Flashpoint 1

I wasn’t sure whether to try this, since I have been ignoring the Prelude to Flashpoint comics, and it’s another series that crosses over into countless other titles (a checklist lists 22 of them in June alone), but I believe the intent these days is generally to make the central series readable in isolation, so I gave it a go.

The whole thing is Barry Allen waking up into what I assume is some parallel world, where he has no powers and his life is very different. There is no clue as to why he’s there, but obviously he has used his powers to enter other universes often enough. I’m quite impressed with this alternate Earth – for once it’s not the usual DC Earth-One with a few little changes. Atlantis has sunk Western Europe and occupied it, the Amazons have taken over the UK, and the world’s top heroes are very different characters, even the variations on existing ones being pretty major. It’s nice to see someone putting in more imaginative work on this kind of task than just “on this world, the heroes are evil” or altering some costumes a bit.

It’s also written with real skill, neatly filling in all sorts of details on Barry Allen’s life there as well as introducing a bunch of new heroes and major world events without absurd or awkward exposition. I’m not sure that the big final-page surprise is up to much, though. I’m also not sure how we are supposed to care about the events in this other world, all happening to characters we’ve not seen before and I don’t suppose we’ll see again after this is done with; and even if this isn’t an alternate Earth but the usual one disrupted by some change imposed to its past, we know it will be reset by the end. Still, at least it’s a well crafted diversion along the way.

I liked the art better than I expected – Sandra Hope is a very good inker, giving a stylish Jim Lee gloss to Kubert’s solid layouts. It did occasionally give the impression that the story had been written for fewer than 34 pages: 2 full-page panels, 3 double-page panels and a number of other panels that you wouldn’t expect to take up most of a page make it feel a little stretched in places.

This is a well-done comic, but ultimately it feels like just another alternate world story that will amount to nothing afterwards, and can be skipped completely without losing any understanding of the state of the DC Universe, if you care about that anyway – and if I am wrong in that assumption, there really ought to have been something to suggest that in this launch issue.