With news that Warner Bros.'s upcoming speedster movie will be titled The Flash: Flashpoint, we’re digging into the comics to get a better idea of what to expect.
Flashpoint is the name of writer Geoff Johns and artist Andy Kubert’s 2011 DC Comics crossover that put the Flash at the dead center of a DC Universe-shaking cataclysm that took comic fans on the ride of their lives and left a legacy that continues to impact the company’s characters today. It’s a pivotal event and, given its importance, it’s no surprise that it’s getting the movie treatment.
If you want to get yourself up to speed(!) on Flashpoint before the movie hits, here’s how to do it.
This is where it all happened. Johns and Kubert’s crossover event is about as ambitious as superhero comics get; a grandiose epic that’s part Twilight Zone, part Lord of the Rings and part Blade Runner. The inciting incident finds our hero, Barry Allen, waking up as a stranger in his own world. His closest friends — the ones who are still alive, anyway — don’t recognize him. Two former allies oppose each other in a devastating war. And the costumed community he fought beside is nowhere to be found
To say much more is to spoil the mystery at the heart of Flashpoint, but that mystery is a neat trick. Not just because of how cleverly Johns and Kubert slowly reveal the secret of how the Flash’s new world came to be, but because of how intimate and personal they make the revelation. Suffice to say, Flashpoint’s central conflict doesn’t hinge on a magic gauntlet or a kryptonite spear, but something far more human and intimate. The story’s stakes are immense, but it never loses sight of the real people at its core.
This book collects the core Flashpoint story and will give you the event’s main thrust. At this point, it remains to be seen just how closely the movie will adhere to the events of the book. There’s already a reasonably faithful Flashpoint movie from DC’s animation studio (titled Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox), and The CW’s Flash series tackled Flashpoint in Season 3, though it played much looser with the source material. What we do expect to see, though, is the Flash entering into a strange version of his world where he has to overcome both a nefarious villain and a great personal tragedy to make things right.
Flashpoint touched every corner of the DC Universe, so while the story itself was Flash-centric, many of DC’s other titles were affected by it. And of course, there is no DC event without Batman playing a central role. Flashpoint’s butterfly effect on Gotham City was a cruel one indeed, and too delicious a spoiler to give away here.
This book collects a few different Bat-titles, and while they’re all worth a read, none is more vital to your collection than the central one: Batman: Knight of Vengeance #1-3, by comic book dyo Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso. Even back in 2011, writing a “grim and gritty” Batman story was pretty passe, so Azzarello deserves credit for making this grim and gritty Batman story thunder with real shocks and some emotional beats that recast the entire Wayne family in a new light, even as the world it set in is unfamiliar. It’s undoubtedly one of the finest Batman stories ever told, which is no mean feat.
The other standout title here is Jimmy Palmiotti and Joe Bennett’s Deathstroke and the Curse of the Ravanger, which re-imagines classic DC villain/anti-hero Deathstroke as a seafaring mercenary out to rescue his daughter. If that sentence doesn’t interest you, superhero comics aren’t for you.
The other stories in the collection don’t quite live up to Knight of Vengeance or Curse of the Ravanger, but they’re still pretty imaginative. In the world of Flashpoint, Dick Grayson’s parents are still alive and the Grayson family’s exploits are chronicled in Deadman and the Flying Graysons, which finds the Grayson’s old circus troop re-imagined as something a bit closer to American Horror Story than Barnum and Bailey’s.
At this point, it’s worth noting that while these trade paperbacks have marquee names on the cover like Batman and Superman, the stories collected within focus on a few different characters and may or may not be related to the featured star.
One of the wildest tricks in the dystopian world of Flashpoint was its depiction of Superman. In this world, he is neither a universally beloved beacon of hope or a cruel dictator like in Injustice, but something else entirely. Writer Lowell Francis and artist Rags Morales (with a story assist from Scott Snyder) swing for the fences in their depiction of someone who, in another reality, would be known as the Man of Steel, and succeeds by way of a singularly sympathetic eye and an innovative third-person narrative device.
