Flashpoint #1 (July, 2011)

"There's only one thing I know about life I know some things happen by chance. And some things happen because we make them happen. Barry Allen was once haunted by the past. But when he became the Flash, he left the ghosts behind. He found love. A family. And for the first time ever... Friends. Barry thought yesterday was finally behind him... but somebody wouldn't let him escape it. When Barry came to me for help, I turned him away. I'm not the hero of this story. I'm a man who's been corrupted by his own unbearable pain. I'm a man who has too much blood on his hands to be called good. I'm a man who had nothing left to live for-- until the day I met the Flash."

-Thomas Wayne, A.K.A. the Batman

After a two page spread with most of the major DC heroes in their current forms, Barry Allen awoke to a heavily altered and more thoroughly corrupted world. Sure his mom, who we only learned a few years ago had been murdered in his youth, was now alive and well. That didn't make up for the hundred million dead "when Atlantis sank Western Europe into the ocean. Before that, thirty-two million were slaughtered when the Amazons claimed the United Kingdom as New Themyscira." Aquaman and Wonder Woman were at war and out to rule the world. Looking at another two page spread of the "heroes" assembled to stop them, it didn't look like a world much worth saving. Few of the heroes from the earlier spread were represented, and those present were pretty heinously reworked.

Once Batman said "no" to pitching in, the alliance fell apart, which goes to show what a bunch of weasels this lot were. Meanwhile, Barry Allen was heroic enough not to pitch the world into Hell for the sake of visiting with his mom, and instead drove his car to trespass in Wayne Manor. The Batman slapped him around some, before Barry deduced that this was actual Thomas Wayne, who had survived that night in Crime Alley.

"Flashpoint Chapter One" was by Geoff Johns and Andy Kubert with Sandra Hope. It looks like a Hollywood production with plenty of money but no soul behind it, so I was more bored reading it than anything. Sure it's offensive, but the impoliteness is felt in the abstract, with many miles of detachment on my part. It's funny though, because I think this is the beginning of the end for Didio Comics, for I foresee a DC Implosion coming that will really shake up the comic book industry. Poor Barry Allen seems like he'll go from a sainted super-hero to the bad penny turning up to bookend the Post-Crisis DC Universe. Your mileage may vary, but for me, I think I'm going to use this as something of a stopping point for my reading. I'll keep up with this or that, but my allegiance to the line is pretty much dead, and had been on life support for most of the decade anyway.