At the Center of It All

Of all the heroes we’ve seen so far in the Absolute Universe (and I know if you’re reading along with me as I publish these reviews that I haven’t gotten to Absolute Martian Manhunter, but we’ll get to those books soon enough), The FlashStruck by lightning while working in his lab, Barry Allen became a speedster known as The Flash, launching an entire set of super-fast superheroes. is the one that I feel has struggled the most. The other heroes have come out the gates and, in various ways, have proven themselves to be heroes. Their backstories have been changed, their concepts tweaked, but you can kind of see the glimmer of the hero you expect sitting there, behind all the changes. Wonder WomanLong considered the third pillar of the DC Comics "Trinity", Wonder Woman was one of the first female superheroes ever created. Running for as long as Batman or Superman (and without breaks despite a comic downturn in the 60s that killed superhero comics for about a decade), Wondie has the honor to be one of the longest serving, and most prolific, superheroes ever. is Wonder Woman no matter the skin you put on her.

With Absolute Flash, though, I have yet to get that vibe. Even now, after a second book that tries to push the character forward, explain his powers, and really set the rules of his world in order, I still don’t really have a grasp of the hero. Wally West in this universe is a kid with powers thrust upon him and no one to train him or show him the right way to do things. That’s a big change over Wally’s story in the Prime universe, and while I get why the authors did this, as a way to strip away everything familiar and give us a new take on the character, the one thing that’s still missing for me from the character is true heroism.

That isn’t to say the character could never grow into that hero we expect. It’s just that unlike every other hero in the Absolute Universe line so far, Wally has a lot of growing up to do before he’s really able to live up to the mantle of the Flash. Diana spent her whole life in Hell preparing to be a hero. Bruce trained himself for years to become the BatmanOne of the longest running, consistently in-print superheroes ever (matched only by Superman and Wonder Woman), Batman has been a force in entertainment for nearly as long as there's been an entertainment industry. It only makes sense, then that he is also the most regularly adapted, and consistently successful, superhero to grace the Silver Screen.. Kal-El was trained by his parents to be a warrior for good before he gained the title of SupermanThe first big superhero from DC Comics, Superman has survived any number of pretenders to the throne, besting not only other comic titans but even Wolrd War II to remain one of only three comics to continue publishing since the 1940s.. Sojourner Mullein became a cop before she gained the powers of the Green LanternMade up of aliens from sectors scross space, the Green Lantern Corp. defends the universe against threats with the power of the Green Light of Willpower.. But Wally is just Wally, and he hasn’t even figured out his own life yet. He’s not compelling as a hero because he’s not ready to be one, and I’m not sure as of yet when that will change,

This second volume of Absolute Flash finds the Rogues – Captain Cold, Captain Boomerang, Golden Glider, and the Trickster – catching up to Wally. But instead of capturing them, as they’re supposed to, they instead make him an offer to become a Rogue, like them. They see potential in the kid, and they all (or almost all) have serious reservations about Dr. Thawn and her meta-technology program. They’d rather be on their own, doing things their way as a unit instead of working under her thumb.

Wally turns them down, though, because he has to save his dad. The elder West was captured by Thawn and is being held prisoner as bait so that Wally will come back to the military base. Thawn needs him to help her open a portal, the same portal that her grandfather, Eobard Thawn, opened decades earlier. That’s also the same portal that the Elder Thawn disappeared into and was never seen again. She wants to prove that her grandfather was right, that the bridge between worlds can be opened, and with Wally’s power she might just pull it off. But if she does, she may unleash an evil on the world that can’t be stopped.

Absolute Flash struggles with two things, and they’re both issues that hold the book back. The first is that it doesn’t really have the time to develop all the characters that are in the book. The first volume dumped on us not just Wally West and his dad, but also Barry Allen, Dr. Thawn, little Grodd, and all the Rogues as well, and they’re all fighting for control of the narrative in this second book. Sometimes one or two emerge to take over and give us a better sense of their characters for a few pages, such as in a backstory issue all about Cold and his sister, but by and large the book skips over actually investing in the characters at all simply so it can keep forcing its narrative forward.

And it’s a narrative that doesn’t really work because we don’t understand the characters well enough. Each character can, in essence, be boiled down to one character trait. Wally doesn’t understand himself. West Sr. is sorry he was mean to his son. Elenore Thawn is driven to prove her grandfather right. Each of these are talking points they repeat over and over, but I wouldn’t call them true character traits. It never feels like there’s anything deeper to these points or the characters. It’s just things they say to keep the narrative moving.

It all then leads to the second problem: once the narrative gets where it’s going, it’s pretty well incomprehensible. Wally’s power opens the portal, and Wally gets sucked in, only to meet up with the phantom of Barry Allen within this new, other world. There Barry then exposition dumps a lot of gobbledygook on us, blabbering technobabble about the sealed dimension, how things work differently, how Thawn was trapped there for years, how there’s a dark pit that can suck you in and take over your mind, but all of these points are just factoids, items on a list that don’t have any strength behind them because they’re thrown at us quickly and then forgotten just as fast.

Hell, Barry even tells Wally that eventually he and his team of other phantoms (other alien species that ended up opening their own portals and getting sucked across the divide) could eventually reopen the portal to send Wally home, but they don’t know how long it would take. The implication is months, if not years. Except even then, panels later, after the evil dark phantom of Eobard Thawn intrudes into the main world, Barry skips back over like it’s nothing so he can fight Thawn. Why? How? Don’t ask questions because the book isn’t going to tell us.

That big fight, which the book has been presumably building up to this whole time, is also pretty awful. It’s over in a matter of panels, without you even really seeing or understanding what’s going on. It’s like whole portions of content were edited out of the book, multiple pages of script that should have been put in but weren’t because the comic was bumping up against its twenty page cap and the story had to end. It’s rushed, hollow, and devoid of meaning, all because the book has yet to truly invest in anything it’s trying to tell us.

Despite all this, I really want to like Absolute Flash. I still feel like there’s a kernel of something interesting here and now that we’re finally past this first narrative, with Wally’s powers explained and the first big threat over, maybe we can push forward and really, finally discover who Wally is going to be as a hero. We already see his powers, but we have yet to see the man he can become. This book has interesting illustrations but the one thing it has yet to properly illustrate is Wally as a character, and the book is never going to work until it does that.

I’m still giving Absolute Flash a chance, but I have to admit that its days are numbered for me. I’ll likely give it another big arc, maybe a chance for the hero to crossover with the other books for some (presumable) kind of Absolute Justice League. But if the book still can’t get its act together after that, it’s going to be the first of these titles I drop. I like the Absolute Universe but right now Absolute Flash is easily the weakest book in the whole set, and that’s by a mile.