Review: Absolute Flash Vol. 2: Still Point hardcover/paperback (DC Comics)

Absolute Flash Vol. 2: Still Point is perfectly readable and I’m eager for the third volume. But, not that it’s a competition, Jeff Lemire’s Absolute series still ranks for me below the others, especially after Absolute Green Lantern pulled away with a dynamic second volume.

Lemire’s teen-starring book, the only one of the main Absolute titles, delivers what teen-starring books usually do, a protagonist more given to angst and emotion as he learns that great power requires great responsibility. But I continue to feel Lemire doesn’t crack the Absolute ceiling of delivering much more than that.

Certain elements of the Flash mythos get turned on their heads, mostly the Rogues, but otherwise this is somewhat superheroics as usual. There’s something potentially interesting here regarding the Flash and time travel, but Lemire only graces the surface of it; now a dozen issues in, I’m not sure we’re even that clear on what young Wally West’s powers actually are.

Reading Absolute Flash, I continue to think Lemire’s almost got it … but not yet.

[Review contains spoilers]

It’s often been a danger in Flash comics, at least from Geoff Johns on out, that the Rogues might become more interesting than the Flash du jour himself. That danger is even greater in the second volume of Absolute Flash, when the gathered Rogues are willing to “go rogue” to save Wally West’s father, Rudy. Here, Rudy hasn’t been particularly lovable, which makes the Rogues' dedication to him all the more impressive (they’re all military compatriots and Rudy helped them out of a jam). “Captain Cold” extends an equivalent fatherly protectiveness toward Wally, rather more decent than we usually see Leonard Snart act.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

In all, the major Absolute twist for Flash seems to be that the Rogues are the good guys this time, still rough around the edges but generally on the side of the heroes. Among the Absolutes, that’s not so big — we’ve seen something of the same on alternate earths and so on — but it’s near the most significant thing Absolute Flash can hang its hat on.

The rest was, I felt, kind of a muddle. There’s some suggestion of destiny here (potentially retroactive destiny, with some time-travel shenanigans happening) that Wally West was destined to receive the Flash powers. But it’s not clear — scientist Barry Allen sees a figure that tells him it must be Wally who crosses to the Still Point, but under artist Travis Moore I couldn’t tell if Barry’s talking to the evil Eobard Thawne (who wouldn’t be wearing a Flash costume) or to a future Wally or his own future self.

Later Thawne’s granddaughter Elenore reveals she tricked Barry into befriending Wally so that Wally could be sacrificed to the Still Point. In the same scene, however, Elenore suggests she only made the decision to use Wally after Barry apparently died, which doesn’t jibe with her interest in Wally beforehand. So I came out really not knowing whether Wally was fated or tricked or what.

Wally does eventually go into the Still Point, where he discovers Barry’s spirit still lives (“Flish” is the best line of the whole thing). We also know Eobard Thawne attacked soldier Jay Garrick and they both fell into the Still Point, where Thawne let himself be tempted by the “Alpha/Omega” (this Absolute book’s site of Darkseid). Yet Wally returns from the Still Point raring to take revenge on the returned and now monstrous Thawne, even though Thawne is arguably more victim than culprit at this point.

That battle comes in the form of Wally running toward Thawne, the two disappear into an indistinct burst of red as drawn by series artist Nick Robles, and a moment later everyone’s picking themselves up from an explosion. That’s kind of the way it goes; Wally later chases Thawne, then jumps on him and punches him, and earlier, Wally somehow absorbs lightning and then punches the (Absolute) Weather Wizard.

The book has not been so much about speed — none of those tropes about finding speed-proof shoes and such — and maybe that’s a distinguishing factor. The flip side is that Wally seems to mainly just hit things while surrounded by red squiggles, and 12 issue in that feels lacking.

Where Wally’s “power set” does show potential is in too few time-travel scenes. That’s maybe not quite the right word — Wally isn’t time traveling so much as it seems like he sees the past and future around him; once he’s surrounded by versions of himself separated by seconds, and another time he pre-experiences a conversation he’ll have with Barry issues later. That’s fun, something the mainstream Flash titles have maybe dallied with, that perhaps the Flashes don’t run so much as they bend time around themselves. That would be a hook, a Wally West for whom time travel is a standard part of his powers, but that’s all theoretical until Lemire fills in the details.

Again, I enjoyed Jeff Lemire’s Absolute Flash Vol. 2: Still Point; it’s not bad comics by any measure. But like the first volume of Absolute Green Lantern, it is six issues leading up to two superhero-like figures hitting one another, and if the other Absolute books did the same, they did it with more aplomb. In its “seasons” (“End of Year One,” here), in its youthful protagonist, one sees Lemire here, sees Sweet Tooth (“Human-animal hybrids” is another good joke). It’s just that “Year Two” needs to step it up a bit.

[Includes original and variant covers]

Rating 2.25