Running from Everything

Well, it had to happen sooner or later, I suppose. I’d been wowed by the first three volumes in the Absolute Universe line – Absolute Batman, Absolute Wonder Woman, and Absolute Superman – and while I didn’t entirely get the fourth main book in the franchise, Absolute Green Lantern, I was at least intrigued enough in where the story was going that I’m willing to give it time to grow. But I knew, sooner or later, some book would come along that I just didn’t like at all, something that fell flat for me out of this whole comic line. Who knew it would be Absolute Flash?

Now, in fairness, I do have to admit that I am not the biggest fan of The FlashStruck by lightning while working in his lab, Barry Allen became a speedster known as The Flash, launching an entire set of super-fast superheroes.. They’re not a bad character, no matter what incarnation you’re speaking of (Jay Garrick, Barry Allen, and Wally West included), but when you look at the major players in the Justice LeagueThe premiere team at DC Comics, their version of the Avengers (which actually came before the Avengers and, really, has existed in some fomr since the early 1940s), the Justice League is the team-up to end all team-ups, featuring some of the most popular, and longest running, characters in all of comics history (and also Booster Gold)., Flash is the one that’s always interested me the least. A guy that can run really fast? I mean, sure, that’s a super power, and not an entirely uninteresting one, but when you’re comparing that to a goddess, a super-powered alien, a space cop with a ring that can make constructs, and a dude that’s really angry and really rich, I just haven’t thought that Flash was that interesting. And, unfortunately, this book doesn’t really sway me on that opinion.

It’s an Absolute Universe book, so it tries to do the same, “strip the character of everything that matters,” trick all the other books have pulled. And yet, somehow, that doesn’t lead to a compelling character. The book’s idea of stripping away what matters equates to removing Wally’s family. No Iris, no Barry, and no one else to ground him. But it still has him get caught up in a science experiment gone wrong, still hands him his speed powers almost instantly, and then just lets him run off to find himself. Every incarnation of The Flash has, in a way, been running from their past, running towards a brighter future, and despite the changes that Absolute Flash makes to its character’s backstory, it doesn’t actually feel like it’s changed enough to justify the whole reboot aspect. Something is missing here, and I can’t pin down specifically what that is…

Absolute Flash focuses on Wally West. An Army brat, Wally has been moved from base to base by his father, a man wrapped up deep in some kind of R&D project for the military. Wall lost his mother a few years back, and has been in a deep depression ever since. She was his grounding force and without her Wally feels adrift, unable to find happiness that, far as he can see, doesn’t care about him at all. The only person to show any interest in him is Barry Allen, one of the techs working at the military base, as Allen sees a bright young boy that might just have a knack for all this science stuff.

Unfortunately, when Wally goes to visit Barry one night at the lab on base, Barry’s experiment goes horribly wrong. Wally gets caught in the energy of the experiment, and this not only gives Wally incredible powers, it also kills Barry in the process. Running from what he thinks is a citation he caused, Wally discovers he can run really, really fast. So fast, in fact, that it almost seems like he moved backwards and forwards in time. His powers are incredible, which is why the same R&D group that his father was working for now wants to catch Wally and experiment on him. Wally is the solution to what they’ve been working on. Catching him, though, is a much bigger problem.

There are two aspects of Wally’s story that didn’t work for me, and both of them are fundamental to how Wally’s tale is told. The first is that Wally is a deeply depressed guy who just isn’t interesting to read about. I know that makes me sound callous, but as of yet the book hasn’t really done a good job of illustrating how Wally’s mental health plays into his superhero persona. Kal-El was shaped by seeing his whole planet destroyed. Bruce uses the pain of seeing his father killed to become Batman. Diana literally claws her way out of Hell to become Wonder Woman. Each of these heroes has their problems baked into all aspects of their superheroics, and they’re necessary traits that define them.

Wally’s depression, though, feels less like something fundamental to his rise as a superhero and more a trait given to him simply to make his backstory grimdark. Losing his mother doesn’t alter his trajectory in any meaningful way. Yes, it makes him sad, and distrustful of his father, but from everything we’re shown about the character he didn’t like his dad anyway. And he’s not running from the pain of losing his mother, nor is he running from his own depression, so that whole setup feels needless to the character. Functionally all it does is make him hate his super powers, sucking all the joy The Flash would usually feel out of being the fastest person alive.

This isn’t me complaining that writer Jeff Lemire gave Wally a dark back story. This is me complaining that he did it without using it to make the character more interesting. If Wally were just angry at his father for forcing him to move from military base to military base, that wouldn’t really change much of the story for Wally. Losing Barry in the experiment is a more immediate cause of guilt, and it leads to a more immediate threat for the character. What I want is for the book to justify making Wally so depressed, and so flat, and as of yet the book hasn’t done that.

And then there’s the experiment itself. Wally, unlike every other hero we’ve seen in the Absolute Universe so far, doesn’t do anything to earn his powers. He doesn’t train, he doesn’t fight his way through something, and he doesn’t free himself of Hell to get there. Wally is an accidental rounding error in an experiment, one that he wasn’t even meant to be part of, so when he gets his powers they are disconnected from who he is as a person at the time. Making him a bystander that accidentally gets his powers removed a lot of the relevance they should have to him. It’s forcing powers onto someone that wasn’t meant for them, at least not yet, and that drains something crucial and interesting away from the character.

The problem really boils down to how quickly the book gives Wally his powers. Within the first issue we go from Wally being a normal kid to the experiment to him suddenly having powers. While I know this book is called Absolute Flash and, as such, it needs to have The Flash in it, because of where the book starts in Wally’s life the whole origin of his powers is rushed. We barely even understand Wally as a character before his whole life is fundamentally changed. The book struggles to grapple with that change in status quo because it comes too fast and doesn’t work for the character.

Functionally everything about this title feels wrong, and the book doesn’t ever seem to recover from it. Instead it throws more and more ideas at the wall, including an already developed group of “Rogues” set to chase Wally down, but it never really finds Wally in all this mess. The core hero of the story hasn’t even found himself yet, leaving a massive void in the center of the story that no other book in the Absolute Universe line has had to contend with. The book struggles all because of the narrative decisions Jeff Lemire makes at the outset.

This isn’t to say that Absolute Flash couldn’t become an interesting book. Given more time (which the series has already gotten, and we’re slowly catching up to as I do these reviews) it’s entirely possible that all my qualms with the story could slowly drift away. Maybe Wally gets the fleshing out he needs. Maybe the book finds a way to better connect him to his powers. Maybe the book finds strengths down the road in the flaw of its conception. It’s all possible. Right now, though, this book is way too uneven to work. I want to like Absolute Flash, but this first volume completely fails to deliver for me on any front.