The Flash by Mark Waid Book One

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Superman had Man of Steel, Batman had Year One, Wonder Woman has George Perez’s opening arc of her title, Green Lantern had Emerald Dawn. The Flash and Wonder Woman join other titles from DC including Action Comics, Detective Comics, Superman, and Batman in having reached their 800th issues. The best parts of this arc though, was watching Wally travel across the future on his way back home. If you want to read about the Wally West incarnation of The Flash I guess you could start at the beginning with Mike Baron but is not that necessary. The end of this book sees him square of against the Rogues who are powered up by Neron and have taken over the city in his absence.

It's a fun collection of issues to read (I just finished Book Four,) but should be read with the awareness that the writing and art are both problematic in a way that's not okay now and wasn't really then (this was only 20/30 years ago). The Year One story was the best part of this volume, whereas the individual one-shots were merely OK. This triggers a series of flashbacks that retells Wally’s first short-lived run as Kid Flash (he would later go on to a much more prolific tenure as a member of the Teen Titans). Waid would continue to work on Wally West for nearly a decade, building a world that would keep the character running for years. And racing to Keystone City straight from the future, it’s Impulse, the latest member of The Flash’s super-speed family!The Born to Run storyline that functions as a retold origin story for Wally West is wonderfully swift, energetic, and filled with great dialogue and impeccable cliffhangers. The issue will also feature a lead-in to the September relaunch from incoming creative team Si Spurrier and Mike Deodato Jr. You're going to have to power through the two specials if you don't like 70s/80s style superhero comics, but once you get through them, it's really well-crafted modern storytelling without the Gotham grime or the Vertigo "edge". This was was previously collected as two separate volumes (Emergency Stop and The Human Race), but they omitted the Green Lantern and Green Arrow crossover issues, which will be included in this new edition. Birthright contained several characters and elements from the Silver and Modern Age Superman comic books and homages to Superman: The Movie and the Smallville television series.

jumped from Jay in one issue to Barry in another, to Wally as Flash, then back to Wally as KF (his origins issue), and then back to Wally as the Flash and somehow Barry and Iris are both dead. With no other options he figures the only way to rid himself of Savitar is to trap him in the Speed Force.What starts out as one of the best cliffhangers ever, with Barry showing up at Jay Garrick's house, turned out be one of the most tryong moments of Wally's life. Waid's fellow comics creators Neil Gaiman, Kurt Busiek, Dan Slott and Yanick Paquette contributed to his campaign, while artist Ethan Van Sciver began a similar campaign for Meyer which quickly surpassed Waid's in funding. luckily (in a sense), dc hasn't had a decent flash arc in over ten years, so it's really easy to ignore all the recent stuff. I tried getting into the Geoff Johns Flash awhile back, but wasn’t very compelled by it, so I thought I’d give this a try and see if it would hook me better.

He quickly begins to train Bart in the ways of "speed" so that he will be ready to take over for him in the event of his death. In April 2022, Waid was reported among the more than three dozen comics creators who contributed to Operation USA's benefit anthology book, Comics for Ukraine: Sunflower Seeds, a project spearheaded by IDW Publishing Special Projects Editor Scott Dunbier, whose profits would be donated to relief efforts for Ukrainian refugees resulting from the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

I've never been much of a fan of the Flash or have much familiarity with Mark Waid's writing but the Year One story arc was fantastic. Her skin also gets progressively lighter each issue, the GL crossover with Gorilla Grodd is pretty starkly racist, and the only black 'regular' character is Chunk, who shows up maybe three times to be laughed at and discarded.