The Problem With the Flash's "New" Origin Story

A few month ago, when I rounded up the Best Comics of 2020, I praised Dial H For Hero for “redefining a hero’s ‘secret origin,’ not as the moment where they acquire superpowers, but instead as the moment they decide to use their powers to do good.” Of course, this isn’t an idea Hero came up with wholesale. I truly love the series, not only for choosing to make this idea a prominent theme, but for summing it up so eloquently, but the thought has been around for about as long as superheroes themselves have. The best known example is probably Spider-Man. Peter Parker gained superpowers when he was bitten by a radioactive spider, but he didn’t become a superhero until his callousness lead to the death of his Uncle Ben, and he learned that with great power there must also come great responsibility.

Before Spider-Man came onto the scene in the early sixties, this aspect of the secret origin didn’t tend to receive as much focus. There were exceptions, of course — Batman was driven to fight evil by the death of his parents, and Captain America specifically wanted to protect his country from the threat of the Nazis — but for the most part, heroes created during the Golden Age of Comics (the 1940s) used their abilities to fight crime and protect people simply because it was the right thing to do. That’s admirable, and created a few timeless origins — such as Superman, who gained powers from his alien home-world but chose to use them to fight crime because of the morals taught to him by his human parents — but the idea was overused and generally not given must thought. Ultimately, most of the Golden Age heroes didn’t receive that level of characterization or rich backstory, and essentially ended up fighting crime simply because “what’s what comic book characters do!”

It was Marvel Comics that revolutionized superheroes and the secret origin throughout the sixties, but none of that work would have been possible without the superhero renaissance brought about by the Silver Age of Comics, which was kicked off by their rivals, DC Comics, with the 1956 introduction of Barry Allen, a.k.a. The Flash.

Barry Allen wasn’t the first superhero to be called The Flash — that would be the Golden Age super-speedster Jay Garrick, who wore a nifty tin hat — but he was the first to wear the iconic red costume, and is generally the most widely known and popular incarnation of the character. Barry worked as a forensic scientist for the Central City Police, and gained his abilities when a bolt of lightning struck a rack of chemicals in his lab, bathing him in the electrified chemicals. The reason why Barry chose to become the Flash, though, is more subtle, and at least to me, more interesting.

Even before gaining his powers, Barry already had the morals of a hero, having taken his job because of his desire to help people and see justice done. Like Superman, some of this is just the result of Barry’s wholesome midwestern family and upbringing, but uniquely, Barry Allen was also a comic book fan. In fact, the writers decided that the old Jay Garrick Flash stories from the 40s were actually comics in Barry’s world as well, and that Barry grew up reading them. It’s an ingenious way of explaining specifically why Barry decided to use his powers to become a costumed superhero — he was taking up the mantle of his childhood hero, and DC was honoring their past in the process — but more importantly, it allows the audience to relate to Barry in a new way. Like Barry, they too grew up reading comic books, having their morals shaped by them, and hopefully gaining a sense of justice from them. There’s immediately a kinship there.

Barry’s origin didn’t come up often throughout his career, but it was the perfect base for his character, the perfect explanation for the steady, kind, moral man he became. Barry Allen remained the Flash until 1985, when he sacrificed his life to save the universe during Crisis on Infinite Earths (which I talked more about in this article). After Barry’s death, his sidekick Wally West, who up until that point had been known as Kid Flash, took up his mantle and carried on the Flash legacy, living to honor Barry’s example. Throughout Wally’s career, writers occasionally revisited Barry’s origin. One story claimed that, when Barry died, he became pure energy, traveled back in time, and became the lightning bolt that granted him superpowers in the first place, creating a time loop. Another writer, Mark Waid, realized that DC’s various character with superspeed all had wildly different, and oddly strange, origin stories, so he decided that all their abilities were fueled by a common power source, an extra-dimensional energy field known as the Speed Force that occasionally broke through into our world and granted people extraordinary speed.

All these changes were minor, though. The major changes to Barry’s origin didn’t come until 2010.

