This is a reboot.
And it all started with the Flash…
The Flash is one of those characters I find endlessly fascinating. He’s one of the most important characters in comic book history. He’s also one that recently went through a pretty rough patch. But first off: The Flash is more than just one person. It’s actually three (there are some other people who donned the costume in the past, but for the sake of the argument…) Jay Garrick, Barry Allen and Waly West. Barry was dead; for a long time. Recently he returned. And what a timing: In the post 9/11 world we’ve been living in all through the aughts, a character like Barry, a concept like the Flash, wouldn’t fly. 24 was one of the most watched shows on the tube. Now, that has changed. The poster-child for 9/11 craziness, Jack Bauer, is going to retire. Marvel’s dark age is as well. No more Disassembled. No more Civil War. No more Secret Invasion. No more Dark Reign! All behind us. The Heroic Age looms, and it all seems just a bit brighter. DC even calls it out: The Blackest Night is followed by he Brightest Day. Coincidence? Maybe. Well, I don’t think (or I don’t want to put words in someone else’s mouth, to be precise) that Geoff Johns thought about his epic tale that way. But we, as the readers, can interpret it that way. The build-up to Blackest Night was a dark time in the DCU. Deaths, rapes, and horrible kids. The same on the other side of the street. Cap and Iron Man fought. Spidey made a deal with the devil, literally. (Don’t remember? You’re quite lucky…) Then, the night fell. The heroes gathered. In the middle? The Flash. Barry Allen. He instantly became a Blue Lantern, an ambassador of hope. “All will be well”, indeed.
A new era is dawning, and not just in comics. In art. In the world.
It all started with the Flash.
I remember that I had a stack of comics as a kid, like most of us had. In that stack? An 80-page Giant about the Flash. A bunch of stories. I don’t have the book anymore, but I still have the memory. Also in that stack? Morrison’s JLA run. I’m a huge Morrison fan, as some of you might know. For me, Wally West was the most interesting character in the book. I don’t know what it is with the Flashes. The concept of being fast, maybe. A desire to accomplish more in less time. Also: Thinking faster than the rest. I always had that, to some degree. I’m also a knowledge junkie. The Flash learns fast. I can identify with that. The Fastest Man Alive. A concept that couldn’t be simpler, and yet is highly compelling. So many opportunities. So many ideas. The Flash is one of the reasons I love comic books. The Flash is one of the reasons I’m doing this.
I am a writer.
This is a reboot.
And it all started with the Flash….
Pete Schueler is currently residing in Berlin, Germany. He’s desperately trying to get his writing career somewhere. Where that is exactly, is not defined yet, but it should be somewhere where it’s visible. He’s been a comic book and pop culture geek all his life, but started reading them funny-books again on a weekly basis just three short years ago. In this time he matured from reading just DC books, to preferring mostly Indie titles. He still has a reverence for the Big Two and superheroes in general, and consumes them at a regular rate. The books, not the heroes. 
Merin on 
I never really read the Flash with any amount of devotion or even much interest until the Rebirth miniseries, but Geoff Johns seems to have a way of taking this seemingly two-dimensional characters from the Silver Age and making them seem fresh and human for a modern audience. I loved Rebirth and I will be picking up (and reviewing) the new Flash title. If its anything like his run on Green Lantern, it will be awesome.
Evan Henry (your future comic reviewer)