AKA FlashFreak
Favorite Characters:
DC: The Flash (Jay & Wally), Starman- Jack Knight, Stargirl, & Shazam!.
MARVEL: Daredevil, Spider-Man (Peter Parker), & Doctor Strange.
Current Pulls: Not a thing!
An apt description - nobody else has played two different live action Flashes. I've not seen the original 1990 show, but John Wesley Shipp is great whenever he shows up in the modern show, as Henry, Jay, or reprising his 1990 role as Barry.
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"My name is Wally West. I'm the fastest man alive!"
I'll try being nicer if you try being smarter.
Does anyone know if there was a stated reason why DC kept Barry Allen dead for so long? 1986 - 2009. That's 23 years.
I think of of the generations of kids who missed out on learning about the Silver Age Flash through the late 80s, 90s and all of the 00s. Wally supplanted Barry on the on mainline Flash books, on the Justice Leagues (JLI, JLE, JLA), and in animation (Superman TAS, JL/JLU). We had Bart on YJ, TT, and Flash as the grandson to a character, DC wasn't writing about anymore. But DC never missed a chance to remind us who Bart's paternal grandfather was.
What was the deal with two decade long hiatus?
I don't know what the official answer is but as someone who started reading midway through this era (so I might be biased) I think that it was mostly just because Flash was on such a creative hotstreak through most of that period. Why mess with a winning formula? The first 20 issues or so of Wally's run is a little rough but once it picks up it has a shockingly good streak pretty much all the way until 2005 and even after I'd argue it never actually got bad enough to really need to bring Barry back.
Also, I never really felt like I missed out on Barry when I got into Flash. He showed up enough in the series either through time travel or flashback so I still felt like I got to know him and because he had actually been dead so long it seemed at the time (as silly as it seems now) that his was one or the few deaths in comics that actually mattered and would stick longterm. That made Barry more interesting and unique to go back and check out to me because it felt like he had a completed story with a great ending. Also, past adventures were referenced enough that I would go back and check out issues from the original Barry series.
When he came back in 09 I felt like I knew the character pretty well considering he had died before I was even born.
Last edited by The_Sneezing_Stormtrooper; 08-22-2021 at 04:44 PM.
Well, I won't say I "know", but back before Crisis on Infinite Earths, he was finishing up a looooooooooooooooong stretch with one writer (Cary Bates) and I'm not sure if it was felt that there was really much else that could be done with his character at that point.
Plus, in a way it made sense to kill off Barry as a result of CoIE because it was through Barry that all the multiple Earth concepts were introduced into DC in the first place. So his death in a story designed to end the multiple Earths may have seemed fitting.
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First is from the Legends of Superheroes tv special played by Rod Haase and the third is Kenny Johnston who played Barry Allen from the cancelled Justice League pilot
Not going to lie even though he was Bart, Smallville’s take on Impulse felt more like Flash with elements of Barry and Wally (comic Wally and DCAU Wally)