What eventually led to you wanting to get off that book or did DC say, alright, we want to move you someplace else?
FM: So I think at that point, my Wally itch was getting really, really itchy. And I had pitched a way to bring Wally into the New 52.
Do you remember what that mechanism was going to be to introduce him?
FM: I do. And this is kind of funny, and I don’t know if Dan will read this, but maybe he’ll laugh. So we wanted to introduce Wally, similar to the Silver Age books, in which he was going to be Iris’s nephew. I had even storyboarded a whole scene, but this the scene that I storyboarded was, was while he was becoming the Flash, but it was for the future because I needed to see where it was going in order to go backwards. So because one of the things that Dan was really adamant about was that there was going to be no other Flash, he didn’t want to muddy the water. So I totally get it.
Even though there was a Kid Flash in Teen Titans at that time
FM: Look, I made that argument. So I came up with this very simple idea of Wally West being introduced as Iris’s nephew, and he was going to be in a wheelchair, right. So he was going to be this kid that had an illness that prevented him from walking to show Dan that look, “he can’t run. So there’s no possible way of this ever happening. Right?” You know, and I wanted to create this, this big emotional arc, where, you know, Barry became the Flash as a result of this accident, righ? And he kind of learned how to deal with it. Wally wanted to be the Flash, right and essentially, he was going to betrying to figure out a way to get to run. And you saw, I kind of teased a little bit of that, when, in the issue where Iris West ran in a suit. And, you know, if you’ve ever ridden a bike or driven a car, and you remember in The Fast and the Furious where they’re drifting so the centrifugal force would pull the person behind. So my idea was that Barry was going to come up with something that would kind of for that moment, help Wally run. It wasn’t gonna be to make him the Flash, it was just to give this kid who’s never experienced running an opportunity to run. At that time, one of the most satisfying things about writing “The Flash” is I would get emails with people who were like, “I’m in a wheelchair, and I love ‘The Flash’ because it’s pure escapism.” I wanted to get that real fan feeling of somebody accomplishing their dreams.
And one of the things that we said was that the wheelchair also represented Dan in that Wally can’t become the Flash. He can’t run in that Dan is preventing Wally from running, you know? I just wanted to introduce the wider range of the Flash family because, you know, when Barry has this kind of very, like, father-like, thing to his character, he’s very old school and I think they wanted to make him cool. But, I mean, it’s not that he’s uncool…
He can’t be cool on the way that Wally can be cool.
FM: Exactly, exactly, you know, and I just wanted to expand on on his supporting cast. “I promise you, He will not become the Flash, just let us introduce him, please. You know, I fucking wrote this whole story arc, and I’ll be honest, I, I can’t find it. And I am so frustrated because I can’t find that file. You know, I had what I call ‘the great big computer crash’ and I lost a lot of files. I’ll be honest, one of the things really drove me off the book was that I was like, you know, at this point, the better part of my 20s and 30s were spent on “The Flash.” I drew “The Flash” for a year with Geoff, I wrote and drew “The Flash” with Brian for another four years. At that age, that’s a big chunk of my life, and I felt like, if I’m going to dedicate even more time to this book, I’d really like to bring in some of the characters that I love. And when I couldn’t, I was just like, “Okay, I think I’m done,” you know? Yeah. To be honest, I am still very pissed off that as soon as I left, they brought Wally back, you know? And I remember asking, like, “What the fuck, man, how come I couldn’t bring him back?”
He was introduced in a “Flash” annual in June of 2014. That must have been just a few months after you left the book.
FM: That ate at me, you know. And what they said was “we were afraid that when you left, sales would drop, so we needed to do something”. And I was like, “if you gave me Wally, maybe the sales would have gone up?” I think that was the beginning where it felt like things were much more reactionary rather than proactive.
I don’t know, maybe I wasn’t the right guy to do it. I know that Dan has this sort of rule where sometimes he doesn’t like creators who have too much reverence for certain characters. Which, I don’t know. I mean, that works pretty well for Geoff, who greatly loves every one of these characters.I think when you look at the decisions being made at that time, it makes sense at that time. You know, so that’s why it’s hard to really play Monday morning quarterback with all this stuff. At that time, they thought those were the right decisions.