The Fastest Man Alive

Joshua Williamson & Carmine Di Giandomenico “The Flash Vol 1: Lightning Strikes Twice” (DC Comics, 2017)

Do you want the good news or the bad news? Because this book has some of both.

Let’s start with the good news.  First, this book (& the Flash himself) seem to be central to the Rebirth event.  So you are reading a book about a character who is right in the thick of things.

Second, if you are a fan of the show, Rebirth puts the Flash very close to his TV counterpart.  If you like the show, you will most likely like this book. (And this is a very smart move on the part of DC comics. Too often there is nothing on the stands for people who are brought in by other media.)

The bad news is all intertwined with this.  First, this book doesn’t really deal with any of the big story of Rebirth or with White Wally West.

Second, just like the TV show, we get another evil speedster.  Really? Maybe I’m the only one, but I am so freaking tired of evil speedsters.  I’m ready for a Turtle revamp.

It’s not that I felt like any of the writing or art was not competently done. It’s more that I felt that I’d read all of this before. Evil Speedsters, dead women.  It just feels tired.

I think that it’s important to have new stories that are more in the spirit of the old stories.  Not just old stories over & over again.  There’s a difference.

Mr Lector, Welcome to Twin Peaks!

Joshua Williamson & Mike Henderson “Nailbiter Vol. 1: There Will Be Blood” (Image, 2014)

Did it all start with Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal Lector? I’m not sure, but at some point if you had a cop, then you had to have a serial killer.  Based on our popular entertainment, you’d think that America is a nation of serial killers & future victims.

So what happened?  Why are our fictions overrun with sadists with genius level IQs? There’s a sense that Nailbiter is engaging with that question, at least obliquely.  Buckaroo Oregon is the home of 16 of the weirdest serial killers on record.  Of course they all have crazy gimmicks, like 80s WWF wrestlers, because that’s how serial killers roll (see basically every TV police procedural for evidence).  Nicholas Finch shows up in town because his friend and lawman Eliot Carroll calls & says he’s figured it all out.  Of course Carroll has now disappeared (shades of Twin Peaks!).  But Sheriff Shannon Crane is on hand to help search for him.

Their search leads them to murders, bodies, and buckets of gore.  

By the end of this volume I didn’t have all my questions answered.  In fact, I had more than at the start.  But I had been entertained and found myself deeper on the hook than before.  What is with Buckaroo?  I need to know more…