There’s no denying it: The Flash is a brilliant superhero character. Everybody, even the littlest kid, understands what he’s about; anyone, even the most jaded adult, can fantasize about what it would be like to be him. And like all good one-power characters, he does that one thing so well that he’s effectively omnipotent…if you just take the time to apply a little comic-book science to the problem.
Flash Fact: it’s all about the comic-book science.
Which means that now Buddy Baker’s yellow-headed alien friends are back (and what the hell kept them so long, anyway?), we can get right into it. Why Flash sucks, I mean. My God, but he’s sucked for a long time, you know? And, that doesn’t seem right. There must be some sort of explanation for that. This brilliant, simple, fantastically pure wish-fulfillment of a character…where did he go wrong?
Let me set the stage for you: it’s the immediate aftermath of the Crisis in the DCU. John Byrne is revamping Superman. Grant Morrison is breathing life into Animal Man. And William Messner-Loebs is writing Flash. I see the issue “Runaway!” on a spinner rack at the 7-11, and on a whim I pick it up, on a whim I take it home…
And just like that, I become a heavy, heavy Flash fan again, in a way I haven’t been since I just started reading comics. And it isn’t just me: Ed, too, has had a mighty Flash freakout upon reading it. Also another friend, who was not only a civilian but a girl. Basically anyone who could parse the language of panels and gutters, and had a few minutes to kill, liked it. It was like magic, I’m telling you.
(His Dr. Fate also worked pretty well like that, by the way…)
But then of course a few years later Ed is making jokes like “look, it’s ‘Maximum Speed Lightning Overdrive’, part one of ninety-six! Gotta get it!” and I am swearing that if the mystery villain is that goddamned Abra Kadabra clown again, I’m going to give up even skimming these stupid things, because I’m starting to feel like he’s my arch-enemy…and also with equal fervor I am wishing that Linda would just die or something already, for Christ’s sake how many times can Wally run faster than he ever has before, how many times can their L*O*V*E triumph over impossible odds, how many times CAN I BE EXPECTED TO SIT THROUGH THIS SACCHARINE PUPPET-SHOW AGAIN MARK WAID! Good Lord, man, at least tell me you’re going to stop doing time-travel/alternate future stories after you’ve finally made it into Guinness, okay?
Longtime fans of Mr. Waid, if any are reading this, are now slightly miffed at me. But hold on, Linda-lovers! I’ll be the first to admit that his writing in “The Return of Barry Allen” was excellent, in places even spine-tingling (and I’m thinking here of the issue in which Barry and Wally are trapped in a force-bubble, from which Barry escapes but Wally doesn’t), and that it made me forget the distinct sinking feeling I’d gotten from reading his Annual story from Armageddon 2001…
But then I stopped relating to Wally, you see. Piper disappeared, along with Tina and Jerry and Mason and Chunk, and we had Hyper Badass Dystopian Future Wally show up a couple dozen times, and then, really…I mean the Cobalt Blue thing, was it necessary to make me suffer through that? And then Linda, Linda, Speed Force, Linda, Linda, Speed Force, in and out and backwards and forwards and blah. I realized I was happier re-reading “Nobody Dies”. I realized I was still interested in what Tina and Jerry might find out about how Wally’s powers even worked. I realized…
Oh, wait, that’s right! I had a point to all this.
Ahem.
How Wally’s powers worked. See, as it happens, I came in just at the right time (again!), because “Runaway!” was the issue immediately following the issue (“Takeoff!”) in which Wally got most of his speed back. What, you didn’t know? That’s right, there were issues of Flash where he couldn’t even run very fast. Seems like a really dumb idea, doesn’t it? Well, yeah. But wait, don’t think I’m knocking Baron, because fortunately in the immediate post-Crisis days in the DCU all kinds of infelicities could be turned to the good, and this was no different…
Over in Morrison’s Animal Man, the yellow-headed aliens show up, and remark on how since they’ve been away many universes have collapsed into one, with the result that everything makes more sense, is more textured, less whimsical, has a greater density of logic. Ah, Morrison. That was a good one. Meanwhile back in Central/Keystone, the problem of how to return Wally’s speed to him morphs into the puzzle of how he could have had it in the first place…and it’s all about the science, of course, but even comic-book science has its limits, and once an explanation for super-speed becomes desirable, what’s possible to explain about it starts to pull away from what isn’t so possible, and in an extremely illuminating way. There’s much talk of “auras”, for example – Superman’s got one, a Kryptonian solar radiance about an eighth of an inch thick all around his body, that protects his costume from being shredded…and as it turns out Wally’s got one too, only bigger and more tricked-out than Superman’s, because it has to cut down on friction, dissipate heat, all kinds of rational-sounding things like that. Also Wally has to eat a lot, because running at super-speed burns a lot of energy. But aha, how much is “a lot”?
