Review: The Flash: Rebirth #4

It’s been a little while since the last issue of Flash: Rebirth.  Late books happen, but sometimes the delay is more disruptive than others.  In this case, the tardiness of the book was significant enough to comment on.  The events in this issue have already been reflected in other books including Blackest Night.  As a result, those stories had scenes that read awkwardly and this book has lost some of its relevance and momentum.

Late books are bad, mmmkay?

If you’ve read my previous Flash: Rebirth reviews, then you know I haven’t been a fan of this mini-series.  In my eyes, Johns has taken the formula of the commercially successful (though criminally over-rated) Green Lantern: Rebirth mini and duplicated it here.  But it all feels so forced and tired.

(On the upside, the book didn’t have a lot of momentum to lose in the two months since the last issue.)

I liked this issue less than any of the previous issues.  As a long-time reader of Geoff Johns, I’ve gotten tired of some of his story-telling crutches.  And this issue is filled with the Johnsisms that I hate.

Professor Zoom gets talky.  He “monologues” long enough for Fro-zone to shut him down.  There’s just no reason for it other than for Johns to shove his point-of-view down the reader’s throat.  These aren’t things the character would say.  He’s just Johns’ mouth piece.  (See also: Sinestro in this month’s issue of Green Lantern.)

The story itself is pretty pointless.  This isn’t a story at all.  It’s an exercise in house cleaning.  Geoff Johns is reshaping the Flash mythos to suit his needs.  And of course that means he retconned the shit out of everything until Barry Allen became the center of the universe.  Yep, Barry created the Speed Force now.

Honestly, these kinds of stories annoy me.  I don’t need a 6-part story to justify continuity “fixes”.  Johns’ retcons don’t feel any more natural just because he wrote a story where Professor Zoom “explained” it all.

There are some good moments in the issue.  I was glad to finally see Wally, Bart and Max Mercury each get a moment to shine.  (Granted, each of them only got a moment.)  And Ethan Van Sciver’s art was definitely worth the wait.

I mentioned before that I thought Green Lantern: Rebirth was criminally over-rated.  Both min-series consistently mostly of retcons to ser-up Geoff Johns’ run on the ongoing series.  In the case of Hal Jordan, the retcons were needed to make him a viable leading man.  But all you needed to do with Barry was bring him back and that already happened in last year’s Final Crisis.

Fortunately, Green Lantern turned out to be a pretty good book once Johns got all the house cleaning out of the way.  Hopefully, that will be the case with the Flash as well.  So, let’s get on with it guys!  Pick up the pace!  No more late issues!

Prior reviews:

Flash: Rebirth #3

Flash: Rebirth #3 (by Bruce Castle)

Flash: Rebirth #2

read/RANT

Review: The Flash Rebirth 2

Let me be up front with my biases.  I’m a Wally fan.  For me, Barry was the guy who showed up when Wally really needed a push in the right direction and then he went back into the Speed Force until the next time he was needed.  He was kind of like Ben Kenobi in Empire Strikes Back.  So, to have Barry back pushing Wally out of the spotlight is kind of like if Ben was the lead character of Return of the Jedi.

This book is entertaining.  You probably won’t be bored.  But I kind of wonder who it’s aimed at.  The story requires you to know quite a bit of Flash back story if you want to have any chance of following it.  But people who have read a lot of these stories may not take kindly to the trade-mark Geoff Johns retcons in this issue.

I don’t think this book is being written for Barry Allen fans.  (Which is probably a good thing, because I think they are a dying breed.)  I imagine some Barry fans are thrilled just to have Barry back.  But I also have to think there are some that are wondering why DC bothered to bring him back if they are going to change the character so completely.  This new spin on Barry isn’t grim and gritty, but he’s not the Silver Age Barry Allen I read about in JLA: Year One and Brave and the Bold.

Johns goes to lengths to get Barry dirty.  He goes so far as to have Barry run through a list of his sins and failures.  He also has Barry act like a bit of a jerk sometimes.  Oh, and there’s an entertaining retcon regarding Barry’s fashion sense.  But after all the tweaks, the guy I’m reading about just doesn’t feel like Barry.