That’s a good story, but the real reason to pick this trade up is the three issues of Booster Gold contained herein. Booster Gold is one of the few people in this new world who has a feeling that things aren’t quite the way he should be, but he doesn’t have much time for detective work with the U.S. Military on his case. This story finds a fresh spin on one of DC Comics’ most fearsome villains, and pitting him against someone as hopelessly outclassed as Booster Gold was a masterstroke.
This collection also features The World of Flashpoint, written by Rex Ogle and drawn by Paulo Siqueira. It introduced us to this warped reality through the eyes of a young, quasi-magical girl named Traci 13. The story doesn’t have the household name pedigree of a Superman or Batman story, but it’s not to be overlooked. It’s a terrific read on its own merits.
Though not quite as gripping a read as Flashpoint’s Batman tie-in, this book is probably the most vital to understanding the new world of Flashpoint outside of Geoff Johns’ main book. Here we’re introduced to a world in which Wonder Woman and Aquaman are bitter foes, champions in a war between their two nations that has wrecked havoc on the world. This war is mentioned in Johns’ main book but never truly explored, which makes this trade a particularly important story for understanding the Flashpoint world.
Wonder Woman and the Furies is written Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning and drawn by Scott Clark and David Beaty, and it covers the beats that led to the war (primarily from Diana’s vantage point). It’s a good overview of the international crisis their conflict has inflicted, but far better is writer Tony Bedard and illustrator Ardian Syaf’s Emperor Aquaman, which captures the Justice League’s most frequently mocked member at his most compelling, broken and terrifying.
This trade also catches up with what Lois Lane is up to in this new continuity. She remains a reporter, but finds herself getting caught up in a movement known as — get this — the Resistance. It features an interestingly nuanced understanding of how humans would react to a war being fought by gods. And finally, this book collects the stories of a new Flashpoint character known as the Outsider, an Indian superhuman more interested in keeping his country out of conflict and his suits looking good than in engaging with the rest of the Flashpoint world. This one is a mini-masterpiece, fraught with wry humor — which is welcome amidst the bleakness of the rest of the crossover.
While Wonder Woman and Aquaman’s Flashpoint stories take place near the nexus of this mutated universe, the stories collected in the Green Lantern book are further on the periphery of the central action. They’re better for it too, showcasing just how far reaching Flash’s actions are while rarely interacting with him or his central narrative. In essence, these stories let creators run amuck with how Hal Jordan, Oliver Queen and others’ lives might have turned out very differently if circumstances had shifted just slightly.
For starters, the Green Lantern in the Flashpoint continuity is not Hal Jordan at all. It’s Abin Sur, the original Green Lantern who most fans know only for crash landing on Earth and dying right after bequeathing his famed power ring to Hal Jordan. In this continuity, Abin Sur survives his trip to earth and becomes a hero. It’s a fun What If?-type story, well-crafted by Adam Schlagman and featuring some fantastic art from Felipe Massafera.
This story also shows us the fate of Oliver Queen who, in DC’s normal continuity, would go onto become the masked archer Green Arrow. Normally, Green Arrow is as famous for his progressive politics as he is for his boxing glove-tipped arrows, but in this Flashpoint one-shot from writer Pornsak Pichetshote and artist Mark Castiello, he’s a hyper-capitalistic weapons manufacturer who’s got a few lessons to learn about the dangers of greed. A potentially trite morality lessons gets some unexpected pathos via Castiello’s artwork.
There’s a great one-shot from Adam Schlagman and Ben Oliver about Hal Jordan’s life without the ring, in which he remains a good fighter pilot and a good man, showing that he would have lived his life as a hero with or without some fancy-schmancy space ring. But the real treat here is Jeff Lemire’s Frankenstein and the Creatures of the Unknown, which follows some classic movie monsters who’ve been recruited by the U.S. Government took take part in the Amazon/Atlantean War. Ibraim Roberson artwork is magnificent throughout, and Lemire does fans of Frankenstein proud, finding yet another layer to one of the most frequently revived characters in all literature.
Tyler Huckabee is really something else. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee where he writes about comics, music, film and TV. You can read every thought that comes into his head on Twitter or IGN.
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