$19.95 from DC
Comics, Hardback
Credits:
Written by Mark Waid
and Brian Augustyn
Art by Gil Kane, Joe
Staton and Tom Palmer
As comics fans, we’re
used to labeling our heroes according to when they showed up on the page. We
speak of the Golden Agers, occupied by about two Marvel characters, give or
take a few obscurities, and of course a slew of DC/National heroes. These
include such characters as the original Flash, the original Green Lantern, and even
a few who we’ve allowed to be reborn, retro-actively dislodging them from the
Golden Age entirely, such as Batman, Superman and Wonder-woman. The Golden Age
was marked by beaming, barrel-chested heroes who fought Nazis and shouted, “And
how!”
Then came the Silver
Age, dominated by Marvel’s new kind of hero, the powerful, complicated loser,
exemplified by the worry-fraught Spider-Man, the constantly bickering Fantastic
Four, and the existentially angst-ridden Silver Surfer.
But DC had a Silver
Age, too, but it was marked by characters like the new Flash. Unlike Marvel, DC
had been around and was still around, and slowly in the sixties and seventies
it folded its heroes over into the new era. These Silver Age DC-ers were
strange; they seemed trapped forever between “And how!” and “Whence Comes the
Titan,” or whatever grandiloquent diction dominated the comics of the new era.
The new Flash was a
bright, beaming speedster with a leotard just like Superman’s rather than the
pants and shirt worn by his predecessor. His origin was slightly- - slightly -
- improved (chemicals splashed on the police scientist; they made him really
fast.) He developed relationship problems, as was the rage. But he never really
ceased being a throwback, to my mind: his foes remained silly, his solutions
gimmicky, his life marked by one ultimately unimportant adventure after
another. Which was okay, actually. Belly-aching heroes get tiresome.
Now, of course, we
live in the contemporary age, a postmodern time when the writers are clever
enough to comment on the cliches of the genre while using them well. Mark Waid
is one of the finest contemporary writers; he has a pleasant fondness for the
silliness of comic heroes and is able to wring interesting character
development out of them simply by focusing on what we always took for granted. Thus
in his Flash: if Flash was a throwback, love him for it.
In “The Life Story of
the Flash,” Mark Waid tells the whole story of Barry Allen, the Silver Age
Flash, from the viewpoint of Iris Allen, his wife. The book combines text and
comics, zooming in for a scene, then pulling out for Iris to narrate us through
the different phases of the Flash’s career. It sounds like it should be dull,
but it’s not. Waid shares with us his love for the character of the Flash by
showing us the love of Iris. We find out Barry was a slow-poke, never punctual,
a charmer, but shy, a homebody, a man who wore bow-ties, a brilliant scientist,
a cute blond, a warrior for justice, basically the most absolutely perfect guy
you could meet. A guy who, in the forties, would smoke a pipe.
The villains the
Flash fought, Iris tells us, were generally silly, and Waid is smart enough to
point out the luck of the Flash that most of these prop-oriented characters
like Captain Boomerang and Dr. Alchemy were, for all their power, not all that
dangerous. That’s Waid’s trick: Waid has a fondness for the cliches of those
days, and works them into the post-modern retelling. That makes it all the more
poignant when he gets to a psychopath like Zoom, the truly mad Anti-Flash, who
killed Iris (you’ll see how) and drove Barry Allen to the brink of insanity. It
makes it all the more awesome when the cosmic nature of the Flash’s powers is
revealed.
Gil Kane and Tom
Palmer, meanwhile, go out of their way to make art that seems to channel
Carmine Infantino and all of those DC Silver Agers. This was a weird era: the
heroes were still barrel-chested, but suddenly, they had abs.
I enjoyed this story
immensely, and appreciated Waid’s attempt at telling a different kind of hero
story: a human one, and a sweet, touching one, not without the losses and
tragedies of any life. “The Life Story of the Flash” gives us a look at the
strange nature of DC, which will forever be haunted by its wartime origins, and
will always, behind the grizzled cynicism of today, somewhere be shouting, “And
how!”