Thursday, October 2, 2008

Flash 239-243

O.K. where to start here... For me the story was a little too convoluted. Basically, the Flash(Wally West) has his twins(who age at a random, accelerated pace) fighting along side him as super heroes. The villain at the beginning of these comics is a new guy by the name of Spin(who was the head of a T.V. station in Keystone City), who is using another new character named Edgar, against his will, to cause the fears of the citizens of Keystone City to become a reality. An example is that the populace was afraid of an earthquake because of one in another state, so Spin used Edgar's Powers to cause an earthquake. It gets even more confusing from there, with Spin causing Flash to rob people(because I guess this was his greatest fear), which stirred up some anti-Flash sentiment in Keystone.

To make the story even more confusing, there is a quick tie in with the Darkside club storyline, which was popping up in a couple of other DC comics, Flash's daughter Iris began to age at a much more rapid pace, and somehow Spin summons Gorilla Grodd to Keystone. Whew....

Anyway, Grodd has a small monkey with the ability to heal others with him and states that he is trying to find a way steal the monkey's powers and then kill it. Soon, Grodd turns the tables on Spin, and it isn't long before Grodd has captured Spin, Flash and Old Flash(Jay Garrish)(who was also there for some reason). Grodd loses track of the small monkey as well as Edgar(who escaped from Spin during the fight with Grodd) and puts the urge in Flash's head to go retrieve the monkey. Confusing enough yet?

Anyway, Flash's kids arrive, help him defeat Grodd, who promptly disappears, while Spin is useless without the help of Edger. Flash sends the kids home, and tracks down the monkey and Edgar who after telling Flash his sob story(he was a lab experiment, he was used against his will, Blah blah blah) dies. Flash takes the monkey (along with his family to Gorilla City) like he was instructed to do by Grodd mentally. All the while, Iris is still aging, and is like 40 now.
Flash fights Grodd again, and triumphs. He then returns the healing monkey to the king of the Gorilla people.

Somehow, during all that was happening, Flash realizes that the kids are aging rapidly due to the Speed Force(which gives all speedsters their speed). He takes them into the Speed Force and reverses the aging that had been done to Iris, while stabilizing their conditions. Back in Keystone, everyone realizes it was Spin who was manipulating them, and that Flash was not really a criminal. And that ladies and gentlemen is our happy ending.

The Good-Umm... Not much, I didn't really like the story because of all the interweaving story lines and extra characters. I enjoyed Flash rushing into the Flash museum as it burned down(Yes, that occurred too!)to retrieve Inertia(the clone of Bart Allen [who served an all to brief run as the Flash])and get him out of the fire before he burned to death(Inertia had all of his speed drained away by Flash after Bart's death and was forced to remain in the Flash museum forever staring at a statue of the man he killed).

The Bad- I kept asking myself what's going on here?!?!?! There was just too much going on and too many story lines converging all at once. These issues could have been broken up into a bunch of smaller, more easily digestible storyarcs, instead of everything rushed together.

Overall- Unless you are a diehard Flash fan, and have the ability to keep like 100 different story lines straight at once, I wouldn't really recommend these issues.

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