Too much, as it turns out. Because even in the DCU, a calorie is a calorie is a calorie, and the numbers don’t add up. Just like how Wally’s powers function at all doesn’t add up. And just to add to the confusion, he keeps getting faster and faster every issue. Not Barry Allen fast, mind you! Tina even suspects that Barry wasn’t quite human, given all that he could do…and that, consequently, one of the reasons for Wally’s decreased speed is simply, strangely, that Barry isn’t around anymore. Even Joan allows as how Jay used to say he always felt faster when he was hanging out with Barry*…and what with these and other intimations of unforeseen connectivity, the texture of the post-Crisis world gets thicker and thicker, just like a plot. The past becomes a mystery, a Gordian knot of Secret Origins…a tantalizing curiousity…
Well, didn’t I say it was all about the science? There’s Tina with her sock feet up on the couch, chewing on her pencil…there’s Chunk, who may contain the compacted ruins of all the universes that the Crisis did away with…or may not…and amazingly, we realize that the DC universe is quite realistic suddenly, because it’s just like our world, in that what superpeople are and do is quite impossible in it. Because it’s only the Crisis that makes it different from our world, you see? All these anomalous elements, that fuel new and fantastical sciences, are because of the Crisis. But, the people inside the comics don’t know that; how could they? They don’t remember anything about it. They don’t realize that an infinite number of jazzy, delightful, paper-thin fantasy-universes have been compressed into a single more rigourously-detailed one…they don’t realize that all of the mad remnants of the DCU are being rationalized a bit at a time as they link up to a worldwide continuity again, made sense of just like errant causal chaff in a dream is made sense of, once the dreamer starts to swim back towards consciousness…they don’t realize, in a word, that they are living in their universe’s afterlife. They just wonder – well, let’s be accurate: Tina wonders – what all these anomalies might imply. What they have to imply.
Well…it’s a strange world, isn’t it?
Sadly, they don’t keep it that way. Before long, all the fascinating irregularities are (at least so the editors think!) smoothed away: the Speed Force emerges as the total explanation for everything the Scarlet Speedsters do, and all the inconvenient, inconsistent, interesting details about the way it works are…well, thrown out, basically. Turned from science, into magic: replaced. Until I bet no one today could tell you how in the hell the Speed Force is supposed to work, at all, except it’s got a name. Even if it really is (as I always suspected it was) the original Barry Allen of Earth-1 himself who’s the Speed Force empowering all the other Flashes in the post-Crisis continuity, it still doesn’t make any damn sense, and nobody seems to care very much that it doesn’t. Tina would care; Jerry would; Chunk would. But they’re all gone, now, gone and out of the picture. And the rest is pure hand-waving. “Speed Force”, indeed! It might have been a good idea, but it’s gotten to the point where it’s all just a bunch of contradictory garbage…rules without rules, and nothing to know, or find out…
(An aside: call me a geek, but I think it’s interesting to consider that if Barry Allen were resurrected in the DCU today, he still wouldn’t be the same Barry Allen who sacrificed himself in the Crisis, only the one who sacrificed himself in the amended post-Crisis timeline…)
…And furthermore, as much as I enjoyed the hell out of Waid’s JLA: Year One, it’s had the unfortunate consequence of making Tina’s musings unoriginal, as Barry himself wondered if he were human, he himself theorized about a “Speed Force”…oh yes, I am moving to full-on sneer quotes around those words now, you better believe it. The DCU may need a speed force after all, but it doesn’t need this mumbo-jumbo “Speed Force” with its elfish heaven for speedsters and its Black Flash and its absolutely irreconcilable conclusions about what and where is the top of the top and what people can even do when they get there. Attempts at explanation have become moot; it’s all pure incantation, at this point. The Speed Force has become holy, in about the same amount and at about the same time as Wally and Linda’s L*O*V*E has become holy, and I can’t imagine that there is anything worthwhile saying about it anymore. And, may I point out, in my book that makes this not the Flash? The Flash is a science-hero, for goodness’ sake! Where is the science, people?!? Because out with the science has also gone the fiction, if you follow me – I’m not saying that the powers of the Golden and Silver Age Flashes didn’t defy logical explanation, but I am saying that the stories built on top of that basic weirdness played otherwise straight with their science-fictional or smash-’em-up plots, and that the later Flash stories gradually dropped off from that standard. Because, what a mistake, to make the heroes’ origins rational and cohesive, at the cost of making their world into superstitious nonsense! It inverts the time-honoured Flash story dynamic to such a degree that all curiousity is drained right out of it. Science just doesn’t have any application anymore. By the time I lost all interest, stuff was just plain happening, without any particular rhyme or reason to it, and L*O*V*E and the “Speed Force” put together were making Wally a supernatural creature without any limits, and without any secrets. Without any mysteries, and without any conflicts. Except, you know, “save the cheerleader, save the world”. At least Barry Allen had the lightning-stroke of fate to contend with! At least his world was an open one, not just neatly wrapped up in a bow! And so was Wally’s, for a while: to Tina’s protest that it all can’t be real, and he shouldn’t be able to do what he does, his answer was but it is, and I can! Whereas to Max Mercury’s assertion that everything he does is justified through him being an avatar of a higher power of Speed, all he can say is…well, I guess that explains that.
