and a workhorse (and I say this not in a derogatory way at all). A new plan was probably made, but it had to be one that still kept Wally out of everything else* because other writers and artists were already working on their projects. So, it's multiverse-hopping with an editorially decided conclusion.
• The reason Lobdell is in this is because he can and will work editorial mandates to a T. No other writer probably had the will or the chops to polish a turd like this one, let alone constrained by editorial mandates and on such fast notice.
* Now, Lobdell is an X-Men guy. He knows how this is gonna sound to fans. Not only he really tries to get Wally right, he basically spoiled 90% of the book before #1 it even came out to try and reassure readers, but make no mistake, it will still follow whatever editorial decided to take and/or keep Wally off the board for a while.
• Maybe (and this is a strong maybe) Dan Didio had something planned for Wally in the upcoming DC event, but because of the shitshow HiC was, he couldn't keep him on the shelf till then. (When BC leaked that this book was coming, they specifically mentioned DC trying to cool off retailers, even). So, this book is what we get.

Make no mistake, FF was never something done to "test the waters". No one ever even thought it could hate 80k (only 2 DC books sold 80k in October) and, even if it did, it wouldn't become a monthly either. This book was never anything other than a very rushed attempt at buying time and Damage Control for what is probably the most hated story of the last 25 years, and the fact that it is somehow an enjoyable story with characterization that ranges from "respectful" to "spot-on" is to Lobdell's credit. He may not be on the pantheon of greatest comic writers, but he can really polish a turd to diamond-like shine when he needs to.

*If you guys pay attention to these things, we recently had a Batman Beyond issue where the Flash is... Barry. Pay a little more attention, and look at the current Snyder Justice League: right now they have camos from different Earths and several different futures. Some Flashes appear. We have Danica, we have John Fox, we have a previously unseen version of Bart, but we have no Wally at all. There are some futures where Wally is specifically the Flash, like the Earth-22/Kingdom Come one, and he's just not there along with everybody else. Now, these issues were illustrated by at least 3 different artists (Redondo, Porter and Manapul). I don't know about Redondo, but Porter is a Wally fan, and a Manapul is a big one 2 (he tried to sneak Wally at the beggining of the New52, editorial made him remove it. His pitch for him never saw the light of day, etc). So, the fact that we se no Wally here in panels where at least an alternate of him would make sense, and the fact that there are 3 different artists drew this tell me this is no coincidence.

NO Wally West is still a mandate.

Don't get your hopes up. Don't expect anything to change. Don't expect his friends to ask where he is or the rest of the DCU to interact with him. Enjoy the mini for the next 3 months. As of right now, jack-**** has changed and functionally, we have no Wally West on the DCU.

God, reading this depressed the **** outta me because I know it's true.