Van Sciver Talks Designing A New Costume For Wally West
Artist Assures That The Flash: Rebirth #3 Will Be "A Revelation"
Following the events of Final Crisis, Barry Allen is alive and well again…but he’s hardly spent a minute not wearing his Flash suit. Since helping to defeat Darkseid, he’s been wandering the countryside, averting catastrophes and wondering aloud if the world was better without him. In the closing moments of #1, the villainous speedster Savitar emerged literally out of Barry’s chest, but was almost immediately caught by Allen…whose touch turned the self-appointed “speed god” to dust. This issue follows up on the events of that book, and features the death of all the members of Savitar’s speed cult.
There’s a framing device where the action—such as it is, in a book where so little happens that the reader is left to feel like Barry Allen, watching the seconds tick by like hours—of some of the apes in Gorilla City painting a cave mural of Barry Allen, with black lightning bolts reaching out and blasting other speedsters. When asked whether the painting itself might be a clue to one of Geoff Johns’ arcane mysteries, not unlike the chalkboard in Rip Hunter’s lab during the writer’s runs on52 and Booster Gold, artist Ethan Van Sciver said, “I wouldn't look for anything like that. It's fairly direct, and one-dimensional in more ways than one. Then again, maybe Geoff had something else up his sleeve. He always seems to.”
There’s a whole lotta nothin’ goin’ on in The Flash: Rebirth #2 by Geoff Johns and Ethan Van Sciver. The art is absolutely beautiful—some of the best work of the already-very-accomplished Van Sciver’s career—but the whole issue is spent telling what the first issue already showed (a clear violation of one of the cardinal rules of comics and cinematic storytelling). Let’s review:
· Barry Allen, back from the dead after all these years, isn’t as thrilled about it as everyone else is.
· He’s acting very standoffish, making even his closest friends feel a touch awkward around him.
· As a result of his resurrection, crazy things are happening in and around the Speed Force, including but probably not limited to the death of Savitar (seen last issue when Barry touched him as he tried to escape from his prison inside the Speed Force) and the strange “speed seizures” that this provoked in DC’s other speedsters. The fact that the speed seizures were greater for those characters more directly connected to the Speed Force is not surprising, but one of the few new pieces of information given this issue.
· Barry Allen is the new Black Flash.
This last point isn’t necessarily old news (although I think everyone with half a brain had assumed it at the end of issue #1) but it certainly was done in a telling-instead-of-showing way, with Wally actually saying the words to Barry at the end of the issue.
Given that Barry and Wally spend most of the issue talking or running together, the issue of their almost-identical costumes becomes a bit of a bone of contention once or twice, particularly since one of the only weaknesses in Van Sciver’s art is the fact that the two of them have virtually identical faces. “It's a major problem,” the artist confirms, adding, “and will be dealt with in this miniseries. I do my best to always distinguish them from one another, but it's hard sometimes.” He says that “the easiest answer, to alter Wally's costume more drastically from Barry's,” is “part of the gig.” Says Van Sciver, “It's my job to find Wally a new suit that is familiar to fans and different than Barry's.”
We get all of this for our money, plus about ten pages dedicated to the “Nora Allen’s unresolved murder” retcon introduced last issue and the heart-pounding “Secret Origin of Barry Allen’s Bowtie,” which might have been a great story if written tongue-in-cheek but unfortunately was neither. There are also other, quieter retcons in the series as well (continuing the tradition Johns started in Green Lantern: Rebirth when anything that didn’t serve his needs was treated to have simply never occurred) as “I was in witness protection” is apparently a magical phrase that makes the world forget they spent the last however-many-years knowing that you were The Flash.
Ultimately, as much as I love Geoff Johns ordinarily, he’s striking out with this series so far for me. I didn’t need to see Barry back as The Flash before this story started, but at least I wasn’t openly hostile to the notion. I’m getting there. The flawless work by Van Sciver might make this the best case of lipstick on a pig in recent publishing history, but that doesn’t make it inherently worth reading.
According to Van Sciver, though, if you agree with my assessment of the series so far, “Issue #3 will be a revelation for you.”
No comments:
Post a Comment