Review: DC K.O.: The Flash trade paperback (DC Comics)

DC K.O.: The Flash is one of those event tie-in books where the connections are all one-sided. There’s nothing in this book that actually affects or intersects DC K.O. directly (aside from the All Fight Month issue, which also appears in the DC K.O. All Fight collection). Not that there’s not precedent for such thing, not that that’s not the veritable bread and butter of regular series comics-event tie-ins, but this is definitely one of those.

Thus the main draw might be longtime Flash scribe Mark Waid writing Wally West again. At the outset of reading this, I was inclined to say that, if I’ve been back and forth on Waid’s work since he returned to DC, this volume shows he hasn’t lost a step at least when it comes to writing Flash Wally West.

The more I read, the more I might qualify that. Waid seems to have Wally just right, up until he doesn’t. There’s a co-writer here, Christopher Cantwell, though it’s surely far too much of an easy out to suggest any differences in the character marks a change in the writer.

So perhaps only completists might need apply. As the book cover reveals, Impulse plays a large role, and if my take on Waid and Cantwell’s Wally is uncertain, I’m less unsure when it comes to the pair’s Bart Allen. Maybe that’s the takeaway; we could do worse than Mark Waid writing a new Impulse special.

[Review contains spoilers]

As mentioned, among the opening action sequence and into most of the first chapter, I was ready to declare Mark Waid’s Flash Wally West was back.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

Waid writes a Wally who’s more than a little “impulsive” himself but whose good judgment has him land on his feet. There’s a great bit about a “cakewalk” that’s hilarious and gets Wally’s voice just right, not to mention that the writers add another hero who thinks “superhero death tournament” might be a bad idea (clearly I’m on Wally’s wavelength, since in my review of DC K.O. I also called it “harebrained”). There’s also a reference to Wally’s strained relationship with his father, something I thought Waid flubbed in World’s Finest: Teen Titans, so again, it was good to see Waid on a title where the Wally character was working.

There’s trouble not long after, when Wally starts opining how his only goal in life was to be someone else — the Flash Barry Allen — and that continues really throughout the book. “I’ve always in some way been in Barry’s shadow,” Wally thinks at one point, and at another, “I sometimes wonder if I could’ve been anything else at all. If my life has just been some carbon copy.”

That’s really old news when it comes to Wally — I know for a fact that Mark Waid and I were both there as writer and audience for The Return of Barry Allen — and reads like how someone with only the CliffsNotes version of Wally West might write him. I don’t know if that’s Cantwell writing Wally or not, but I hope so, because Waid you might think would know better.

It comes around in the end that not only has Impulse Bart Allen become the living embodiment of the Speed Force, but he confirms that even without Barry Allen, Wally would have eventually become a speedster. I’ll grant I’ve never quite heard that one before, but indeed it’s an answer to a problem the audience resolved long ago, if not Wally and/or his writers. At the point in which Wally in his popularity has about literally wrested this book away from Barry, letting alone all the years Wally was acknowledged as the one true Flash after Barry died, for that to be the emotional arc of this book feels uninspired.

I did appreciate Impulse’s impulsiveness here, and as I noted in my review of Justice League Unlimited Vol. 1: Into the Inferno, Waid recaptures Bart’s cartoon thought balloons with aplomb. At one point the writers have Impulse going back in time to try to stop Barry from sacrificing himself in Crisis on Infinite Earths, and even if Bart’s being mind-controlled, it seemed awful silly he wouldn’t know that or would be made not to know about Barry's later resurrection. But, balance that with Bart being the embodiment of the Speed Force — that the Speed Force is “impulsiveness” and vice versa, and that has a lot of potential. Waid’s off the title after this but I hope either he or another writer follows up.

The first “All Fight Month” book I read was in Aquaman, one of the only, I think, not to use the “different skins” gimmick where the fighting heroes can reappear in different past forms. As such, it’s delighted me every time I’ve come across it since, and none yet moreso than when Guy Gardner takes on his Vuldarian “Warrior” form that we haven’t seen in forever. It goes a little way toward mitigating Waid’s mishandling of the time-lost Warrior in DC K.O.: Justice League Unlimited, and extra points to Waid for all the attention on Guy’s 1990s form.

I also thrilled here that Cantwell (surely Cantwell this time) swings back around to tie up a loose end from his DC All In Challengers of the Unknown miniseries. That the particular loose end gets tied up at the tail end of a Flash story and not in DC K.O. proper or another Challengers miniseries likely answers the question I posed in my review, whether Challengers “is the start of a renaissance for the Challs or just a bit of event-driven fluff,” but still I wasn’t expecting the wrap-up at all, so that much was fun.

As we’ve discussed before, must the show go on? DC could just as soon have put Flash on hiatus ahead of Ryan North’s run as they could have published the issues in DC K.O.: The Flash and I don’t know that the world would have been much different. Not essential reading here at all, but some things to see and some things to think about.

[Includes original and variant covers]

Rating 2.25