One of John Broome’s most elegiac characters, Daphne Dean, returns to The Flash in a story that harkens back to back to wistful childhood memories of Daphne and Barry Allen when they were children together in Fallville. Daphne would play the damsel in distress, and Barry, dressed as his comic book hero the Flash in a costume his mother made for him, would be her rescuer. All was not strawberries and cream because they would occasionally be accosted by the neighborhood bully, one Lance Basilla.
Flash (pun not intended, it happened by itself) forward to the now of 1982 and we find that Daphne has come to Barry for some help. She has been getting ominous love letters from Lance who says that he wants to marry her at all cost. Daphne is then accosted by someone dressed as a mummy just as Lance would do when she and Barry were kids. We segue to a sleep clinic where Lance is being studied by a team of doctors. The docs marvel at the vividness of Lance’s dreams, and they wonder “if we’re witnessing a phenomenon more astounding than we know…”
Well, they are because Lance’s dreams are being manifested in the real life attacks on Daphne by the Lance mummy. The Flash defeats the mummy after an arduous struggle, and, in a quick reversal, Lance runs away from the clinic and then writes Daphne telling her that he’s not for her and that she’s obviously found someone better. An artificially quick and unsatisfying ending no doubt necessitated by the shortened length of the Flash stories due to the fact that he’s sharing his book with Dr Fate. As Daphne and Barry walk off into a sunset (really), we’re told by the narrator that fate still has a surprise in store for them.