In 2005, DC released a sequel to Crisis on Infinite Earths called Infinite Crisis, and in a bit of symmetry with the original, they decided to kill off the current Flash, Wally West, and have his sidekick, Impulse a.k.a Bart Allen, replace him. The idea was poorly received and even more poorly executed, and the franchise floundered until 2009 when DC decided that the way to fix this was to bring Barry Allen himself back to life. This technically happened in a story called Final Crisis, but it was 2010’s Flash: Rebirth, written by Geoff Johns and illustrated by (the now-disgraced) Ethan Van Sciver, which took the time to explore what it meant for Barry Allen to be alive again and how he fit into this new DC Universe. It also revisited, and radically altered, Barry’s origin.

In Johns’ telling, Barry still gained his powers when struck by lightning in his lab, but his childhood was radically altered; Barry’s mother was murdered when he was a child, and his father went to jail for it, though he proclaimed his innocence his entire life. Barry’s desire for justice, his becoming a police scientist, his eventually using his powers to fight crime, his entire moral framework now stemmed from this incident, from his desire to free his father and avenge his mother.

I hate this take on Barry’s origin, but even on a more objective level, it just doesn’t work. Let’s talk about the two major reasons why.

First of all, this origin doesn’t fit with Barry Allen or the Flash in terms of tone. It’s an incredibly grim origin, and while Barry and the other Flashes are no stranger to tragedy, it’s not a tone that works as the very base, the genesis, the origin of any of these characters. The Flash, in all his incarnations, is a steady, fun, colorful character who loves being a superhero. Superspeed is a thrilling, visceral power that can’t help but put a smile on your face. Team books, such as the Justice League, often use the Flash as the comic relief or the team’s conscience; when the Justice League animated series did an alternate reality story where the League became fascist dictators, they were unable to think of any situation where Flash would turn on humanity and instead made his death the catalyst of the other heroes’ turn to evil. Again, this isn’t to say that bad things can’t happen to Barry or the other speedsters; I’m just saying that, at their heart, these are characters who are supposed to be grounded in joy, not tragedy.

Changing Barry’s origin is an implicit rejection of the joy and simplicity of Barry’s previous origin. Why can’t Barry just be a good person who learned to value the lives of others above his own from his family and from comic books? Is that really such an old fashioned notion? Johns’ origin would certainly have you think so.

In fact, this feels like a betrayal specifically because it comes from Geoff Johns. From 2000-2004 Johns (along with primary artists Scott Kolins and Howard Porter) wrote The Flash, at the time starring Wally West. In this run Johns introduced a character named Hunter Zolomon, a criminal profiler who befriended Wally and often assisted him on his missions. Hunter had a dark and tragic past, and tragedy followed him into the present, where Gorilla Grodd brutally attacked him and broke his back. Hunter begged Wally to travel back in time and stop this from happening to him, but a heartbroken Wally, knowing the dangers of time travel, had to refuse. So Hunter attempted to use the Flash’s time machine himself and it literally blew up in his face, but the explosion untethered him from time, allowing him to run even faster than the Flash.

Hunter decided that it was his tragedies, all the trauma he’d faced, that had granted him this power, and he decided that in order to become a better hero, Wally needed to go through tragedy as well. So Hunter, now the villain “Zoom,” decided to “help” his “friend” by attacking Wally’s wife Linda, who was then pregnant with twins, causing her to miscarry. Later Zoom attempted to force Wally to man up by killing him, but Wally refused and overcame him, powered by the love of his family and friends. It wasn’t just Wally refuting Zoom’s twisted viewpoints, it was Johns’ writing as well; the story ends with Zoom realizing that Wally was right and apologizing for everything he put him through.

So imagine my surprise when, only six years after this story was published, Johns goes on to alter Barry Allen’s backstory in order to give him a more tragic origin, seemingly to make him more compelling, a stronger character. Imagine my surprise when Johns, in essence, said “Zoom was right all along!”

Can you get why I feel betrayed by this updated origin?

Okay, that’s everything that’s wrong with this origin thematically. Let’s move onto the second problem with it: it doesn’t work from a more mechanical, writing viewpoint either. Take a look with me at the following image, which contains the preamble that opens up each and every episode of The Flash television series on the CW.

That’s quite the mouthful, isn’t it? This updated origin isn’t simple. In comparison, I want you to take a look at the first page of All-Star Superman 1, in which Grant Morrison and Frank Quietly tell their version of Superman’s origin story.

