I'm fixing to drop the new Flash series, which is something of a blow, because Flash was the first comic I started collecting. I dropped it when Carmine Infantino came back onto the book, then picked it up after Crisis and have been reading it ever since.
But it's not the Flash I want to read, and it hasn't been for some time. And the new one is just boring.
So I wanted to say, "I'm dropping the Flash because it's not what I want to read, I want to read Flash stories more like _______" when to my astonishment I hit a big blank. I've been reading the character for most of thirty years (and fifteen years of back issues before that), and I have trouble naming a standout?
Oh, there are types of Flash stories I like. Happy-go-lucky Rogues' Gallery capers (like I talk about here). Grodd stories. But it's surprisingly hard to pick a specific favorite story.
"Beyond the Super-Speed Barrier" is a good one. I like the one where Flash gets a sprained ankle rescuing some guys from a collapsing building*, then has to face Heat Wave and Captain Cold while on crutches, and the combined heat/cold treatment from the Rogues effects a superspeed cure.
What's your favorite Flash story? What's the comic that you'd point to and tell DC, "Give me more like this"?
*You don't see enough rescuing being done by superheroes these days, even in the post-9/11 world of recognizing the heroism of first-response rescuers like firemen and cops. Used to be half the LSH's action scenes were major S&R events.
I think my favorite Flash stories were in the Wally West era. (How odd to think if it being over.)
The Return of Barry Allen was awesome. So was the Flash vs Vandal Savage story that concluded in #50. Born to Run (Wally's "Year One" story) nailed why being Flash is incredible. I liked the one where Flash is on an airplane and a stewardess gets sucked out through a hole and Flash jumps out to save her. And the one where Flash is in a movie theater and the film freezes because Wally spend up as a reflexive response to a bullet poking him in the back of the neck.
I like the Messner-Loebs take on Wally's extended family and friends. I loved Waid's sheer joy of speed and creating the "Flash Family." Morrison threw in some really cool whacky science (like The Human Race). I think if you took those three aspects of Flash together and gave them the right artist, that'd be gold, baby.
Flash #54, by William Messner-Loebs. "Nobody Dies"
That might be my favorite single issue story of any title.
Return to Barry Allen, definitely. I wish that Mark Waid was still around.
Dodging the question a bit, I think the problem with the current Flash is that Bart has even less of a personality than early Silver Age Barry. Which is rather odd, given that as Impulse he had a very strongly developed and specific personality.
But let's look at the current bit. He's this 20 year old guy, y'know...ignoring that chronologically he's still about 4, having gone through two separate incidents of fast aging, the most recent jumping him from mid-teens to 20ish. No signs of that at all. No signs of his previous "impulsive" personality. Just some whining about the speed being dangerous, but he'll use it when lives are at stake. Oh, and a random girlfriend...whose at best only his second romantic relationship at all and the first was more puppy love. No indication of how that affects the developing relationship or his interaction with her.
Save for it being shown that Jay knows him (and no real indication that Jay and Joan were his guardians for a year or so), you could replace "Bart Allen" with "John Smith" and it wouldn't matter. The character's still a vanilla cipher after several issues.
Oh, and could someone at DC figure out if Wally is a) vanished somewhere other than the Speed Force with Linda and the kids b) somehow now in the Speed Force, apparently with Linda and kids or c) returned, presumably with Linda and the kids, but in isolation for some unspecified reason? I think all three have been referenced in One Year Later/52 books so far.
The Flash#134, by Grant Morrison. "A Day in the Life" story starring Jay Garrick!
Return to Barry Allen.
Mark Waid was the writer that really defined Wally West Flash for me. Barry, had died the ultimate heroic death and Wally took on the Flash mantle but was always trapped under decades of Barry-Flash stories. When Barry shows up in that doorway I got goosebumps. One of the best comic pages ever for me. Somehow Mark Waid seemed to resurrect the DC Christ figure without it coming off cheesy like the Marvel Phoenix debacle. It seemed too good to be true in this era of Kill Superman and it was. The first sign of trouble was...Barry jealous? How is this possible, he is the Silver Age Martyr. We watched him get scanned by the soon to be insane Parallax/Phoenix formally known as Hal Jordan who wasn't actually....Oh hell, the guy with the ring said he was real.
I love this story because we get to see the Flash Family in action together. Well thought out speed special effects, wonderful characterization and an engaging story. After this story line Wally West is The Flash. Any attempts to bring up the Uncle Barry's Shadow tangent was an ill fit.
IMO It wasn't played up enough that Wally had more experience than most heroes his age. He has been super powered since childhood. He should never be treated like "the kids table" hero, He is a veteran. At least this storyline freed him from the Spiderman/Firestorm/Nova/Kyle Rayner struggling young male hero arc. Thank goodness.
And lastly, can the West family please disappear into the speedforce forever. I don't want to be reading a Crisis Comic in 20 years where he comes back. Because Im sure DC would kill Linda and the kids and make me watch Bart beat him to a bloody death.
Yeah, "Nobody Dies Today." The whole Messner-Loebs era, after a few-issue settling-in period, was pretty much exactly what a good superhero comic should be, assuming it can't be Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol.
I think probably you can't have Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol without a library of ordinarily good superhero comics to give it something to contrast with.
I enjoyed the early issued of the Wally West "Flash". It was good to see a less than light-speed speedster and his struggles, and his own unique supporting cast.
The pinnacle of Wally's career was the "Return of Barry Allen" storyline. It was the storyline that solidified in everyone's mind that Wally was the Flash and not some pretender to the title.
Sadly it also spawned a slew of "Time Travel" and "Speed Force" epics that grew more and more tiresome. Over-using the history and legacy of the Flashes, where Wally was no longer his own man but a mere link in the Flash legacy.
At times, Wally's Flash was more interesting when he was acting as a part of a team. Which was fortunate in that at various times he held membership on two teams at once.
Kyle Rayner's G.L. suffered from the same problem. He was often more interesting when he was acting as a JLA member, or crossing over with the Conner Hawke Green Arrow than he ever was in his own book.
"Nobody Dies" was a great Wally story. Another really nice one -- and I didn't realize how much I liked it until I reread it recently -- was the one in Grant Morrison's short run in which he races his imaginary friend Krakkl (who looks a lot like Sonic the Hedgehog) around the universe. Really nice stuff there.
As for favorite Barry story, I really loved the Ringmaster 4-parter as a kid -- it had just the amount of drama and personal jeopardy that I could connect to. But my first issue -- in which the Rogues give him the Roscoe award -- was one of the craziest issues ever, and hooked me for life.
I agree with everything Tom said about Bart, by the way. He used to be a very well-defined character, and now I'm reading about him from sheer inertia.
If memory serves, the two stories in Secret Origins Annual #2 - "The Unforgiving Minute," by Bill Messner-Loebs, and "Mystery of the Human Thunderbolt," by Robert Loren Fleming - were both very good. The first was quite touching in dealing with Wally's attempt to cope with Barry's legacy, and the second had the neat revelation that at his end, Barry accelerated so fast that he traveled through time and became the very lightning bolt that caused him to become the Flash in the first place. Although that sounds potentially cheap and gimmicky, it came off very well in Fleming's telling.