Flash might be my least favourite superhero. I’ve never read a good Flash comic and the character itself is so dated. He runs fast and can travel through time/across dimensions. So what - so do numerous other (better) characters. He looks like a parody of a superhero. His rogues gallery stinks: a psychic gorilla, a guy with an ice gun and a guy with a boomerang? THEY seem like parodies of supervillains! Flash has always been bad and yet DC keeps trying to make people care about this antiquated, feeble superhero.
But maybe the reimagined Absolute Flash is better - maybe Jeff Lemire could be the creator to finally make a good Flash comic?
… no. As talented as Lemire undeniably is, his best work is almost entirely his creator-owned comics. His worst is almost always the work-for-hire garbage he sharts out at Marvel and, especially, DC. So it goes with Absolute Flash - a dire Flash comic and amongst Lemire’s most forgettable books.
Wally West is Flash. He runs fast and his best friend is a psychic… monkey (oh snap what a twist, he’s not an ape in this one…) called Grodd. Captain Cold, Captain Boomerang and Generic Evil Government Military Types are chasing him for Reasons. Riveting.
Absolute Flash has some of Lemire’s worst storytelling and writing on show. Dr Barry Allen sees Wally sulking because he’s an army brat who’s always moving around because of his dad’s military work and… I guess he wants to cheer him up for some reason? By inviting him to see a highly classified military science lab? Why would that cheer him up? Why isn’t this area better protected from civilians? Why isn’t Allen fired for this obvious breach of security? Does this make sense to anyone?!? He also wants Wally to work for him part-time because he knows Wally’s too smart for school because he read his file - an intelligence we never actually see manifest (tell, don’t show). Barry Allen just comes off as gross and predatory.
I don’t know where Wally got his powers - we don’t find out in this book so I guess he just always had them? Same goes for his costume - he just got that from somewhere or they came with the powers?? To be totally fair to Lemire, we probably find out in later books why this is but this approach highlights the disjointed and shoddy nature of the storytelling still further. And I won’t be reading beyond this first volume anyway because I don’t care to find out what nonsensical reason is given for how he got his powers and costume (I’m guessing the answer to both will be creepy Barry Allen).
Grodd has an awful character design - he’s green for no reason and HIS BRAIN IS EXPOSED!! But he doesn’t die from this fact - no, he’s psychic instead. Fucking. Dumb. The bad guy says lines like “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, time to make this whole world fall.” Who’s the bad guy saying this to? What does it mean to make the world “fall”? Gibberish. It doesn’t sound cool, it doesn’t make sense, and it’s idiotic. Shite villain writing 101. Reverse Flash is gender-swapped because that’s so imaginative. That’s certainly not a worn-out cliche at this point.
Ironically for a speedster character, both the writing and storytelling comes off as rushed. Horrendous, sloppy work from Lemire, coupled with unremarkable art, I’m definitely not in two minds about Absolute Flash - unsurprisingly, this is the worst comic in DC’s Absolute line.
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