Time-Vibrations: The Flash #203, featuring the unfortunately titled "Flash's Wife is a Two-Timer" by Robert Kanigher and Irv Novick, contains a plethora of pseudoscientific Fast Talk fodder. Rest assured this won't be the last time we visit this issue. The story, which introduced the idea that the scarlet speedster's soul mate was born in the distant year 2945 A.D., is both heart-wrenching and absurd and broaches a number of science-fictional dilemmas of the heart. One of the story's most amusing moments, however, has to be this transitional sequence which, to the uninitiated reader, looks as if it might contain history's most outlandish Dear John letter. Though Iris West Allen is eager to explain her temporal predicament to her loving husband, she is unexpectedly seized by time-vibrations and begins to slip away to the far-flung future. In true dramatic fashion, the plucky reporter has enough time to convey her dilemma to us in incomplete gasps laden with technobabble. "Time-vibrations becoming unstable... being drawn back to the future... Can't reach phone... Must leave Barry... note--!" Iris has put our beloved slowpoke police scientist through a lot over the years but you've got to give her credit; though she is being abducted from the timestream and is, by all appearances, becoming virtually intangible, she still has the presence of mind to contact her husband! Ah, bless. Luckily, these remarkable "time-vibrations" are remarkably slow going, allowing our considerate heroine more than enough time to take up pen and paper and scribble out a brief domestic memo. Imagine Barry Allen's reaction when he returns home to find this note scrawled upon his kitchen wall: "Darling-- Can't stop myself... irresistible force pulling me--1,000 years--future--Help me." Boy, if I had a dime for every time one of my girlfriends tried to get away with that old excuse!
Issue: The Flash #203 (February 1971)
1 comment:
This was great to read
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