New Comics: The World’s Fastest Scapegoat

 

It’s very dark in there.

It’s the 13th and final issue of “The Flash: The Fastest Man Alive.”

If you’ve been paying any attention to the comics rumor mill, you know what happens in this one.

If you haven’t, you’re about to find out. Shut yer eyes quick, chickadee, spoilers in the next paragraph!

Bart Allen dies.

In fact, he gets his speed taken away, he pulls off a pretty good fight against the Rogues, and then they beat him to death.

Yes, they actually killed a Flash without letting him run.

In other words, DC decided they didn’t like the character, so they simultaneously killed and dissed him. Because all Flashes are supposed to die running. It’s in the contracts. If you’re a Flash, you die while running faster than you’ve ever run in your life, skirting just this side of hypercosmic speeds, your atoms actually burning down and exploding as friction, kinetic energy, and Einstein’s frustrated ghost strip away your individual protons and hyper-accelerated skin cells.

Flashes never die on their backs getting their guts stomped out by supervillains.

The problem is that DC thought they’d shake things up, age Bart Allen to adulthood, change his personality, and rake in big bucks with their new and angsty Flash. Lo and behold, readers didn’t like the new Flash. Readers didn’t buy the book. Readers said the book sucked.

DC decided they had to ditch the book and, assuming the readers hated Bart Allen, killed him off as dismissively as they could. “Yay for us, readers!” DC yells. “We killed the character you hated, Bart Allen! Love us again!”

“You idiots,” snarl the readers. “We liked Bart. We hated your stupid comic book.”

“Don’t worry, readers,” says new Flash scribe Mark Waid. “I’ll fix this for ya.”

How? That’s a post for another day. (In other words, tomorrow morning.)