Okay, maybe it’s the fact that it’s summer and that I have always associated comic books with summer. Lying on my bed as a kid reading comics waiting for something to happen (For a fuller explanation, lister to Sonic Boom by the Gear Daddies and you’ll get it). Whatever the reason, I loved this issue of The Flash! The Don Heck art continues to shine in support of one of Cary Bates best issues so far. Maybe it’s because he uses the entire issue to tell a single story, or maybe it’s the fact that he’s tying up loose ends like a worker in a garment factory. All I know is that these is one nicely done issue.
The story opens with the Reverse Flash hiding in Barry’s house as Barry as the Flash triggers a bomb set by RF on the Cosmic treadmill. Thinking that he’s knocked off his rival, he starts making a recording that leads to several expository pages where he admits to killing the Flash, being the brains behind the police department drug cartel, drugging the Flash with angel dust the night of the masquerade ball, and, when she wouldn’t agree to marry him, killing Iris. Aside from the fact that it’s a little sicko… it certainly keeps the book moving in a new direction. And it finally elevates the Reverse Flash to number one on the arch villain list.
As it turns out, and, as you probably already figured, the Flash didn’t die in the treadmill explosion. He scattered his body’s molecules a split second before the explosion, which gave him control over them so he could pull them back together. He then confronts the Reverse Flash and they battle across the rest of the story until RF tries to return to the future in his time capsule. The Flash KO’s him, and, absent the cosmic treadmill, attempts to guide the time capsule himself, but only succeeds in sending it back to “beyond the brink of time”. The Flash bails out into the time stream leaving the Reverse Flash to his fate. As to the Flash himself…? I’ll let you know.
