Mark Waid turned me into a fan of the Flash. I am sure I am far from the only person who can say that. I recently read The Flash by Mark Waid vol 1 (yes, that’s the title), which is both his earliest work on the Flash and some of his earliest work period.
Since it was before I started read the Flash back in the day, I hadn’t read a lot of it. And, well, you could tell that it was early work. It was readable but it didn’t have the quality that Waid would start developing shortly after these stories. And yet, you can see the starting sketches of what would become Waid’s bigger picture.
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When Waid took over writing for the Flash, it was after DC comics had introduced the Wally West version of the Flash. Barry Allen had died in the 1986 Crisis on Infinite Earths and Wally went from his sidekick as Kid Flash to the big role. And, with everyone knowing death is cheap in comic books, readers kept expecting Barry to come back.
It’s a testament to how well Waid got readers to accept Wally that Barry stayed dead for 23 years.
The key storyline in that was ‘The Return of Barry Allen’, which is in volume 2 of the Waid reprints. That was the storyline where I started reading the Flash. Actually reading it one month at a time to pace it out and knowing just enough Flash lore to appreciate the twist made me a fan.
And after that, Waid stopped dealing with the idea of Wally being a replacement and focused on Wally as a real grownup and exploring a whole bunch of neat ideas about super speed.
But reading this earlier work has made me realize that the Return of Barry Allen was also Waid coming into his own as a writer. He made Wally West into his character and made that character fun.
And in volume one, I can see Waid laying the groundwork for that, in particular retelling and recontextualizing Wally’s origin story. It wasn’t quite there yet but you could see where Waid was heading.
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