One of the biggest complaints about the New 52 was the eradication of fan-favorite wisecracking Flash Wally West in favor of his more straight-laced predecessor, Barry Allen. Writers Francis Manapul and Brian Buccellato have been making a game effort to get us to like Barry as much as Welly, but their main successes have been with making the villains like The Rogues and Gorilla Grodd compelling. Barry still feels somewhat dull. So it makes some sense that their forays into Villains Month would get interesting without Barry in the picture. Buccellato’s Gorilla Grodd #1 worked pretty well last week, after all, and now that they’re teaming up for Flash #23.2: Reverse Flash #1, they’re also featuring the West family. Exciting!
Well, don’t get into a tizzy just yet. This is not the West family that was. Yes, Iris West is still around, but her brother is no longer Rudolph West, the asshole father of Wally West. Instead, her brother is the brand new Daniel West, and their bastard father is William – who nonetheless looks a lot like Rudy used to, and Daniel harbors a resentment for him that’s much like Wally’s resentment for Rudy. Except Wally admired the Flash so much he became the superhero Kid Flash, and Danny hates his father so much that he became the villainous Reverse Flash… which remains perhaps the silliest villain name ever, but I digress.
Daniel’s story, as we learn in this issue, is that he was a lonely kid who had to suffer his dad doing mean-dad stuff like pouring coffee on his beloved pet crickets, taunting him about his dead mother and shoving him around, until the point where he snapped and accidentally shoved his father down a flight of stairs, paralyzing him, and then ran away from home for good. He still loved his sister Iris, though, but she was an overachiever while he was always looking for an easy fix, and she kind of resented him for leaving her alone to deal with their father. Just after Danny turned 18, he was part of a bank job that the Flash stopped on his first day of superheroing, and he had to do a nickel in the joint. Once he got out, he went to find Iris again, and wound up smack dab in the middle of the recent gorilla invasion of Keystone City, which subsequently got him rounded up by The Rogues, who were trying to help fight the apes, but also shunting people into Mirror Master’s pocket universe in order to rob them as a “protection” charge. Danny bucked against that, grabbed a car and then crashed it into a monorail with a Speed Force battery, and the resulting explosion bounced him from the Mirror World and dropped him in the desert somewhere with superpowers – the ability to jump backwards in time and look like a red guy with a thick black crust in the process.
His first thought when discovering his power? Let’s go back in time and kill dad.
What’s interesting about Danny West is that you can really sense that he’s on that line between well-meaning guy and self-absorbed prick. He blames his father for everything he’s done wrong (“I’m what you made me!”) and his father was a pretty nasty jerk. By extension, though, every mistake he makes is always going to be somebody else’s fault, and he’s always going to be the put-upon hero of his own story, even after he tries to murder somebody to give himself a happy ending. That’s a solid job by Manapul & Buccellato to give us this sort of frustrating character who would ostensibly like to be good, but who doesn’t realize he can’t look outside of his own perspective. Daniel West feels like a real guy – that friend who you just want to slap some sense into sometimes because he’s just close enough to getting his head on straight that you think the slap might actually knock it into place.
Scott Hepburn’s art is kind of all over the place. There are some interesting layouts and flashback sequences, and the dramatic moments certainly have some punch, but other parts feel a bit rushed, which I suppose is what happens when you’re working on a monthly-book deadline, and it’s forgivable. There’s also that thing that Flash artists are doing where they work the credits into the artwork, which is sometimes cool and snazzy but sometimes a bit jarring, when you’re getting this big emotional moment of the last time Daniel believes he was ever happy, and suddenly “DC COMICS” is carved into a stump, and “Unleashes” is floating on the water. Then again, after you take a moment to adjust, it does bring a proper sense of foreboding.
It may be a long time before we see Wally West again, but there is a West who is now a Flash, if that helps. Foreshadowing, maybe?
