Written by Si Spurrier

Art by Mike Deodato Jr

Colours by Trish Mulvihill

Letters by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou

Published by DC Comics

Wally West is the fastest man alive. But his powers shouldn’t hurt. Especially when there’s a new speedster in town, Gorilla Grodd is attacking the police and his home life is quietly being torn apart…

Si Spurrier is one of the best writers working today and this is some of his best work. Spurrier takes everything that’s always been lovable about the Flash and twists it into a new shape whose geometry isn’t quite of this Earth. His Wally is still a deeply likable, very kind klutz but his emotional awareness is blunted. He’s in pain, he’s hallucinating and worst of all he’s in denial. There are moments here where Wally is the most human superhuman I’ve read in a long time. He makes bad choices. Familiar bad choices. Spurrier doesn’t denigrate his humanity but he embraces its flaws and what they bring and folds them into the stories unfolding here. Wally isn’t facing up to something being wrong so he has trouble at work, trouble dealing with Grodd and trouble at home. He’s in no way a villain but he’s in no way prepared for what’s folding down into his life from somewhere terrible.

Spurrier’s got a lovely eye for cosmic horror and there are three beats here that are positively Lynchian. Fellow speedsters Max Mercury and Impulse glimpse something vast and terrified as they run through time. Linda West is the still point of the amiable whirlwind of her familial life, post-partum depression dancing with the loss of her temporary powers to create a serious problem she can see but Wally can’t. Yet. Irey West finds her brother crying in the school basement and doesn’t quite see the small, strange figure whispering to him. This book is subtle and unsettling and the gradual curdling of the West family’s reality is incredibly well realized.

The art, and layout, are key factors in any comic but even more so here. Time is constantly sectioned up by the panels and there’s a constant sense of tension and motion. Irey explodes out of a group of panels when we see her use her powers for the first time, her skid taking her across another group. That wonderful, awful scene with Iris too where the grid is reworked into the growing sense of this being a conversation neither want but both are trapped in. Mike Deodato Jr’s art is the perfect choice for this and his expressive faces, precision character work and use of light and shadow is the perfect choice for a book of lightning powered runners being menaced by something dark. Trish Mulvihill’s colours  sing too and there’s a constant tension between the friendly yellow lightning of Team Flash and the wrapped blue of whatever is coming for them. Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou’s lettering too shines, and does a lot of the comedic heavy lifting here. We get an extract from Irey’s diary which is a hilarious, and needed, piece of comedy and a moment early on where Impulse’s tone of voice is so beautifully presented you can hear it. This is a team of the absolute best and they’re doing some of their best work.

Verdict: The Flash has never read like this and it’s a revelation. Funny, unsettling, actively spooky and rammed full of ideas, action, character and spectacle this is a fantastic first issue for what looks to be a epochal run, in every sense. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart