BAD THING: Is it just me or is Barry Allen a dick? I mean, a colossal, pretentious, uptight, needs to get laid and/or get his ass-kicked dick? I ask this because for all the complaints Johns gets about fetishism regarding the Silver Age Flash... I just don't see how ANYBODY can believe that Barry is being the reasonable party here, which I think is Johns' intent with the writing.
Really, Barry's rant about how he doesn't like what Ollie turned Hal into makes him sound less like a concerned friend/teammate and more like a whiny little schoolgirl who is upset that she's now only the second-best friend of the girl she spent all of her time with up until yesterday. And the subtext seems to be Johns slamming the Bronze Age and all of the stories where Hal Jordan was portrayed as being less than perfect.
Granting that I'd be concerned if Hal "I Was Manipulated Into Trying To Reboot The Universe To Make It Good For Everybody" Jordan were traveling around with a group of known villains, including several of his greatest enemies, I find it ironic that this worrying is coming from a guy who - a scant few issues ago - was being held up as an avatar of optimism and the most Hopeful person on Earth, to the point that he got to become a back-up Blue Lantern.
And - oh yes - lest we forget, Barry Allen killed his arch-enemy for reasons that were just as personal as Ollie's reasons for going after Prometheus and in much less urgent circumstances. So not only is Barry Allen a dick, possessive and jealous - he's also The Fastest Hypocrite Alive.
GOOD THING: Thankfully, Barry gets the piss taken out of him when he is pick-pocketed - in mid rant - by Larfleeze, proving that the glowing orange klepto isn't really all that bad.
The Final Verdict: After this issue, I really want Barry Allen to die. Again. Slower this time. Much more painfully, if possible. Ideally through the use of some kind of Enema Arrow that proves necessary to cleanse him of the massive stick that is shoved up his...
Ah-ha-ha. But apart from that this is a very nice comic that furthers the whole plot with the Energy Avatars and reveals some cool stuff about the Indigo Tribe. So... yeah.
What makes me laugh is that Flash sounds a little like a JEALOUS BOYFRIEND.
ReplyDelete*lol*
Seriously Barry should have never been brought back. That was one of those things that DC Had done right for so long.. only to bork that up. *sigh*
ReplyDeletemuch less urgent? He and Thawne were racing at full speed toward Iris and whoever got there first determined who lived who died. He snapped Thawne's neck by grabbing him around the neck to take him down, as I recall. He was facing the one guy who was fast enough that NO, Barry could not control the fight. And generally Ollie is a massive ass around Barry. Seriously, I sympathize with Ollie whenever he's not around Hal or Barry but around those two he needs to be told off.
ReplyDeleteAnd as for what makes Barry hopeful? He's standing there, attempting to reason with a man who's entire nature is based on stubburnness.
Yeah. Of course Marvel brought Uncle Ben back first... but that is neither here nor there.
ReplyDeleteYou don't want to know. Trust me. Suffice it to say, it was all Peter David's fault.
Four things.
ReplyDeleteFirst, Thawne DID kill Iris. She got better but originally he DID kill her. The infamous "race" scene involved Barry's second fiance, Fiona Webb.
Second, as illustrated in the comic I linked to above, Barry wasn't sure if he meant to kill Zoom or if it was just something that happened in the heat of the moment.
Third, Barry may have been the only one fast enough to stop Zoom... but there were lots of ways he could have stopped him without killing him. Breaking his leg comes to mind...
Fourth - as far as urgency goes... sure, Fiona may have been in more immediate danger. But Zoom was only going after Barry's loved onea and Barry himself. He never had any great abiding interest in general mayhem, for the most part. Prometheus on the other hand, had just crippled two superheroes, killed tens of thousands of people (possibly hundreds of thousands) and was ready to do worse to millions if he wasn't let go. The heroes only had his word that he wouldn't do something sneaky to kill all those people once he was free, anyway. And given Prometheus' track record, they had no reason to believe he'd keep his word. In turns of magnitude and the threat to the world, Ollie had much more urgent reasons to go after him.
I think most courts(and most people)would ddefine more urgent as mugger with a loaded and aimed gun rather than mob hitman two days after his last job and MAYBE ready to go out and do another.
ReplyDeleteBarry's arms are closer to Thawne's neck than his legs plus he could also grab the shoulders or torso. Going for the leg involves going low and going low if he misses could lead to Fiona's death.
There's a difference between immediacy and urgency though. Prometheus was the bigger danger, and thus a more urgent problem because he had the means to hurt a lot more people even if he wasn't doing it at this moment. By contrast, Zoom was only focused in on attacking one target.
ReplyDeleteIt's a moot point when you're dealing with speedsters, in either case. Urgency doesn't matter as much as immediacy when you can tie a man up in seconds.
I just used the leg break as an example. There are lots of other ways Barry could have slowed down or incapacitated Thawne without outright killing him. He'd done it before. And Barry's a smart guy (or at least, was written as one most of the time) and it was shown before that he was capable of thinking fast on his feet, even under duress. And he usually came up with "what if?" plans after he was beat, so you'd think that after he lost one fiance to an evil Speedster he'd start thinking worst-case-scenario plans.
The reason he killed Thawne had nothing to do with it being the only way - it was because he WANTED to kill Thawne, even if he wouldn't admit it to himself. Plain and simple. Long story short: Barry is a hypocrite for hating on Ollie for what he did to Prometheus.
I hope this is all build up to Ollie finally confronting him on this point and Barry admitting that he probably comes down hard on Ollie because he's projecting his own disappointment in his actions dealing with Thawne before onto Ollie... like he's accusing Ollie of projecting his guilt about his past actions onto Hal.
I disagree. I think it was an accident and his not being sure is him being to hard on himself
ReplyDelete