The Flash #794
Recap
The Fraction is moments away from victory, but they forgot about one thing…an almost-10-year-old with red hair and the power to turn things around. Finally, Irey West has found her new superhero name, and she intends to use it while saving the Flash Family from certain doom!
Review
The Flash #794 picks up with Miss Murder arriving at the speedster’s hideout, where Irey confronts her. Meanwhile, the speedsters devise a plan to stop The Fraction while Jay escapes capture and begins an assault inside The Fraction’s facility.
I’ve been saying since the start of this arc that Iris isn’t dead and will come back by the end. Then in the last issue, Wally died, so clearly, Jeremy Adams planned to bring these characters back. Well, low and behold, it looks like the solution will be time travel. I feel so stupid for not thinking about that. The Flash and time travel are like bread and butter; the answer was legitimately in my face the entire time. That being said, I loved this reveal. The One Minute War has been a brutal nonstop assault on The Flash family, with our heroes winning only a few battles, so time travel is the best and most logical solution to fix everything. Jeremy Adams, we trust this man knows how to write The Flash in the most ways possible.
The highlight on Irey in this run has been a huge selling point for me. How she has taken charge in these last two issues has been excellent for her character. I also loved how she started using Jai as a human wrecking ball. Irey is slowly becoming the best character in this series, and I’m glad she’s finally able to unleash her full potential. Adams did a lot of leg work with the storytelling early on in this run to get Irey her powers back and establish her character, and now all of that is paying off spectacularly. This series will always be billed as the Wally West show, but we Flash fans know this book is about Irey and Jai.
Jay Garrick is another stand-out character in this arc, reminding readers that Adams is as much a Golden Age fan as his mentor and frequent collaborator, Geoff Johns. We often forget that Jay is a war veteran, so he is probably more familiar with this setting than his fellow speedsters. Jay often gets pushed to the sideline in mentor rolls, so it’s neat to see him take some charge and personally fight back against The Fraction. Thanks to Roger Cruz, we also learn that our resident senior citizen Flash is also sporting a set of washboard abs. This stood out like a sore thumb on the final page, but also really harkened back to that 90s aesthetic that this arc has been going for.
Cruz’s art returns to a positive scale since this book features much more action than downtime. His art helps keep up with the sense of speed that we expect when reading a Flash title. I’ve been very tough on the art throughout this arc, but there’s no argument that Cruz knows how to draw speedsters in action. Thanks to Luis Guerrero’s colors, these fantastic, high-speed action pages also pop with color to help highlight the different speedsters in action.
Final Thoughts
The Flash #794 makes time travel seem like the most logical solution to a problem better than any comic has before. The art is electric and the spotlight on Irey continues to be a higher point for the overall narrative.
The Flash #794: One Flash, Two Flash, Three Flash, Four
- Writing - 8.5/108.5/10
- Storyline - 9/109/10
- Art - 8/108/10
- Color - 9/109/10
- Cover Art - 10/1010/10