The Flash vol. 1: Strange Attractor

Wally West is the fastest man alive.  Fast enough to keep all crime under control in Keystone City.  Fast enough to be a good husband to his wife, and father to his three kids.  Fast enough to be on time for his new job working with Michael “Mister Terrific” Holt.  Yet something’s been off with his powers lately.  They’re not working the way they should and he finds himself “stepping out” of this reality uncontrollably.  Even worse is that while familiar rogues like Mirror Master and Gorilla Grodd are up to something, new threats from outside of time – the Uncoiled, the Stillness – are making their presence known.  It’s more than enough tomake the fastest man alive to wonder if he can even keep up.

I’ve read a few solo “Flash” comics before, but this will be the first time I’ve started reading his ongoing adventures.  That’s because Simon Spurrier is writing them and I know he does good comics.  He also does comics that can also be overly ambitious, stuffed full of concepts, and a little hard to get invested in as a result, and that’s what we have here.  I’ve read that he’s tilting the series in the direction of cosmic horror, and while I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad direction here, it doesn’t quite click after this first volume.

The reason for that is that it doesn’t feel like a lot of the stuff Spurrier introduces here gets fully developed in a meaningful way.  While the Uncoiled and the Stillness are given memorable introductions, we don’t learn much more about them after that.  Same for the weird, tranquil garden that Wally steps into in one instance.  He’s also beset on all sides with family problems as daughter Irey is taking steps towards being a proper superhero, son Jai is having second thoughts about being one, and wife Linda is depressed about not being one anymore.  Oh, and hopefully you have an attachment to Max Mercury from previous “Flash” runs as that’s the only way you’ll feel for him after what happens to the zen master of speed here.

There’s also the fact that EVERYTHING seems to be against Wally here.  New threats.  Old threats coming back in new forms.  Family problems.  It makes for a downer of a read, especially when his one source of solace appears to come when he isolates from all of these things.  Not helping matters is that all of this reads like setup at the moment.  Which means that while there’s a sense of ongoing momentum here, we don’t get any payoff in this first volume, or even a done-in-one tale to really show what the writer is capable of here.

What we do get is a fantastic showcase for the skills of artist Mike Deodato Jr.  While he’s done quality superhero work at Marvel for years, it’s usually been of the big, bold superhero action variety.  Here, Deoddato gets a chance to draw some really weird stuff.  Glimpses of multiple realities on a single page.  A coordinated gorilla attack that sees multiple humans encased in bubbles and spirited off into the atmosphere.  Reality breaking down around Flash in multiple and varied ways.  You’d think it’d be too much, but Deodato handles it with ease.  Even the quieter bits when people just sit down and talk to each other.  It’s really a shame he won’t be back for vol. 2.

While it might sound like I’m really down about this volume, outside of the art, I’ve still got enough faith that everything Spurrier is setting up here is going to click.  The last page of “Strange Attractor” makes it clear that he does have a plan for all of this, even if it’s going to cohere in the form of a familiar supervillain plot.  Which I’ll certainly take at this point as the familiar can help to take the edge off of the indigestibly strange, of which there is a lot here at the moment.