Some thoughts about The Flash #1

What's happening to the Speed Force?

Wally West believes everything is fine now that he's together with his family and their newborn child. However, a strange attack by Gorilla Grodd will show how everything what he knew about his world is about to change.

Here we go again. A brand new series for The Fastest Man Alive and I must say that I'm glad that Wally West is still getting the spotlight. As I have mentioned before, I wasn't that much of a fan of Jeremy Adams' previous run on the character, not because I thought it was bad, in fact I thought the intentions were good but unfortunately the craft wasn't quite there so I was excited to learn that a new direction with a different creative team was tackling the series but unfortunately, it seems like quite a few of the mistakes from the last era are continuing here.

Si Spurrier offers a much more high concept angle for the series (as we already saw during his little preview in The Flash #800), one that is more focused on the classic sci-fi elements from the character and this is certainly welcomed due that there hasn't been a lot of that for a while. Spurrier definitely has a good handle on what makes the universe of the Scarlet Speedster fascinating and this is shown right from the beginning with the appearance of Gorilla Grodd (super intelligent gorilla with powers is just fitting here) and this plants the seeds for many of the ideas that the writer is planning to develop over the course of his run, there are many teases about future plot-points concerning the Speed Force and how it can explore different concepts and characters and all of this makes the read feel very content-packed.

Character work is not lacking either since Spurrier focuses a good deal on Wally himself and his relationship with his family. There's a particular and interesting moment where we see a bit of Linda's perspective about how it feels to be the only normal person in a house full of Speedsters and makes me wonder how it will be developed in the future. Not to mention that it shows how an everyman like Wally can deal with problems that the most intelligent scientists can't figure out due to how common his mentality is. Is good stuff.

Here comes the problem though, this book is overwritten as hell. There are so many pages where I feel the art could have told the story fine enough or that the idea could have been told in fewer words and yet Spurrier has this necessity to fill every panel with as much narration as possible and this feels especially wrong for a character from who you would expect a fast pace. Is too verbose for its own good and I hope Spurrier fixes these issues over the course of his work.

Mike Deodato Jr.'s semi-realistic and stiff style would initially seem out of place for this series but thankfully he's able to create very inventive scenarios based on Wally's speeds, the layouts are very creative and tell the story in an unique manner (and would have been better if the writer would let the art more room to breathe).

A bit of a mixed bag but I think there's enough potential here to be invested in it. Just hope the writing gets polished.