Jeremy Adams' Jay Garrick: The Flash is mild, not particularly answering the question of why we need another Flash, Jay’s time-lost daughter Judy “The Boom” Garrick. But what this book did do was reinforce to me that Adams seems to have a plan, with enough recurring elements as to make it clear he’s building toward something, or at least trying to. That goes a long way with me, and I embrace Adams' Jay Garrick as another piece in that puzzle.

There’s also a rather shocking revelation within this book that reimagines one of the cornerstone entities of the DC Universe. I suspect it's going to be wholly ignored by most other titles; indeed, the fact that I’m reading Garrick some time after it was published and I’ve never otherwise heard this mentioned is evidence of that. But still, another interesting footnote for this book, one that maybe someone else will pick up one of these days.

[Review contains spoilers]

The conceit of Adam’s Garrick is that, following Geoff Johns' Stargirl: The Lost Children, Judy has been returned to her parents and their memories of her restored. Apparently when Judy disappeared, Jay also lost memory of a shadowy villain, Dr. Elemental, though Elemental neither forgot him nor Judy (I feel rather strongly this is not how Johns meant it to work, but irrespective). Judy’s back, and now so is Elemental, meaning to use Judy’s powers to elevate humanity (if also killing 90% of the world in the process).

Among complications here is that Elemental turns out to be Professor Hughes, the faculty member that Jay Garrick worked for in his 1940s origin and a mildly recurring character in the Golden Age. Apparently Jay’s exposure to the “hard water” fumes that gave him his powers wasn’t an accident, but rather Hughes experimenting on him; later Hughes reproduces the same accident to give Judy her powers, too.

This won’t matter all that much in the grand scheme, but it is a change to Jay’s origin in the sense that he no longer gained his powers from weird science, but rather from being experimented on by a mentor who would become his nemesis — and the same for his daughter. To me it feels a bit “anti-Flash”; Barry Allen and Wally West both got their powers accidentally, if not pseudo-supernaturally, but not Jay any more. That’s not my favorite, though again I’m skeptical whether this will truly become a mainstay of the canon.

The greater revelation, with implications across the DCU, is that Hughes founded STAR Labs, and that all this time, STAR has been a front for Hughes' experiments, just waiting for Judy’s return. That’s a big deal — where hasn’t STAR Labs appeared? — with potentially Event Leviathan-like effects; what if every major city in the DCU suddenly lost their science center? Or every science character in the DCU suddenly found out their “home base” was built on corruption? I expect this to be touched upon absolutely not at all, but if STAR’s been around even longer than you’ve been reading comics, Adams' revelation was quite the shocker.

The fact we’ll probably never hear about that again, however, reflects the problems with Adams' Garrick overall. Whereas Tim Sheridan’s Alan Scott: The Green Lantern was a character-defining piece, both telling us things we didn’t know about Alan and affording him some new powers, Garrick changes Jay’s origins but doesn’t really change Jay. There’s a bit of discussion between Jay and Joan Garrick as to “now we have this daughter we forgot about,” but there’s no extent to which anyone’s really struggling with either being parents again nor that Judy’s parents are significantly aged. It’s all just fine in a way that’s not very exciting.

Similarly, Judy is uncontroversial; Courtney “Stargirl” Whitmore takes Judy to the mall and Judy is mostly preoccupied with all the foods there are to eat. If you were suddenly picked up from the 1960s and dropped in the 2020s, there’s a lot that’s different with society besides malls having tons of food. Clearly Adams is writing a book that’s intentionally light — this is more Young Justice than a societal critique — but the lack of drama is almost hard to believe. Neither do we ever quite understand the most interesting aspects of Judy, that at times she violates most sci-fi temporal prime directives to go visit her father before her birth; Adams gives us the “what” but not ever really the “why” of Judy, and it’s hard to differentiate her with so many other young speedsters around.

What did strike me is that Adams also brings back Quiz Kid, another of the Johns creations, and Fairplay, the previously unknown son of Mr. Terrific revealed in Adams' Flash Vol. 20: Time Heist. Having caught a glimpse of where Fairplay is going to appear after this, in a book written by Adams, now I’m starting to notice how Adams carries a lot of characters with him from book to book: Starbreaker, Omega Bam-Man, Gold Beetle, and now Fairplay. I adore when authors do this, both spreading characters across the DCU by cameoing them in disparate titles and also creating their own ongoing author-verses, and it makes me that much eager to read Adams' work to catch more of it.

Further, Adams also features Dr. Mid-Nite Pieter Cross here, one of my favorites, after Pieter also appeared in Adams' Flash Vol. 18: The Search for Barry Allen. Pieter’s been generally out of continuity since the New 52, a shame since his and Mr. Terrific’s friendship was one of the best parts of Johns' JSA. Given the lack of mention of Pieter since, and that the resurrected Beth Chapel has retaken the Mid-Nite mantle, I thought maybe Pieter just no longer existed, short of that Flash appearance that I supposed might have been a gaffe. Well, if it was a gaffe, Adams has wonderfully doubled down, presenting Pieter as hale and hearty and just mostly moved on from the superhero game.

Artist Diego Olortegui does quite fine here throughout, with a chipper art style that indeed resembles Todd Nauck, deepening the Young Justice ties. I see Olortegui will be doing some work on Jeff Lemire’s JSA, and I wonder if that will be too cartoony or just right. Though I find Judy’s design also unimaginative, I did think artist Afu Chan had a good variant cover stylizing both Garricks with preternaturally long runners limbs.

Nothing particularly wrong with Jeremy Adams' Jay Garrick: The Flash, and indeed at least Jay and Judy get some sort of spotlight; there’s been more than a few titles with Judy hanging around aimlessly in the background, so now at least she’s starred in something. But no question that among this set of Justice Society miniseries, Alan Scott: The Green Lantern ranks higher; there’s a couple surprises here but the book didn’t do much to make me feel anything.

[Includes original and variant covers, character designs, interior thumbnails]