At his Newsarama blog, Grumpy Old Fan Tom Bondurant weighs in on the upcoming The Flash: The Greatest Stories Ever Told volume. In the process, he reveals some of his all-time favorite stories featuring the monarch of motion--choices that include The Flash (v.2) #54 and DC Special Series #11. Bondurant also addresses the "pure cotton-candy hype" that accompanied DC's mysterious solicitation for The Flash (v.3) #14. Could Bart Allen be about to "merge with the Speed Force more completely and become [Kingdom Come's] omni-Flash who wears only Jay’s helmet"?The Flash Greatest Stories volume looks heavy on the Barry Allen stuff, with only two Jay Garrick stories and one Wally West--and the Wally story isn’t the one where he saves the flight attendant, so that hurts the book’s credibility right there. The previous Greatest Stories book was similarly Barry-centric, but that was understandable since it came out in 1991, right around the time of the Flash TV series. “Flash of Two Worlds” is reprinted, along with the Earth-Prime story “Flash — Fact or Fiction?”, I guess to get us used to the multiverse again. This book also reprints one of my favorite Flash stories, the 80-page “Flash Spectacular” issue of DC Special Series, so there’s that.
3 comments:
I still have that issue (one of many of my faves from Wally's era). Despite the odds, he went after- and saved- the stewardess because he stood by his motto:
"Nobody dies. It's a rule."
...until Johns started writing his stories.
I'm in agreement with both of you regarding The Flash (v.2) #54. It's a spectacular story. And Kelson, I'm with you; The Flash (v.2) #134 has always been one of my all-time favorite issues! Certainly, these two really stand out.
Flash (v. 2) #54 would have been a good choice, mainly because I think it showed Wally's maturity as a character. The Jay Garrick spotlight issue in #134 was good too.
One of the things about Wally's series is that he didn't have a lot of stand-alone issues that could be collected in books like this, and most of the ones that were stand-alone stories were fill-in stories that really shouldn't be in a "Greatest Flash Stories Ever Told" collection.
A couple of entries I would have liked to see however would have been The Flash (v. 2) #101 (basically Wally picking up the pieces after "Terminal Velocity") and #106 which featured a team-up with Captain Marvel versus the Shadow-Thief which I thought was really well done.
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