Absolute Flash #10: The Past Catches Up With You

Lemire’s characterization of Wally in this month’s issue is focused much more on Wally’s speed—how he uses it and how it affects him—rather than on his intrinsic personality. This works well because Wally is still figuring out who he is. Being a teenager torn from his life to move from army base to army base is his backstory, and “not being able to stop” is the central thread connecting Wally’s personality to his super speed. The way this comes out in Absolute Flash #10 is quite clever. For a sizable piece of the issue, Wally is actively racing against the clock to save his father while also not going too fast to avoid falling into Thawne’s various traps. This division of priorities reflects the conflict at hand, as Lemire splits the Rogues and Wally to even the odds and heighten the stakes, which just so happens to fall in line with the issue’s pacing.

That pace plays through the issue like a rhythm. What begins slowly builds into bursts of kinetic speed, reinforcing the superspeed of the Flash. Eventually that speed has to wear off, and that comes in the form of what the issue sets up and where it falls short. Nick Robles carves the action into the page like a mural, supported by Adriano Lucas’ colors. Robles’ action is the vehicle for the story Lemire is trying to tell, but when a comic tries to tell its story through action alone, it misses a lot of the subtext that is normally brought out in dialogue. There are two ends of the spectrum here: too much action and too little story on one end, and too much exposition and not enough conflict on the other. The tenth issue of Absolute Flash is on neither end of that spectrum entirely, but it lands much closer to the former. Most of the dialogue is used to reinforce what the art is already telling us, which, despite being a good story, has its flaws.

By the time I reached the last page, I found myself wanting more, not from this one particular issue but from the overall story of Absolute Flash. It felt as though Lemire was making a big push in this issue, but the story he had set up wasn’t budging as much as he hoped. This is a common problem with many ongoing series when they have certain standout issues. Lemire has to tell a long-form story as part of DC’s mainstream serialized format, but not every issue can be given the same amount of care and attention to detail, which leads to stories, especially comics, feeling poorly weighted in the long run.