“Oof. What a letdown.
After reading issue one of all the new relaunched DC 52 titles, I came away very excited about the Flash. The first issue was paced, had a good cliffhanger, and ultimately made it seem like we’d be getting some detective-y stuff along with the speedster business.
Aaaand not so much.
The whole DC relaunch has been pretty disappointing, personally. I’m not saying that there aren’t good books coming out. I’m just not sure that there is a larger number of good books coming out, or more importantly that I’ve enjoyed DC comics more in the last year than I had in years previous.
The Flash here is a great example of one of the big problems I have with DC comics in general.
I think DC can be really good, and when they let go of the past in some ways it can create some really exciting results. I very much enjoyed some of the Wally West Flash stories from the 90’s. And the Death of Superman was probably one of the most interesting Superman books I ever read. Hell, I was even into Kyle Rayner, the often-maligned Green Lantern who took over for a while.
So a relaunch like this really should have flipped my cookie, I think. But fuck me if it didn’t let down in a big way.
I mean, why am I reading a complete Flash relaunch where in the first few issues we discover that one of the ideas that’s going to carry over is the Cosmic Treadmill? The fact that the words “Cosmic Treadmill” got through once should tell us enough, but twice? Was anyone clambering for that? Really sweating it out after they heard about the relaunch, thinking, “Oh fuck, oohhhhhh fuck, they better not get rid of the Cosmic Treadmill! How else would they access the multiverse through the act of running if not with the Cosmic Treadmill?”
I guess what’s disappointing to me about this book and some of the others is that the relaunch was a great opportunity to do some fun, different things with characters and stories without the shackles of continuity. But, instead we sort of just redid a lot of the same stuff again. We read the same stories with updated art. We got Cosmic Treadmill.
“