The Flash vol. 2: Until Time Stands Still

Wally West is the fastest man alive.  Yet even his connection to the Speed Force hasn’t helped him solve, or outrun his current problems.  From new threats like the Stillness popping up, to old villains like Gorilla Grodd and Mirror Master making their moves, to problems with his wife and kids at home, it’s enough to make a place where he can just go to forget about all of this really appealing.  Except that this place is causing him to forget about everything, and it’s causing Wally to play right into the hands of those who would use him as a weapon to destroy time itself!

You’ve got that, the return of Anti-Flash Eobard Thawne, the intervention of the Linear Men, more Flashes than you can shake a stick at, additional family drama intersecting all this, and even Amanda Waller making moves to set up “Absolute Power” in addition to all of the above.  If you’re thinking that this is one of those volumes of comics where there’s almost too much going on for everything to make sense, or for the reader to get properly invested, you’d be right.  I got the feeling while reading this that writer Simon Spurrier had one big “Flash” story to tell and tried to cram all of it into these two volumes to do it rather than set it up over a lengthy comics run.

This may have been the right call to ensure that Spurrier got to tell the story he wanted to, but it sure made reading parts of this volume a gigantic chore as it felt like I was being pelted with numerous concepts that I couldn’t quite get fully invested in.  What keeps this volume from being unreadable is how the writer manages to barely ground his characters’ struggles in accessible concerns and just barely bring things together at the end of the volume.  The art, mostly from Ramon Perez and Vasco Georgiev also helps as well, with the writers being game for illustrating whatever cosmic insanity the writer is throwing at them.  It’s enough to make me sympathetic to anyone who decided to stop reading this current version of “The Flash” at this point.  Still, the fact that it still turned out comprehensibly in the end at least makes me curious to see what Spurrier will do with this title next when he’s not trying to cram everything and the kitchen sink into a single storyline.