The main plot deals with Barry’s investigation into Savitar’s death.  If you don’t know who Savitar was, I suppose it’s okay.  Johns used him as cannon fodder last issue.  You may scratch your head a few times wondering where he came from or how he got trapped in the Speed Force.  But ultimately, it doesn’t really matter much.  Savitar’s death is just a plot device.

We also get some flashbacks (no pun intended) to Barry’s early days as a forensic scientist and how he met his future wife, Iris West.  A subplot is introduced regarding the death of Barry’s mother.  Apparently, Barry was trying to clear his father of the crime.  I’m not a big enough Barry fan to know if this is an established part of Barry’s history or another retcon.  But it felt like something Johns was adding on to deliver a more angsty Barry.

The issue ends with a shocking revelation regarding Barry’s new status quo.  Presumably, this explains why Barry has remained in our world rather than returning to the Speed Force.  I guess I’d be a little more shocked if I believed this change would remain in place after the conclusion of this mini-series.

If you like what Johns has been doing with Hal Jordan in Green Lantern, odds are you’ll like this Rebirth too.  I admit, I enjoyed the book too.  I just wish it was a little less heavy-handed in the reinvention of the title character.

For more comic goodness, go here.

DC July Solicits + Commentary

BLACKEST NIGHT #1

Geoff Johns and Ivan Reis raise the dead in the most anticipated comics story of the year! Throughout the decades, death has plagued the DC Universe and taken the lives of heroes and villains alike. But to what end? As the War of Light rages on, the prophecy of the Blackest Night descends upon us, with Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps at the center of it all.

Review/RANT: Green Lantern: Rebirth TPB

After all this time, after the Sinestro Corps War, the prelude to Blackest Night, the fanfare around the return of Hal Jordan (including Ross’s childish ‘we won!’ that’s been echoed about randomly by one of the most obnoxious fandoms in existence), and the fact that I just got a late 100$ for graduating from college, I figured I would pick up a few trades that I was curious about.

Green Lantern: Rebirth was one of those trades, being a book that has received such massive heapings of praise that I couldn’t help but be curious about what I’d miss when I decided against buying it after reading the first issue.  While I liked Hal a lot from JLA: Year One, parts of Hal’s fandom has long since been insulting and/or irritating enough, both in real life and in forums, to turn me off from the character in general.  Still, I’ve generally enjoyed what Jordan tales I’ve read – Year One, Hard Traveling Heroes – that I felt I should give it a shot.

The story starts off poorly.  As I read through the prologue, I thought there was some decent suspense building with the aliens prophesying the return of Parallax, but when we moved onto the segment with Hal, I could see that I might have problems – Geoff Johns, it appeared, was part of Hal’s fandom that grated on me so much.  Hal is portrayed as the perfect hero – a ladies man, a man’s man, a man about town, confidant that what he believes is more right than what God believes, and the book most certainly sympathizes with him.  His hair didn’t gray because he was aging, but because that’s what fear does to you.  He didn’t become a more thoughtful hero, a more introspective person, because he reached a certain point of his life and realized that, for all his fighting, he wasn’t really ever winning.  He did it because Fear instilled doubts in him.

And this is the core of my problem with the book.  Geoff Johns has a great grip on Kyle, John, and Guy.  I think he even has a decent handle on Alan Scott.  In one of the most polarizing scenes in the book, Johns and Van Sciver show ‘n tell how each Lanterns’ constructs vary based on their beliefs and values, a genius scene – only to follow it immediately with all of them collectively being taken out in a single instant except for perfect, precise, potent Hal.

The book is worth reading, I think, for it’s introduction to and propagation of the Green Lantern mythology, and it made me excited to read other stories dealing with it, such as the Sinestro Corps War, and Blackest Night.  And, obviously, if you’re a hard-core fan of Hal Jordan, you’d have read this a long time ago.  Even if you don’t like Jordan, though, there are great character moments in here for Kyle, John, and Guy, as well as excellent mythos-building scenes for the Corps as a whole, so it’s worth checking out.

This is the book where Johns really begins to play around with the Green Lantern mythology, and he does so with such a confident, graceful touch that I find it hard to believe that this wasn’t all part of it from the beginning.  It almost makes me sad that he likes Hal so much, because those are the biggest slips in the book, as Johns is so dedicated to making Hal look good that he forgets to make him human.