Some thoughts about Flashpoint Beyond #0

Whatever happened to Thomas Wayne?

Thomas thought he could get away from all the terrible things that happened on his world, especially the death of his son but he will suddenly find himself in a place where the chaos never ended, if anything it just got worse.

Well, here we go again.

I suppose that most of us don't have the fondest memories of the crossover event Flashpoint, probably because that's the series that forcefully rebooted the entire DCU and lead to the New 52 (which was a rather erratic era by itself). Still, as a story I thought that Flashpoint was... okay, not amazing and probably one of the weakest events that Geoff Johns has worked on but still a serviceable Elseworlds tale.

However, it seems like Johns doesn't want to let this particular universe go and there might be a reason for that. As we all know by now, Flashpoint was plagued with editorial changes to the point that it was turned in an actual "Crisis"-level book that completely reset the comics line of the company so it feels like the writer was left with a few unsolved ideas that he wanted to tell and so far it seems like some of them are quite intriguing.

The Flashpoint universe was a place where everything went wrong. Well, the Flashpoint Beyond universe is a place where everything went even worse. Thomas never saved his son, the war between Aquaman and Wonder Woman ruined the whole planet and even the death of the Joker (Martha Wayne) brought consequences. If there's something that I can appreciate about Johns is that he can bring back an insignificant idea from the past and make it an important plot-point, for example the kids who Martha kidnapped during her last attack are actually shown to be traumatized which also involves their parents as well obviously. 

This leads to Thomas trying to find out who or what brought him back to this world and starts exploring it once again. The little details are pretty interesting like what happened to the main conflict of the planet, where did the Super-Man go and even forgotten characters like Element Woman make a re-appearance. It was great to see old concepts like the classic Johns chalkboard where he starts teasing future events and references and speaking of references, it was also cool to see characters from his first Flash run like Chyre and Morillo making some sort of cameo.

Oh, and returning to the point where everything went worse, you just can figure out what happened to Barry once that Thomas tried to replicate the experiment that gave his powers back.

Eduardo Risso handles the art and is pretty fitting considering his involvement in the original Batman: Knight of Vengeance tie-in for Flashpoint and he's also perfect fit here thanks to his expressive style and dark tones.

Solid start. Let's see how this mystery developes.