Quote Originally Posted by Noodle View Post
If they had used Barry in JL would you have said this same thing in regards to Jay?

It comes off to me that 90% of this argument is "Wally replaced Barry/Barry replaced Wally." Barry came along in 1956. Flash of Two Worlds wasn't until 1961. For 5 years Barry straight up replaced Jay. He did the same thing Wally supposedly did. And for the "Wally was wiped from existence" people, Jay wasn't even published for 10 years before Flash of Two Worlds brought him back. That's longer than Wally was gone.

This argument really agitates me. One of my first comics was when Kyle Rayner became Green Lantern. I've been dealing with this literally the entire time I've been reading comics from both the Green Lantern fanbase and now it's infecting the Flash fanbase.
This is very different......

Barry DID NOT replace Jay Garrick and Jay was gone and discontinued before Barry debuted. If anything... Barry’s the reason Jay is still a character that exists because DC may never have revisited him if a new Flash legacy didn’t start in the 60’s. Meanwhile Barry died in the same story Wally took up the Flash mantle. And that story itself was a massive reboot so the very next issue DC could have reverted back to Barry as Flash if they wanted. It was very clear that Wally’s time as Flash came at the exclusion of Barry. That’s a very clear distinction. Barry as Flash, brought Jay back to prominence, along with launching the multi verse. Wally as Flash pushed Barry out of the story.

And yeah I do see the same arguments with both 2nd generation silver age characters. But it’s similar in the GL continuity. Hal needed to be gone (actually worse he was villanized) for Kyle to exist. And I’ve seen Kyle fans say things on here like “well Emerald Twilight was cool concept and made for interesting story” which they never would say if Kyle turned evil and killed all his friends so someone new could come up.