Weird Science DC Comics: Absolute Flash #1 Review

Absolute Flash #1 begins with 15-year-old Wally West, an Army brat having trouble finding things to do or friends to make as he follows his Colonel father from one Army base to the next. Wally is clearly smart, but he has trouble connecting with other kids his age, and his stern, aloof father isn’t easy to get along with.

One night, Wally catches heat for returning to the base after curfew from a walk around town. An enterprising scientist named Barry Allen recognizes Wally’s potential and offers to show Wally the cool experiments he’s working on. Wally is interested, but he declines Barry’s offer to work with him in the lab to utilize his potential. Wally’s refusal is reinforced when his father, Colonel Rudy West, furiously interrupts the tour and orders Wally home.

The next day, Wally and his father argue about Wally’s lack of friends or outlets for his interests, so Wally storms out of their home. Wally heads to Barry’s lab. Unfortunately, he interrupts an experiment for something called Project Olympus. Barry Allen dies in the resultant explosion, and Wally is subsequently racked with waves of head-splitting energy.

The issue ends with Wally on the run in the desert, trailed by a Special Ops team with Rogue-ish characteristics.

Look. If you’re going to tell a sci-fi-based origin story for a new(ish) superhero story, you have to make the setup plausible and be smart about the execution. In Absolute Flash #1, the generalities of how Wally West becomes the Flash work well enough, but it’s the specifics that fall short in Jeff Lemire’s tale of angst and accidents. Overall, it’s not bad, but you won’t be blown away.

What’s great about Absolute Flash #1?

What’s not great about Absolute Flash #1?

Jeff Lemire’s classic premise is a tried and true way for granting a hapless person superpowers, but for that premise to work, you have to believe the circumstances in which it happens. The problem with Absolute Flash #1 is that the circumstances are NOT believable. 

Barry Allen decides to bring Wally West inside a top-secret lab where dangerous experiments are taking place because Wally is “bored.” Later, after Wally has a fight with his father, Wally returns and enters the same lab without any security resistance while a dangerous experiment is taking place. Does the Army not have doors with locks or security guards? Are security standards incredibly lax in Darkseid’s universe? Is this world like the Simpson’s meme where Mr. Burns’s secret control room is accessible by a broken screen door?

This flaw isn’t a question of differing preferences for how something should be done. It’s a question of Lemire not thinking through how something would plausibly work just to get to the outcome, and it feels a bit lazy.