Flashpoint #1 Review, by Marc Alan Fishman – Snarky Synopses #9

May 22, 2011 Marc Fishman 4 Comments

Flashpoint #1

Written by Geoff Johns

Art by Adam Kubert and Sandra Hope

 

For those of you who missed the acidic venom of my article on Flash #11, this review may come as a shocker. For those loyal Marc Alan Fishman fans (hi mom!), this is exactly what you’re hoping for. Flashpoint #1 pretty much confirms my suspicions; Geoff Johns has been replaced by an editorial robot who demands marketability over substance, hype over plot, and splashy images and crap-addled-predictable ‘shockers’ over character development we can care about. Flashpoint is everything that is wrong with comic books today… and I say that not to be a dick, a douche, or dirtbag. I say it because before I even cracked open this over-priced excuse to sell some toys (and no less than 14 mini-series), I asked myself a simple question: What does that book need to do to not completely suck? And the answer was as simple as the question itself; I wanted nothing more than a fun romp with a few creative (note: not necessarily original) ideas to twist the over-done ‘world-turned-upside-down’ concept. And like the Age of Apocalypse, 1602, and countless others like it, Flashpoint is nothing more than DC running on autopilot in an attempt to squeeze out a few more pennies from an event-fatigued fanboy with hope in his heart.

 

Let’s break this down, shall we? If you don’t take my word, or seemingly any other endless array of internet bloggers out there, let’s just state it as fact: Barry Allen is boring. Bland. Vanilla-incarnate. He’s a white-bread super-hero whose powers far exceed his personality. The best thing he ever did as a hero was sacrifice himself back in the mid-eighties during the first ever truly epic crossover (Crisis on Infinite Earths). When he ran himself into oblivion, it forced his then kid-sidekick, Wally West, to “nut  up” and become the full time hero in red. One year ago, Geoff Johns, perhaps feeling a bit invulnerable to fanboy backlash, decided to resurrect this silver age relic. In doing so, Flash: Rebirth single handedly  took all the absolute fantastic work Geoff did on the Flash years before, and flushed them down a big huge toilet. Flash Rebirth was slow, complicated, and overly dramatic for no other purpose other than pomp and circumstance. The ongoing series, now with 100% more Barry, and 100% less Wally became a chore to read, even with Francis Manupal’s amazing artwork. And here, mimicking the success Johns had with the “Sinestro Corps War”, we get a an entire crossover event with the quintessential Nilla Wafer of Super-Heroes as our lead character.

 

But let’s try to forget that. Flashpoint at it’s core is yet-another-elseworlds-taking-place-in-continuity (ooooh, shocking!) clusterfuck. The last 3-4 issues of the the Flash series basically proved that the Reverse Flash, Eobard Thawne, is the DCU’s biggest dillweed villain in existance. Unhappy that his nemesis is still sucking wind, the Reverse Flash decides to up his power (How? By saying he did, duh.) and create a time-anomaly to mess with Barry. Why not just get a gun, or a grenade, or a tactical nuclear bomb, and lay waste to Central City, when you can recreate reality and make 14 mini-series spin-offs?! If this is what passes for villainy, it’s no wonder the heroes always win.

 

We start in on this fresh new world, with Barry waking at his desk in the Central City crime lab. Never mind where Johns left him at the end of Flash #12… that’s a detail that easily lost, so we can have Barry run around like an idiot, when he realizes this isn’t his Earth. Or is it? Lest I get too geeky here folks, but Barry is well aware of the multiple-Earths of the DCU. Given that, would he really be a complete mess, running slack jawed like a crack-addled Doc Brown… or would he take 2 seconds to contemplate if he’d somehow shifted into another Earth? No way! He’d simply borrow a car, and drive to Gotham City to talk to Batman. Never mind that his best friend is Hal Jordan. Never mind that there’s an entire Flash family who might have some insight. Never mind that he doesn’t consider using a cell phone, computer, or any means of communication in order to gain some sense of what’s going on. Instead, he just gets into a car, breaks into Wayne Manor, and confronts Batman to figure out what’s going on. And, spoiler alert, Batman isn’t Bruce Wayne. Oh man, now I’m hooked.

 

Aside from Barry, the book introduces us to the hero-of-the-day, trying to stop a war between Aquaman and Wonder Woman… who might the titular hero be folks? It’s everyone’s favorite Teen Titan! No, not Superboy. No, not Robin. No, not Wonder Girl. No, not Beast Boy. No, not Kid Flash. No, not even Raven. Sigh. Cyborg. Yup. The affirmative action tin-can-black-man is trying to save the world. How? By projecting holograms of heroes (who threaten each other, despite knowing they are all holograms, I kid you not) and asking “Mean” Batman to be his tactician. Big suprise. Bat-dick refuses, and the collection of heroes we don’t care about disband as quickly as they were holo-assembled. How can we care about these guys anyways? They are all Elseworld retreads who we have no connection to, other than vague ideas of their possible powers. We get Shazam, by way of a Forever People assemblage of Marvel kids… Metamorpho with boobs… oh, and some guy in a stitched together ski-mask and tee-shirt combo. I wish I was kidding. We’re supposed to “feel” for these heroes? Why? There’s no pathos here. No depth, at all. Just “Ooh, look! Captain Cold is a good guy! Batman is mean! Sandman is… the same!”

 

Adam Kubert is on art duty here… and it’s about the only decent thing in the book. The colors are overly-moody (the whole book feels like it was colored with that box of “bold” colors Crayola released. You know the kind. Not the normal pack. Not the pastels. The “bolds”…), and the figures are all dark. It’s like all the hits of the 90’s back on sale for $3.99. We get big flashy art, against a backdrop of predictability and nonsense. Kubert is an A list talent, but all his design work here is for not. You can polish a turd all you want, but in the end, all you get is a shiny, stinky mess. It’s a shame really. The idea that Kubert (who is obviously trying his hardest to impress here) is delivering such great visuals, is all smoke and mirrors, to a story Geoff would have written ten times better, half a decade ago.

 

So, there you have it. Flashpoint #1 is at it’s core, just a terrible comic. In two dozen pages you get Barry running around like a chicken with it’s head cut off, Bat-Douche, Cyborg, and a twist ending surprise no better than then a stolen retread of a Grant Morrison twist from the Earth 2 book, published years ago. The series villain is seen, literally, in half of a blur in a single panel… and our titular hero takes us on a journey to a cliffhanger that is all sizzle, but no steak. But don’t worry kiddos! DC head honchos have assured us that this series will totally change the universe by the time it’s over. Unless it somehow has the ability to make me forget I’m dropping money to cover it (here on MDW, and my own lil’ site)… this book encapsulates what urps me most about the comic book industry today; Where hype, the promise of merchandise, and forced emotional turnmoil is given credence over books that care about just telling a good story. At the beginning of this lil’ rant, I’d said all I wanted, in order to make this book pass mustard was a sense of fun, and perhaps a novel idea or two. Instead, DC delivers something that feels like it was written on autopilot… where creators get to live out their underthought Elseworlds fantasies, while we the reader are forced to watch the entire universe of comics take a potty break while Barry Allen runs fast and panics. Flashpoint? Hardly. Flash-in-the-pan more like it.

 

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Marc Alan Fishman is a digital artist, writer, and co-founder of Unshaven Comics. When Marc isn’t knee-deep in graphic design, he’s also a contributor to ComicMix.com, an occasional stand-up comedian, as well as freelancer extraordinaire.