I wish I could explain to myself, as much as you, what possessed me to start collecting old The Flash comics last month with the speed and ferocity that I went after them. I’d been re-reading a collection of the final issues of the series — the so-called “Trial of the Flash” storyline, which is strange and a little camp and gloriously awkward in such interesting and delicious ways as it tries to marry a 1950s approach to story with the 1980s when it was published — when I realized that it was a comic that really didn’t feel like anything else, even surrounded by countless other comics it had inspired. I’m not sure what this is, I thought, I want more.
That I had this thought a week before a local comic show seemed like fate, and so I found the few cheap back issue sellers there (didn’t there used to be more? There should be more, again), and picked up a handful of copies. And then, inspired by that experience, I picked up a few more on eBay. And then a few more. And then more, and so on. The end result? Within three weeks, I had somewhere in the region of 30-40 issues. Thanks, my lowkey version of hyperfocus.
Here’s the thing, though: I don’t regret it at all, and not just because I picked up most of them at bargain prices. Instead, I’m if anything more obsessed by the very particular tone and obsessive nature that the comic displays in almost all of these issues. By hanging on to tropes established decades earlier when they were in fashion, The Flash‘s 1970s and 1980s comics are these fascinating examples of what happens when ideas and cliches metastasize and become something else in the process: there’s true danger in these stories — people die, even the Flash’s wife — but it’s all treated with a lightness and melodrama that defangs everything and suggests that nothing really bad can ever happen, with whatever energies should (and traditionally would) be put into emotionally responding to trauma being instead diverted into answering any one of the outlanding questions each story is built around: How can a man die in the morning and get married in the evening?!? What does it mean that my enemy is now my best friend — and knows my true identity?!? Why am I surrounded by dinosaurs and how can they help wake up this child from their coma?!?
(Yes, that last one is real.)
Each of these comics asks a very particular suspension of disbelief, and then goes on to reward that with stories filled with imagination, good humor, and no small level of whimsy. They’re clearly comics for kids, but done in such a way that I almost feel as if I had to age into in order to fully appreciate. Pow! Zoom! Comics aren’t just for kids anymore, as the tagline used to claim, for real.