Except of course it doesn’t, because the Speed Force still makes no sense. Sorry, I mean the “Speed Force”. As I said, I don’t hate the idea; I hate what’s been made of it. Hey, it could even be salvaged, if it wasn’t holy. But I fear its holiness is just too good a crutch, by this point. Got a headache, take a pill. Write yourself into a corner, pull out the old “Speed Force”…
And that’s why the Flash sucks. I tell you, if I’m a kid, I don’t want to hear about how Flash gets his speed directly from God, and I don’t want to hear about how his wife is his anchor, and how without her he’d diffuse away into Flash heaven. Blah. That is just not relatable. That is insufficiently about what you could do and discover if you could run really fast. In fact it’s reminiscent of the worst of Marvel’s Handbook days, where it seemed there was just no better explanation for Cyclops’ eye-blasts but that they came straight from another dimension. Uh…what? I thought the X-Men was all about that mutant thing, though, or was it…? For God’s sake, Marvel (I remember thinking), keep it straight, and keep it simple. You’re trying to explain too much. If you can’t abide the quirkiness of your own genre conventions, don’t push the problem off onto me…please, if you can’t play around with them, for God’s sake stop playing around with them…
In the modern Big Two comic universes, changes come thick and fast. Too thick and fast. Everything’s cosmological, suddenly, and everything’s fiat. Bart Allen was Kid Flash for like what, a minute? I’ll tell you, for that minute, I was interested again: Kid Flash. Yes. That whole idea is just gold. And yet, its simple, pleasant intrigue couldn’t last long in a world so stuffed to bursting with dystopian futures-gone-wrong and heavenly veloci-dimensions, and death, death, death…Wally was pretty well used-up, Barry was long-gone (except for the many guest appearances he made under Waid’s pen – please, Mark), and every possible future that could follow on from Wally had been so thoroughly explored that it was like all those stories had already been told. So many Flashy sons and daughters out there in the timelines! So many Flashy George Baileys and Sarah Conners! So many origins and counter-origins, and different people to be! I really do like Mark Waid, but it’s hard for me to laugh off the way the whole place got strip-mined during his tenure…and I miss Tina, looking at the equipment Barry cooked up to make his Flash costumes and thinking “wow, what? This guy was a police scientist? This is Nobel Prize-type stuff, here…”
So now Bart, seemingly doomed to continue his main character bit of growing up too fast, and never to be able to stay in one spot long enough to be liked…how long can he last? Is he already gone? I don’t know; I can’t read Flash comics anymore. But if he isn’t gone yet, he’s sure to be gone soon. The formula’s a bit busted, here: Flashes seem to have too much atonement to do all the time nowadays. But, they can’t make any progress; they have to run twice as fast just to stay in the same place. They’re running out of deus ex machinas. They’re running out of time, and unexplored places. Change the person, change the universe, change the tone, flip flip flip flip…all in a misguided effort not to throw the bathwater out with the baby…
It’s almost like a kind of junkie behaviour: DC, you’re tweaking on this Speed Force, I think. You’re like some kind of a…like a…
Veloci-junkie.
You need to get off that stuff, man.
Get that dirty water out of there.
And face facts.
