Absolute Flash #3: Mind Over Monkey

The biggest struggle with Absolute Flash so far has been its pace. In trying to mirror the headspace of our titular speedster, Lemire has structured this debut arc with an incredibly fast, incredibly chaotic methodology. And while that’s cute—and occasionally clever—it doesn’t always translate to something effective, especially now that we’re three issues deep and just starting to establish the hero and his world.

Sure, seminal works have pulled this off before. Ultimate Spider-Man didn’t really roll out its hero until issue six. But even in that slow burn, there was plenty of character and world-building to chew on. Absolute Flash, on the other hand, has leaned hard on visual tricks to avoid doing the heavier lifting of focused character development. It gestures at deeper personal themes but keeps them at arm’s length—almost like it’s afraid to sit still long enough to say something real.

After a repetitive first few pages, issue #3 finally opens the floodgates to something more than stylish art and generic teen angst. This is the issue where you either buy into Lemire’s conceptual reinvention of Wally West or you don’t. I did. Lemire slows down, lets the story breathe, and gives his characters room to stretch. No more brushing past relationships or hand-waving emotional stakes.

Picking up the pieces from the previous chaos, Wally is brought to a screeching halt and paired with a wildly different, deeply compelling version of Gorilla Grodd. Their psychological connection finally pins down the emotional center of this story—and Wally’s pain. There’s real substance here. The idea of a Flash whose closest ally is a psychic mutant monkey could be a joke in lesser hands, but Lemire treats it with enough care that it never feels goofy, even with the Silver Age surrealism baked in. If anything, it finally treats us to a view of this character that is not just a teenager overrun by hormonal angst.

That said, decompression is still a problem. Lemire doesn’t seem interested in tightening things up, and while issue #3 ties the arc together in a neat, cohesive way that’ll read much better in trade, it still lags behind the depth and character work other Absolute titles hit by their third issue. This isn’t a bad book—far from it. It’s conceptually brilliant, visually striking—but like Wally, it’s moving way too fast for its own good, chasing a kind of aesthetic vanity that’s just not as interesting as the story buried underneath.

As for the art—Nick Robles is doing career-best work. His layouts are emotionally charged, his linework just loose enough to catch Wally’s kinetic energy without losing control. It’s a perfect balance of classic and modern. And the colors? Unreal. Adriano Lucas brings such cohesion to the palette that you’d be forgiven for thinking Robles did the whole thing himself. The pair really hit their stride when Grodd enters the picture, communicating volumes with subtle shifts in tone and expression. Which makes it all the more frustrating that Lemire stretches things out when his art team could be telling the story with half the effort and twice the impact.