The Flash #796 // Review
All they have to do is make it to the tower and take out the transmitter. If Barry Allen and his colleagues can do that much, they’ll defeat the villains. It’s going to take some bravery and a hell of a lot of ingenuity, but there’s a good chance of success in The Flash #793. Writer Jeremy Adams puts together a fun superhero team ensemble dynamic with the aid of artist Roger Cruz and inker Wellington Dias. Colorist Luis Guerrero lends vibrant depth to the visuals in a largely satisfying trip from cover to cover with a whole lot of Flashes.
It’s the speed force. The villains in question are using people with a connection to the speed force to run their tech. Like batteries. Or...engines or something. Harness a few super speedsters, and you’ve got really advanced tech. The one thing that Barry Allen and company have that the villains don’t have? An organic connection to the speed force that’s wielded just a bit more masterfully than a bunch of techies from another world. It’s only a few of them against a well-tuned army of villains, but a group of the most powerful speedsters in the DC Universe will be hard for anyone to beat.
Adams leaps right into the issue with a hell of a lot of exposition that kind of overwhelms the reader. One need not be intimately familiar with everything in the DC Universe to follow what’s going on. Clearly, the heroes are in over their heads and guessing. There’s that sense of intrepid danger from ill-understood rivals who would think nothing of using a human being to power advanced tech, so the stakes are clearly defined in a well-modulated action sequence featuring many different Flashes of many different personalities.
More than simply having different personalities, each of the Flashes has a distinct connection to the speed force and a distinct way of approaching their powers. Most artists would get lost in defining each character by costume alone, but Cruz and Dias give each of the Flashes a subtly different posture that speaks to a unique personality. That level of detail adds a rich depth to the visual world of the story, which is absolutely essential to overcoming the conceptual mass of the weird science that Adams is working with. Guerrero’s color brings that visual reality to life with a great deal of depth...even when there’s little more in the background than speed lines.
With so many characters to be juggled in and amidst the central conflict, it’s some kind of miracle that Adams and company manage to keep it all together in a way that feels at all coherent, let alone...fun. The multi-generational Flash team is unlikely to continue working together forever, but Adams and company make it all so enjoyable that it’s difficult to imagine the current incarnation of the hero working any other way. It’s just too much fun like this.
