After my recent dive into years worth of The Flash issues from the 1970s and early 1980s, I feel like I’ve come away with a pretty good understanding about what made those issues work, and the specific languages, codes, and signifiers at play throughout that era that have fallen out of favor (and, in many cases, out of use entirely) since then. That last part is a shame; comics as a medium is such a unique blend of words and pictures that I feel like there are multiple tricks that only comics can do that just don’t get used anymore because they’re not fashionable, and it feels… I don’t know, like tying a hand behind your back for no reason, perhaps?
To that end, I realized that there’s so much inside this particular era of Flash comics that, should an enterprising creative team wish to do so, a revival of Barry Allen as the hero inside the costume could literally build a comic just out of reconsidering some of the particular visual iconography of his original run. (No pun intended.) To wit:
- The majority of Barry Allen Flash comics are built around the concept that the cover presents an outlandish situation that requires explanation, and the issue itself solves the mystery of how it happens. (Even if, as is often the case, the cover is not entirely an accurate version of events.) If Wally West Flash comics are straightforward superhero comics, Barry Allen Flash comics are whodunnits, or howdunnits. They’re mystery stories.
- Unlike most superhero stories, Barry Allen is the adult in the room. His rogues gallery, his work colleagues, everyone else in his life (with the exception of his love interest(s), for some fascinating reason) are all a little kooky and out of there, but Barry is curiously immune: he’s a professional who cares about his friends, his career, his family, and even his hobbies — because, somehow, he actually has hobbies. In revivals, that’s translated into “Barry was a square,” but there’s something more interesting in the idea that Barry holds it together while everyone else… doesn’t.
- For a long time, Flash comics started with a first page that flashed forward in the narrative while setting the scene for the reader and restating the question posed by the cover. It’s a fun trick to introduce the reader to the stakes of the story, and one that also allows for misdirection and/or contextualization that can’t be fit in anywhere else in the issue. Why did this drop out of use?
- For that matter: can we have omniscient narrators back in comics, please? Less first person narration — something that the Wally West Flash comics really popularized back in the ’90s, perhaps ironically — and more third person!
- While we’re at it, why can’t we have caption boxes with hands like this again?
I think what I’m saying is, if I could write fiction, I’d want to write a Barry Allen Flash comic, just to use all these tips and tricks to see what happened.