*At this time Jay is presumed dead, of course…although as we discover in the pages of Sandman later on, he and the rest of the JSA are only trapped inside a little notional universe created by the Norse god Odin, so he could study different-case scenarios for Ragnarok – sheer brilliance, Neil!
Some nice food for thought in this post. Personally, I think that even if the Speed Force was never invented they’d run into the problem of the source of the Flash’s power becoming almost mystical in nature. Once you ask the question, you give disbelief a foothold, so there’s only so long you can say “How can he do this?” without either throwing your hands up in the air and giving up on the question or inventing an explanation for it.
But I think the Speed Force itself, being a total non-explanation in the end, is open to the same kinds of pseudoscientific questions. Just like Doctor Thirteen questions the Spectre and the Phantom Stranger, someone is going to seek the rational core of the phenomenon. What is this Speed Force energy, where does it come from? If it can act like a “place”, somewhere to disappear into, how can it transfer itself into a single person like it did with Bart? I think the ball is there, some writer just needs to run with it – of course, that hypothetical writer’s explanations for it will just start the cycle again! That’s nothing new, though, that’s just part of the ride. Things tend to get cyclical like that in comics – secret identities revealed and then forgotten, origins retconned again and again, whole concepts like the multiverse wiped from the canon just to come back again; I think the Speed Force will end up the same way, in the long run. A question is asked, an explanation given, that explanation questioned, something else coming out of the whole thing, and on and on.
I’m glad you touched on the Marvel stuff, because I was thinking of that while reading the first part of the post. Cyclops’ eye beams, the Hulk’s (and I believe Hank Pym’s) extra mass, the tissue that comes out of nowhere to regrow Wolverine; I think they’ve all been touched upon in a similar way. It comes from somewhere, some other dimension, some pocket of the universe inaccessible by normal means. But where? Is it all from one dimension, or different dimensions? Is there a dimension of pure optic beam force, a dimension of green gamma-soaked tissue? Is it a regular place with energies that undergo some kind of conversion process before shunting into our own dimension and out the eyes of Cyclops? And does someone live in this dimension, as tends to happen in every other alternate dimension/world/universe? Are the heroes draining a thriving place of its life-supporting energies when they use their powers? To me it just raises questions again, and gets me right back onto the pseudoscientific speculation kick. With the Marvel explanations and the Speed Force and etc, we’re still not far from where we started.
But I have to agree, that “Linda’s my beacon!” stuff sure did get old after a while ;)
Hey, Penguin…you know I couldn’t absolutely swear that the Speed Force wasn’t a Messner-Loebs invention. I mean, it’s very, very, very Waidian, naturally. But there is, as I said, Tina chewing on her pencil…and also that ferment of creative post-Crisis cross-title rationalization…and so it seems quite possible to me that Waid inherited an ongoing behind-the-scenes plan for better Flash explication.
At the same time, though, I took the Messner-Loebs issues of Flash to be doing something a tad tongue-in-cheek, saying “yes, it’s all nicely rationalized now…except it isn’t. And it never really can be.” Which it can’t be, actually! A classic WM-L thing: how can Flash do anything at super-speed, if he doesn’t THINK at super-speed? And yet if he thinks at super-speed, he can’t do anything except see people moving really, really slowly. A great storytelling tool, but…doesn’t make sense, if you play out all the implications. On his way to Coast City to go see Green Lantern, he’d age a year, subjective time. Ridiculous! And yet, comic books are, indeed, ridiculous. And at a certain point one has to accept the basic fantasy of it all. Can’t quite figure out how to do italics, etc., in these comments. Oh well. Anyway…I liked the deliberate (and humourous) examination of the failure of everything to make perfect sense in WM-L’s run, in part because of Wally’s own reaction to it…summarizable, perhaps, as “they know what they know, but I know what I know, and being who I am I have to accept being face-to-face with it…”
Absolutely brilliant superhero comics! Superhero comics for a new age!
