The Flash: Move Forward Volume 1

The Flash is an old-school costumed hero from DC who can move at such high speeds that he essentially becomes a miniature atomic burst, vibrating at frequencies unseen by the naked eye. Quit laughing.

In DC Secret Origins, we’re told that The Flash (as opposed to a dirty old drunk in a raincoat, The Flasher) is Barry Allen, a “police scientist” who gets struck by lightning and doused with chemicals, gaining super abilities for reasons that remain, shall we say, obscure. Don’t you love the way these things happen?

His first adventure involved him chasing “The Slowest Man on Earth,” a turtle-like criminal that, let’s be honest, wouldn’t be too hard to beat. (Flash does this at an amusement park, if I remember correctly.) Decades later, he’s still at it—zipping around as a "police scientist" working in, I guess, CSI, with his perspective girlfriend and partner, Patty Spivot. He’s dumped his other gal pal, Iris West.

After a terrorist attack by helmeted cyber-hooligans sends Allen/Flash tumbling through concrete into the sewers, he discovers that the man he may have killed, his old friend Manuel—a womanizing, cloned lothario—has been resurrected in a lab. Flash has a series of flashbacks, then finds out scientist Darwin Elias has developed a tool to help him break into literal warp drive. Flash bursts through the dimensional barrier (dude can sprint like no one else) and then gets blamed for an EMP attack—though, as we later find out, he wasn’t responsible.

There are some weird things going on in this comic, not the least of which is its non-linearity, which, though confusing, is still absorbing. Honestly, I didn’t think I’d bother reading it, but despite not always knowing what the hell was going on, I still found myself hooked.

Flash learns that Manuel has been cloned—repeatedly—and that “Mob Rule” (sounds like a hip-hop group) is just a bunch of little Manuels running around in body armor. The book culminates in an icy, apocalyptic showdown with Captain Cold, who, frankly, looks like a rather pathetic supervillain—what with his hoodie and all. He’s doing everything for his sister, who inexplicably hates him but was almost put into a coma because of Flash’s EMP burst (which, again, he wasn’t responsible for). I’m not sure how this fits into the bigger picture, but it’s still pretty great.

We have ice, ice everywhere, and a boat perched surrealistically on top of a massive frozen geyser. Flash goes into another dimension (he’s possessed of the “Speed Force,” which is this super-consciousness where everything is in a constant state of becoming—flux, moving quickly to manifest in our world as a liminal energy field that’s neither here nor there. It’s like a high-speed Twilight Zone).

Puzzlingly, somewhere along the line, the whole thing veers off and turns into a Planet of the Apes sequel.

The artwork is both high-speed and strangely, I don’t know, undercolored or flat—nothing particularly striking. To be more specific, the colors look as if the comic was printed with various melted shades of sherbet, rather than solid, good ink. The art by Brian Buccellato excels at depicting Flash moving at light speed, contained in a cone of pure energy. It perfectly complements the story by Francis Manapul, and you can easily imagine each panel as a scene from an actual animated movie.

Being at the top of an ongoing series, The Flash: Move Forward Volume 1 doesn’t have much in the way of narrative resolution. Instead, it picks up threads that will be resolved much later in the story arc. No matter. The Flash is easily one of the most recognizable superhero characters ever created, alongside Superman and The Dark Knight. This slim graphic novel collection is unexpectedly engrossing. Even its somewhat muddled (or alternatively, alternative) narrative style is a bit like being in the Speed Force zone: you can see everything laid out all at once, every possibility, and it’s both fast, furious, and fun.

We’re sure that Barry Allen will prevail in the end, of course. He’d better be on his guard, though: as Dracula has already warned us—both the dead and the living travel fast.

Excelsior!

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