Review – Flashpoint

Anyone who’s been within earshot of me over the past four or five months knows what a stringent supporter I’ve been of DC’s ongoing, tremendously successful New 52 initiative. And, of course, anyone who was reading comics prior to August 31, 2011, knows that the story that explained how we got from a universe with continuity dating all the way back to 1986, to a universe where continuity only extends as far as ten years ago, was a little thing called Flashpoint.

There’s been a cycle lately, ever since Marvel’s 2006 Civil War mega-crossover-event-stravaganza, for each company to do one of these big events during the flagging summer months. It got to the point where for a lot of people, even hardcore comic fans, the last few years have ended up suffering through a Secret Invasion, ignoring an Infinite Crisis, and falling asleep through Fear Itself. At its outset, Flashpoint looked to be the exact same thing – 5-issue mega-“Event of the Year” with about two-dozen tie-in books, ranging from one-shots to three-issue series, all while DC’s normal books were still going on. However, around the time the second issue hit stands, the reasons behind all that became clear.

Now, outside of all the (much-deserved) hoopla over the New 52, and the back-and-forth between Marvel and DC that muddied both of the big event books this year as they were happening, how does Flashpoint read as a standalone story? Well, having read back through the recently-released Hardcover today, I can say with confidence: Pretty darn good. In fact, it reads better as an all-in-one volume by far than it did as five individual issues, complete with cliffhangers. Geoff Johns is completely at home with this story, doing what he does best better than he ever has before – building a complex world in as economical of a way as is possible. Andy Kubert’s art, as well, is at its usual level of excellence – demonstrated best towards the end of the story, in some truly gorgeous scenes of all-out superhero warfare.

For those still unfamiliar with the plot, it essentially deals with Barry Allen (The Flash) waking up in a world that’s slightly…different, from the one he’s used to. For one thing, his mom’s not dead. That’s weird, right? He was pretty sure she hadn’t been around for a while. Oh, and the whole running faster than anyone else thing? Not going so good at the moment. That’s ok, though. I mean, he can just go find some of the rest of the superheroes and they can help him figure out what’s going on, right? Right.

Well, nobody’s ever heard of a “Superman”, although there was this crazy spaceship that crashed into the middle of Metropolis, killing around 30,000 people – the same year that Bruce Wayne was shot and killed by a burglar in the middle of an alleyway, driving both his parents way off the deep end. His dad Thomas started dressing like a bat and beating people up in the middle of the night, and his mom Martha put on clown makeup and became a psychotic killer. Ok, so, the big two are out. What about Wonder Woman? Surely, someone’s heard of her, right? Oh, everyone’s heard of Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman, who’s war with Aquaman has a death toll already in the millions, culminating in her invasion of Britain and rechristening of it as New Themyscira. If someone doesn’t do something to stop the war between the Amazons and Atlanteans soon, they could very well tear the planet apart. And we’re not talking figuratively, either. Ok, fine, what about Hal, then? You know, Hal Jordan? The Green Lantern? Listen, Barry, I don’t know what kind of drugs you’re on, but Hal Jordan’s just a test-pilot for Ferris Air – a damn good one, but just a test pilot. There was some alien fellow who was calling himself the Green Lantern, though…Abin, something or other?

Crap.

So with the entirety of the rest of the Justice League incapacitated in some way or another, and his memories of the way the universe used to be rapidly slipping away, Barry has to convince the “heroes” of this world to unite and help him figure out some way to put things back the way they used to be.

For people who’ve been reading comics long enough, this kind of setup probably feels a little familiar, to an extent. Throughout the ’90s, DC did a series of stories called Elseworlds tales, where familiar characters were put in unfamiliar settings, often with interesting results. What if Superman’s rocket had landed in the Soviet Union, for instance? That well could only be dug so far, though, so we haven’t seen any stories in that vein in quite a while. While Flashpoint is obviously not an actual elseworlds tale (Johns takes care to make it clear to us early in the story that “This isn’t a parallel Earth, or a mirror world. This is home. This is real.” – Insert dramatic music cue), it does share many aspects with the best of those stories. One thing that was very different, though, was the scale of this story. Being a big crossover event, there was of course the requisite nigh-infinite number of tie-in titles, but in this case, they all serve to fill out corners of the world that we only catch a glimpse of in the main tale, and a lot of them were pretty interesting – I’ll likely get a chance to talk about some of them once those trades come out.

All in all, if you’re someone who’s been reading The New 52, and is a bit curious as to how we got from there to here, or if you’re someone curious about The New 52, but can’t quite figure out how we got from there to here, or if you’re just someone who enjoys a damn good superhero story of apocalyptic proportions, then Flashpoint gets my highest recommendation. And yes – to those who are wondering still, we do get a reason for Wildstorm and Vertigo characters being part of the DCU now, however shaky an explanation it may have been. And really, do we need a reason other than “because how else are we gonna put John Constantine in the Justice League”? I don’t.