Absolute Flash #1-3

Absolute Flash #1-3

Originally released in 2025

Written by Jeff Lemire

Art by Nick Robles

While I do plan on getting back to the Absolute series that I've already started, I want to get an introduction to each of the currently-running Absolute series first since there aren't many of them. (After this, it's just Green Lantern)  I'm going into this and Green Lantern completely blind; in the case of Batman, Martian Manhunter, and Wonder Woman, I had a vague idea of what to expect, but here, I have no clue.

Right out the gate, I'm pleasantly surprised to see that the Flash is Wally in this case.  Maybe I just haven't read the right stories, but I find Barry less interesting than Wally, though it likely helps that they did such a great job with Wally as the Flash in the DC Animated Universe show Justice League (and Justice League Unlimited).

Barry is still involved, naturally, serving as a sympathetic figure at the army base where Wally lives.  He shows Wally what he's working on, an experiment dubbed Project Olympus (not sure if that will come up in Absolute Wonder Woman, given the name), and wants Wally to work for him.  However, Wally's father, another scientist on the project who is much stricter, refuses to allow it and threatens to report Barry for even letting Wally see any of the experiments.

Some time later, Wally is being pursued by the military, including an interpretation of the Rogues (the giant boomerang was something of a giveaway)  Wally suspects that his dad sent the Rogues (I'll call them that for now until I get a name for the group - it's Captain Cold, Golden Glider, the Trickster, and Captain Boomerang) after him, but he seems to be hopping back and forth through time, or at least part of him is. (there are panels where he screams, surrounded by red versions of himself, and then it cuts back to some time earlier as he reacts in confusion)

A day beforehand, Wally stormed off from one of his father's lectures to find Barry, as Barry's the only person on the base who believed in him.  He walks in on Barry being in the middle of some kind of experiment that has catastrophic results.

We hop back and forth through time for a bit, but whatever that experiment was, it ends about as well as you'd expect Barry's silver age method of gaining powers (being doused in chemicals and struck by lightning) to end.  It's unclear what the experiment was, or how Wally was responsible for altering it (aside from maybe distracting Barry at a crucial stage, though it seemed like everything was going wrong before Wally even stepped in), but the end result is a heartbreaking one for the boy.

Issue 2 gives us a clearer idea of what happened - Wally was seemingly pulled apart, appearing one day later with super speed.  However, as far as anyone at that time knew, Wally was dead.  Rudy West, Wally's father, doesn't take it well.

However, Wally reforms to some degree before being sent back to a day in the future, and Barry's still alive, so we still have a lot to learn about what led to Barry dying and left as a skeleton.  As Wally tries to escape the Rogues, he gets a glimpse of his future, or rather, two possible futures, making for a different take on the "Flash of Two Worlds" concept.

With the Rogues unable to catch Wally, they're forced to turn to their back-up plan despite their extreme reluctance.  They must unleash Grodd.

He's... not as physically intimidating as his main version, that's for sure.

At the start of issue three, we get a more direct flashback of what happened to Barry, and it isn't pretty; Wally connected with Barry somehow when his powers first manifested, and as he ran to get away from Fort Fox, Barry was dragged behind him, seemingly pulling him through time.  Whether it will turn out that Barry lives on in some form is unclear (Barry could have switched places with a version from the alternate destroyed future that Wally saw, for all we know), but he's left looking like a rotting corpse by the end of Wally's relatively short run.

In the present, I know that Grodd is going to be powerful in spite of his appearance (it's Grodd we're talking about here, an immensely powerful psychic), but he's so hard to take seriously like this.  Characters making comments like "we have deployed the monkey" make it even funnier to me.  The book briefly numbers "moments of connection" that Wally makes (with number 1 being Barry, number 2 being Grodd, and number 3 being his late mother), which is clearly building up to something.

Wally and Grodd see each other's memories, which is enough to get them to sympathize with each other and team up.  I don't know what the Rogues were expecting when they let Grodd loose, but it definitely wasn't this.

With Grodd on his side, Wally escapes, burying Barry before taking the suit that Barry wore (which must be one-size-fits-all, given that Wally is much, much shorter than Barry) and modifying it somehow for it to be his costume. (it's unclear how he did it, but hey, it makes for a good final image)

This book isn't as dark as the other Absolute stories, despite Barry's demise. (it's hard to feel like it's completely serious when characters say things like "the monkey's gone rogue!" and Wally has said psychic monkey as a sidekick/partner)  The book feels like a large metaphor for Wally having his whole future ahead of him and lots of potential to change the world, for better or for worse.  It seems obvious that he's not going to wind up the deformed destroyer of the world that was shown in one timeline, but maybe that could be the Absolute adaptation of the Reverse Flash. (rather than being Eobard Thawne, it could be an alternate version of Wally West from the reverse side of the same coin)  Or maybe I'm reading too much into it; we'll see how it goes.