Although maybe I should just say again, The Return of Barry Allen was AMAZING…at the beginning, quite in line with that theme I just described, only willing to take it to the limit and break the glass…one day soon, to make up for all the shit I’ve talked about Mark Waid, I should really do a big expose of his awesome inventiveness there…
I stray from the point somewhat, though. Which is: I think the DCU has suffered a lot from the needless (and occasionally obsessive, in my opinion) joining-up and basting of loose ends since those days, and what bothers me in Flash is that the loose ends were so comprehensively tied-up that it killed any excitement about what, perhaps, the shape of the new DCU really was, in the aftermath of 1986′s biggest event comic. It could’ve turned out to be a very, very interesting place, and Flash could’ve explored it. Which is sort of why Ed called me all excited a while ago to say “check it out! Last page of the new 52…THE YELLOW-HEADED ALIENS!!!” Because the communal collection is SO BORED of the new normal of DC, and those longboxes desire nothing more than a return to the creative ferment of the near-post-Crisis days, that those aliens symbolize to me. It’s just as you say: part of the cycle is supposed to be that something new comes out of it. Nothing new has been on offer in Flash for ages. But those Animal Man aliens give me hope, Penguin, that things haven’t been quite so well understood and comprehended that something new and cool can’t happen…
Like it was before (ptui!) Zero Hour.
On Cyclops, Hulk, Hank Pym, The Vision…yeah, a disturbing tendency to throw sandbags at the flood until you get a mudslide. Remind you a bit of, say, The Authority? Cyclops’ power, like everyone’s power, is only the power to open interdimensional portals (except Cyke does it with, you know, his EYEBALLS), and questions fall to the ground like pennies, and it’s as if you’re dared not to pick them up. Not Marvel’s finest hour.
Whoops! Pardon me, Penguin, I have to go drink some beer! Let’s continue this later. Hope I was coherent.
Also, the sharp-eyed reader will have noticed how this post, and Penguin’s comments, have more than a little something to do with what’s on offer in my vanity Atom half-script…gee, I really should find a way of storing all that fan-fic stuff around here somewhere…
I always thought The Return of Barry Allen summed up Wally West’s journey, and that the remainder of his run was simply regurgitation of the same points over and over.
“Wally has arrived! He’s the true Flash!!”
I miss Barry because I always liked the idea of a scientific super-speedster. Of course, as you said, the Barry who would return “these days” is the post-Crisis Barry who sacrificed himself in the Post-Crisis Crisis On Infinite Earths. (Ugh)
The Earth-1 Barry was wiped away along with the original Silver Age/Bronze Age DC around the time Man Of Steel debuted.
You know, I was never able to quite pin down why I stopped liking the Flash post-Barry. It wasn’t that I couldn’t see why I didn’t like Wally, but I shouldn’t have, by my own reckoning, liked Barry in the first place. But that was the real beauty of those older stories: it wasn’t about who Barry was per se, it was about what Barry — and, by extension, I — could do with the ability to run faster than anything. It had some of the beauty of the wish fulfillment of the original Capatin Marvel that has also been dragged through the continuity-for-the-sake-of-continuity wringer.
Excellent observations, pillock! Much appreciated!
Wow, Plok/Pillock, I just now saw that you had moved! Congratulations!
Anyway, have you seen Secret Origins Annual #2, the all-Flash issue from the Messner-Loebs era? It has Wally on the analyst’s couch trying to figure out his problems with his speed, and a recapping of Barry’s origin (by Robert Loren Fleming and Carmine Infantino) wherein Barry, disembodied as he travels back through time during the events of Crisis, becomes the “human thunderbolt” that strikes his younger self.
As for Wally, basically the analyst tells him the limits on his speed are self-imposed, planted there subconsciously by Barry during a typically trippy ’60s adventure. Any time Wally would feel himself straying from the path of decency — in other words, any time he found himself not living up to Barry’s ideal — those subconscious governors would kick in and he’d lose his speed. This obviously informed “The Return Of Barry Allen,” but as you can tell it’s full of metatextual goodness.
Heh, being addressed as “pillock” is really quite funny…
Sean: Glad you agree!
Keeper: I know, quite annoying really, especially considering that Messner-Loebs got to the end of his “Wally’s arrived” story in Flash #50, suitably marked by the new costume, and the requisite speed breakthrough…man, I loved that Laroque art, too…and then TROBA was so well-done, I forgave it for going over that same ground, but a hundred issues later it was still going on!
Tom: I know that one! Sadly, it isn’t in the collection. Interesting how that era of Flash tolerated many different “speed limit” explanations at the same time…I really do miss that original post-Crisis ferment, that let the various creators do new things within the shared universe by invoking the past that only us readers remembered…
As children, we accept. As adolescents, we question. As adults, we doubt.
I hate when the impossible is explained. The explanation doesn’t make sense, and doesn’t go away. Know why super-heroes have powers? Because they do. Not because there’s a few extra dimensions full of green mass and optic force floating around.
