The Four Color Media Monitor

The finale for Flash: Rebirth has finally made its belated debut (Hat tip: Titans Tower Monitor), and what do you know, Geoff Johns has pretty much left things a mess, as the following suggest:

The Speed Force is re-imagined not as an impersonal energy field from which speedsters draw power, but as an energy field that Barry Allen generates…from which other speedsters draw power. Meaning that ultimately every other speedster on the planet owes his or her power to Barry Allen, even the ones who predated him. “Barry Allen made me the Flash,” indeed.

Indeed. As I once said, turning him into something not unlike a deity only makes him less human, and I thought that's what heroes like Barry were meant to be.

We’re clearly going to be seeing a Zoom Corps in the future. This might sound more exciting if the same author hadn’t introduced the Sinestro Corps a few years ago, then expanded it to an entire rainbow of fill-in-the-blank Lantern Corps.

Speaking of which, Johns took all those rainbow colors in Green Lantern more than a bit too far.

But few of these changes could be as bad as this one, which sadly looks canon, even as it ends:

Barry Allen’s past has been massively retconned to give him a tragic backstory, also providing a convenient excuse for anything that DC wants to revise about Flash history from the Silver Age onward. (As if half a dozen line-wide universe-altering events aren’t enough.)

A large number of the replies on the review thread are negative and certainly disappointed with how this ended, in a tangle of padding for trades. It's clear that the book isn't so much meant to have an ending as it is meant to be a setup for what's to come, which, as noted before, does not look to be anything optimistic. "Brightest Day" indeed. Johns has only insulted past stories featuring Barry's parents, and forced in a tragedy for tragedy's sake upon one of the last DC heroes whose background wasn't built on that kind of overused premise, which is becoming aggravating by now.

With all the ensuing disappointment over the miniseries, it's likely that the relaunched book won't see much success when it comes out. One way to get an idea of this is by noting how it looks to be a tie-in to another crossover, Brightest Day, which is unlikely to live up to its name. Those who avoid the next volume of the Flash will be doing the right thing, IMO. Geoff Johns has been going overboard for too long now, and it's time to stand up and make clear that we're not accepting his out-of-control storytelling anymore.

Labels: dc comics, dreadful writers, Flash, violence