Simon Spurrier’s Flash Vol. 4: Bad Moon Rising, his final volume, starts well enough that I thought that this run might be ending on a high note. We start in the middle of things, with the Flash fighting a super-speed war against Eclipso on the moon, moving too fast for anyone else to intercede, and with Flash Wally West throwing hundreds of his time-split duplicates at the enemy, cannon fodder to hold Eclipso at bay. It’s dark and gritty and gripping, with Flash allies and enemies militarized on both sides.

What happens is, the story goes on a bit too long, and the interesting supporting cast never amounts to anything, and the art seems increasingly hurried, and there’s no consequences for an ever-compounding series of bad decisions on Wally’s part. I do appreciate Spurrier’s attempt to do something different with this run, whether the deep sci-fi of the first two volumes or the “nary a punch thrown” ending, but ultimately this just never rose to the level of something truly compelling.

[Review contains spoilers]

Again, the start, full of surprises, is Bad Moon Rising’s best bit. The Flash and his seven thousand duplicates have been at war for years, relatively, he explains to Mr. Terrific’s visiting droid. There’s the intentionally uncomfortable situation where Wally has to wring some good vibes out of Linda and the kids for the sake of the “troops,” indicating the weird straits the Flash is in. Mysterious enemies abound — like the so-called “K-Zero” and “Radwave,” plus regular ol' terrifying Godspeed — as well as allies with exotic-sounding names like “the Terrible Two,” “Max Mercy,” and “General Garrick.” The former are Speed Force’s Wallace West and Avery Ho, two of my favorite speedsters, and the latter is not Jay, as might be presumed, but Judy “the Boom” Garrick, who never gets included in anything, so it’s fun to see her.

But Max Mercy, as it turns out, is just Max Mercury with a funny name, and in that the cracks begin to show. Why does Max even need to be called by a different name up on the moon? How did Judy come to be part of all this? (She and Wally have met offscreen, but barely ever spoken that the audience has seen.) And the powered up villains, as it turns out, include Captain Cold, Heatwave, Magenta, Godspeed, Girder, and … Tar Pit, I think? At least some of them have gone good, I’m pretty sure, and in the case of Godspeed, August Heart has been dead and resurrected without explanation yet. Essentially, at the beginning, I was hoping the book would have a lot of answers and also spotlight a lot of the cast, a la Jeremy Adams' Flash: The One-Minute War, but instead most of this is just window dressing, never truly relevant to the plot itself.

One reason to think Bad Moon Rising might follow similar patterns as One-Minute War, despite different writers, is that each had their own additional self-named special. The One-Minute War Special, as was the custom roundabouts Lazarus Planet and the start of Dawn of DC, was an anthology, with stories of side characters even beyond One-Minute’s expansive main cast. And so, Bad Moon Rising has a seemingly large cast, Bad Moon Rising has a special, the special seemed likely to spotlight that cast.

Instead, the Bad Moon Rising Special is an extra-sized special about the Shade, replete with Starman references, written by Alex Paknadel. That’s remarkable on the face of it (Starman ended 25 years ago, folks!), though the Shade’s appearance out of nowhere at the end of the third chapter makes this feel like a swerve for Moon (he’s there before, but so disguised as to be anybody). I get it, Shade was originally a Flash villain, this is a story about Eclipso, etc., but Shade has been so long not in this mythos that the book’s sudden focus on him screeches the whole forward action to a stop.

And yes, I did hold out hope Spurrier might reference the Shade’s last appearance in a Flash comic, Joshua Williamson’s Flash Vol. 2: Speed of Darkness. There, a DC Rebirth Shade, before all the recent continuity restorations, remembered that Barry and Iris Allen had been married and other forgotten pre-Flashpoint lore. Williamson never explained why Shade knew it all, probably because the editorial plans for the whole DCU changed, and not that Spurrier should interrupt his story to defer to a plotline from almost a decade ago, but I was disappointed there wasn’t a “Glad you all got your memories back” or the like.

When Wally and family were battling dino-creatures on Skartaris in Flash Vol. 3: As Above, I noted that Vasco Georgiev’s art seemed the right tonal shift after Mike Deodato. But what starts pretty well — the moonscapes and the pitched battles and so on — began to lose detail by the end, Eclipso depicted with a random claw reaching into the panel, Irey West morphing between pants and a dress between pages, and so on. And I might be too much of the school of José Luis García-López and Dan Jurgens, but Georgiev’s manga-forward depictions of Irey and Jai West — Irey particularly — felt melodramatic to me (tears literally streaming down Irey’s face) in a way that only heightened the West kids' annoying tendencies.

I do again appreciate that Spurrier tries to make this not quite superheroics as usual. A big turn in the book comes not through punching but when Flash and company realize Eclipso’s actions are just to win daddy Darkseid’s approval. Also that the other shift is Wally realizing their super-dog Foxy ate Barry’s Flash ring and “still hasn’t pooped,” such to allow them to teleport Foxy away from Eclipso. It’s scatologically sillier than I think Spurrier intends, but still a clever use of a joke in one part of the tale to create a solution in another. Also smart that the Wally clone with heart that figures it all out has his uniform torn just so to resemble Wally in his Kid Flash days.

But in part we’re in the Flash Vol. 4: Bad Moon Rising mess because Wally, rather than level with his family about the demands of home and work, instead split himself into two beings and didn’t tell anyone, and then later sent thousands of his duplicates to their deaths in an ill-fated war of attrition. The end of this book echoes the beginning of Simon Spurrier’s Flash Vol. 1: Strange Attractor in Wally and Linda out on a date; last time Wally was pretending not to be superheroing but he actually was, and this time Wally and Linda are both working and she gives him the nod to run off. Lesson learned, maybe, but was it the right lesson? I’m not sure, and neither am I quite confident this book knows either.

[Includes original and variant covers]