Drew: This past weekend, I had the distinct pleasure of attending Boston’s own Comic Con. Like Peter and Shelby‘s recent experience at C2E2, this was my first con. I arrived a little late, and found the line stretching around the block (the entrance to the convention center is around the corner and down a looong city block from where I took that picture), but was only the first of many lines I would enjoy that day. Continue reading
Today, Drew and Patrick are discussing the Flash 7, originally released March 28th, 2012.
Drew: When we wrote about the Flash 6 last month, we couldn’t get over the thematic richness of that issue as it explored concepts of cause and effect through time and space. One of the reasons that issue is so satisfying is because it speaks to our own experience of events — we can arrange them chronologically, but they often have connections to distant moments in time. This is the Flash as the mortals around him (or, perhaps more importantly, comics fans) experience him; sometimes out-of-order chronologically, but never emotionally. With the Flash 7, Francis Manapul and Brian Buccellato set out to do something much more ambitious, as they put the burden of cause on our hero without any real understanding of the effect. Continue reading
Today, Drew and Patrick are discussing the Flash 6, originally released February 22nd, 2012.
Drew: Barry Allen has a strange relationship with time. It’s the essence of his character; he moves (and thinks) fast enough for issues of cause and effect to not matter to him in the same way they do for us. The complexity of that relationship increases exponentially when time travel is added to the mix, breaking down the meaning of cause and effect altogether. Francis Manapul and Brian Buccellato have done a great job introducing these elements without giving Barry absolute control over time. The EMP blast from the previous few issues addresses these complications dramatically, but issue 6 is told in a non-linear fashion, allowing Manapul and Buccellato to address the issue of time travel thematically. I’m going to re-shuffle the story into chronological order for the sake of clarity (a la our Batwoman 6 write-up), but understand that the story is arranged in LOST-style flashbacks to reveal the causes of events after the effect has been established. Continue reading
Retcon Punch 