Superman’s whole shtick, summed up in four pictures and eight economical words. Superman’s origin explains him; Barry’s complicates him.

Even more importantly, Superman’s origin is a part of his past that explains who he is today. In contrast, Barry’s origin follows him into the present and becomes an active part of his adventures as a superhero, a mystery that has to be solved. It’s a story that imposes itself, rather than serving as a natural springboard. While plenty of writers have gone back and revisited Krypton, they certainly don’t have to, but the whole point of introducing a mystery about Barry’s mother is to eventually solve it. It’s not satisfying if it’s never resolved, and that places an imposition on every new piece of media that introduces Barry Allen as the Flash to eventually tell that story, and it’s not one that’s open to different takes or interpretations in the way the destruction of Krypton is.

Flash: Rebirth at least resolves things by the end of its six-issue story; turns out that the Flash’s arch-enemy and stalker, The Reverse Flash, had traveled back in time and killed Barry’s mother as a form of pre-emptive revenge. But then, only a year after Flash: Rebirth, DC rebooted all their books from scratch in the New 52 initiative, meaning that the new Flash creative team ended up having to tell their own version of this story in the comics less than five years after the original. The Flash TV series spent its entire first season solving this mystery. Both versions of the Justice League film stuck with this version of Barry’s origin, so it looks like the Flash solo movie is preparing to tell its own version of this story as well. Readers, it’s exhausting. I am so tired of seeing this same story told over and over in different mediums with only mild changes. Enough.

The story complicates Barry in other unfortunate ways as well. Barry’s mother is killed by the Reverse Flash traveling back in time to get revenge on the Flash. In order for this to make any sense, it means that, at some point, Barry’s original origin story still happened. Barry Allen grew up with two loving parents, became The Flash, became Reverse Flash’s archenemy, and Reverse Flash ran back in time to kill Barry’s mother, creating a new timeline where Barry’s mother died when he was just a child. This means that time travel and alternate timelines are now a foundational part of Barry Allen as a character, which is an incredibly complex thing to introduce new readers to right off the bat.

To me, though, the most infuriating thing about that last fact is that it’s essentially Johns admitting that a new origin for Barry was always unnecessary. In order for this new origin to happen, in order for Barry’s mother to be murdered by Reverse Flash, first he has to become the Flash the old fashioned way. This new origin didn’t fix a flaw in the original, it just needlessly complicated it in order to chase that grim and grisly tone that was supposedly necessary to sell comics in the 2000s. Unfortunately, it’s now followed Barry for a full decade and become a part of both a TV show and a movie, likely cementing itself in place for decades to come.

I’ll probably always be mad about that. This updated origin misses the tone of the entire franchise. It needlessly complicates the character while also revealing nothing new about him. It’s unnecessarily bogged down all future incarnations of the character with a “mystery” that’s already been solved four times before. I hate it. To me, Barry Allen will always be the nerd who grew up on comic books and put what he learned into action. Some people just do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do. Why mess with that?

The Flash is my favorite superhero, but Barry Allen isn’t my favorite Flash — that would be Wally West, who is actually my favorite character in all of comics. Wally’s had a rough time in the comics throughout the last few years, but that all looks to be changing as of March’s The Flash 768, which not only restores Wally to the book’s title role, but also seems determined to, above all else, allow Wally to have fun adventures as the Flash. This interview with new writer Jeremy Adams got my hopes up, and the issue lived up to my expectation; Adams doesn’t ignore the trauma Wally’s faced over the last few years and the fallout it’s had on his life, but his number one priority is allowing Wally to have weird, wild, colorful adventures, and it just makes me so happy. I loved this issue, and I have big expectations for the this run going forward.

Also, I’m just really happy for Adams that he gets to write this comic. We aren’t close by any means, but Adams and I have actually followed each other on Twitter for pretty much a decade, and in those early days, before he broke into writing for television, we used to talk and debate about comics fairly often. I know how passionate he is about these characters and this art-form, and thus it’s just so cool to see him living the dream.

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The Problem With the Flash's &quot;New&quot; Origin Story

The Problem With the Flash's "New" Origin Story