If a reader can’t get away from the impossibility of dodging machine gun fire, emotional androids, hypersenses that don’t drive a person insane, and being able to lift (press) in excess of 100 tons… it’s a different world, with vastly different physical laws. Just enjoy it.
Pretty well said, Mike.
It’s the love that makes it work, right? And where there’s no love…
Well then, it’s just a tarpit full of tinkertoys.
Thanks for commenting.
Dude, the reaason people need superheroes to make sense is because they need to have the REAL WORLD make sense.
However, the real world DOES NOT make sense. All the mroe reasons for superhero comics to make sense. They’re supposed to be fictional. So they make more fictional sense than the real world does.
Thank you! I don’t know what to say other than I feel the same way. I’ll say a bit more anyway, though, about the comics goodness that was the Baron/Messner-Loeb run. First, it was an ensemble cast, putting Wally among a great group of eccentric (but mostly non-superhero) characters: Tina, Jerry, Mason, Chunk, Wally’s ditzy girlfriend (who ends up with Chunk), plus Piper, Wally’s mom, and so on. Wally’s powers and heroic responsibilities stood out from this background in an interesting way.
In the bulk of the Waid years, Wally exclusively hung around with speedsters, talking about their legacy, their progeny, and the speed force. Lightspeed navel-gazing.
Another joy of this post-Crisis timeframe was the way the characters would play against silver-age expectations: Tina’s wondering about Wally’s powers was an example of that. Wally, portrayed as someone with no interest or ability with science, with no interest in maintaining a secret ID, and with less maturity, certainly is another. Even Linda, as she was originally shown, played against the Lois/Iris female reporter tradition by thinking that Wally was an egotistic jerk. The refreshing of the old tropes was fun. Go back and look at the issue where Wally attends the Rogues Gallery reunion to see what I mean.
My least favorite part of the Messner-Loeb years was the ongoing “Barry wouldn’t think I’m good enough” storyline. The rest of thie time, Wally lived in a new, interesting mileau, where it seemed anything could happen.
Like you, I *loved* Waid’s “Return of Barry Allen” storyline. I wish he’d stopped there, because this is also the point where the other speedsters come in to help, and never leave! Seeing Jay, Johnny Quick, and Zen Master Murcury in this story was exciting, but soon they, along with Jesse Quick, Impulse, etc. become a super-speed Memphis Mafia, insulating our young, fun hero from anything like a normal (or at least non-superheroic) world. And the navel gazing began.
I think I just made a Wally-as-Elvis comparison. It must be time for me to stop.
One more thing: I loved the early Geoff Johns issues because they again showed us, in working-class Keystone and its cops and denizens, another great environment for Wally to interact with. But once the focus again became “The Barry Allen legacy”–this time tied into the Identity Crisis story, I lost interest again.
Okay, I’m done. Thanks again for giving voice, better than I could, to my own frustrations with the title.
…and sorry for the typos!
Right on, Mike! You say it so well. I sense that like me you could go on about the joys of the pre-Waid Flash for hours and hours…you mention a few things I was going to bring up in my post, but edited out. The original Linda, for example. The sly humour of the Rogues. And, my favourite line, that simply says it all: “somehow, Flash has used ordinary people to beat me!”
I wasn’t kidding when I said I got civilian girls to read Flash, and Dr. Fate too…goes to show, good writing is good writing. And, good art too, obviously.
And was Laroque incredibly awesome, or what? Not taking away from any other Flashy pencillers of that era, but…
Hey, Mike, I’ve got an idea. Let’s make this an interminable thread of Flash appeciation. You talk about Kilg%re. I’ll talk about Hermes. You talk about Blue Trinity. I’ll talk about Veloci-junkies. Let’s go on and on.
Sigh. If only some bright light at Marvel would bring WM-L in to revitalize the FF, or the X-Men, or Spider-Man, or…Iron Man, or the Defenders…good God, that’d be…smart…
Oooh, I could indeed go on and on (“The Clipper doesn’t know–The Clipper Guesses!”) if time permitted (I’m at work, of course). What I will do, right now, is bookmark your blog! I wandered in via the Blog@Newsarama. Great place you have here.
Now I’ll get back to work, trying to not daydream about a Messner-Loeb run on FF…
Thanks!
By the way, now that no one’s looking anymore…psst…
The title of this post is supposed to be exceedingly clever…although whether it actually is or not, I couldn’t say. All to do with Flex Mentallo and Morrison’s JLA, you see…