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You’ll believe a man can run really, really fast.

Grant Morrison had the easy part in bringing Barry Allen back.  In Final Crisis, Morrison got to bring the Barry Allen Flash back, use him to defeat the big bad and then just leave.  He didn’t really have to offer much of an explanation how or why Barry was back or even have to answer “what’s next for Barry?”  He got to use Barry Allen and then split and leave the hard work of giving Barry Allen a purpose to Geoff Johns who is kind of an expert at these things.  After all, Johns has done similar restorations to Hawkman and Hal Jordan so it only makes sense that if DC was determined to bring back Barry Allen, Johns would be the writer they’d tag to do the heavy work.  So Barry Allen is back and everyone should be happy, right?  A colleague, friend and mentor who died to only save the universe is back and it should be time to enjoy so why does Geoff Johns and Ethan Van Sciver deliver a horribly depressing and brutally ugly book that should be celebrating on of the first heroes of the silver age?

I think Geoff Johns has two modes when it comes to writing comics—he can either tell stories or he can tell events but he generally trips up when he wants to tell a combination of the two.  Green Lantern Rebirth worked as both but Infinite Crisis fell apart as a story as it existed primarily just to serve larger concepts and move DC’s characters from point A to point B.  A JSA story like Black Reign worked because he took his time building up to that and actually had to have his characters judge their actions and themselves but the recent JSA storyline “Thy Kingdom Come” feel apart under its own weight when a Superman ripped the head off of a god.  There’s so much of Johns’ work to enjoy and so much that just leaves you scratching your head and trying to figure out what he was really trying to do.

As a first issue, Flash Rebirth #1 shows both sides of Johns’ writing abilities. When he can focus on the character, he writes a naturally conflicted Barry Allen.  Here’s a man who, for all intents and purposes, has been dead for years but he’s also been part of everything, losing his own consciousness while being part of reality, so it only makes sense that he would be unsure of why he is now back and what purpose he has as a human being again.  Of course he isn’t going to pick up right where he left off pre-Crisis and while he’s been gone, other heroes have died and miraculously come back.  A large chunk of this issue is spent navel-gazing with one of those heroes; Hal Jordan.  Wandering through the Flash Museum, Hal talks about Barry’s return while Barry broods, avoiding his family and friends by surrounding himself with a giant monument to his life.

While Johns may have an interesting take on Barry Allen after all this time, he spends way to much time telling us about Barry Allen rather than showing us Barry Allen.  For a good portion of this book, we’re told about Barry’s return from all the Flashes; Jay Garrick, Wally West, Bart Allen and even by Barry himself.  We’re told how great, how heroic and how noble Barry is but that’s all—we’re told it and not shown in at all in this issue.  We never see Barry actually doing anything that remotely supports what anyone is saying about him.  Barry Allen is a character who, in one form or another, has been around for 50 years but that means nothing in a comic book labeled as #1.  Johns basically does an information dump on the character and tells us how others see him without actually showing us much of the character.

Johns makes two odd choices in this book—highlighting a level of violence that I’m not too sure if I personally want in a Barry Allen comic book.  The first is almost something we’ve come to expect from Johns as two forensic cops are sliced up and stabbed by an unknown bad guy who has lightning-shaped daggers.  The level of violence and amount of blood are out of place in a book about one of the earliest silver-age heroes.  The second instance of violence is a bit more subtle but way more insidious in intent.  I guess being dead for 20 years isn’t enough trouble for Barry Allen as Johns retcons in a horrible event from Allen’s childhood, one that Johns will presumably build a whole backstory around and use to give Barry Allen more of a backstory and more motivation in life.  It smacks of being unnecessary and just shoehorned so that Johns can give Barry Allen a dark background and make him as driven and emotionally broken as almost any other superhero character.

For a book about a character whose main attribute is speed, Flash Rebirth #1 is a slow, plodding download of what we may be or could be thinking about the character but it doesn’t offer much more than characters pondering their own belly buttons.  Barry Allen died in an age before grim and gritty was the standard tone for comic books, before dying was a simple plot device and characters got maimed on a regular basis.  In the same way that he ushered in the Silver Age, his death may have been the final breath of that age.  Now that he’s back, Johns immediately throws all of the modern baggage a hero supposedly needs on Barry, making him as dark and troubled as any character.  Is this really how we wanted to see Barry Allen brought back?

Flash Rebirth #1
“Lightning Strikes Twice”
Written by: Geoff Johns
Drawn by: Ethan Van Sciver
Lettered by: Rob Leigh
Colored by: Alex Sinclair

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