The Flash #798 // Review
Wally got pulled from paternity leave to deal with something big at the office. And that office is a lab. And that lab belongs to a guy named Michael Holt. Wally West was just settling into a reflective moment with a growing family. Now, he’s involved in a crisis that will take him through time and space. It’s okay: he’s done this sort of thing before...and he’ll do it again in The Flash #798. Writer Jeremy Adams launches Wally and company on a new adventure with the aid of artists Fernando Pasarin, Oclair Albert, and Will Robson. Color comes to the page under the power of Matt Herms.
It’s a pretty massive device that Holt and West are dealing with. It’s a towering piece of tech that looks very, very ominous. Holt is talking with a few techies in lab coats about whether or not it will hold. One of them gives it a thirty percent shot. Another thinks that it’s more like a fifty percent shot of holding, but he’s pretty sure it’s going to rip open a black hole in time and space. Holt says that if that happens, they could probably find a superhero or two to help out...like maybe Batman or Superman. Given the fact that West and Holt are the Flash and Mr. Terrific, they’re going to be the first responders...
Adams has a remarkably solid sense of composition for the 798th issue of The Flash. The story opens with the miracle of birth with a newborn in the arms of a mother and West’s loving family. This firmly establishes an emotional foundation as West heads off to Terrific’s engineering lab with its clearly dangerous tech, which ramps up the inevitable conflict. The Flash is catapulted forward into the kind of weirdness that he tends to deal with in time and space. There are a few surprises here and there. A new story shoots off the last page into the next couple of issues. Very well-constructed. And once again, Adams is working with a large, extended ensemble. The Booster Gold variant in this issue is written with a particularly sparkling wit.
The art team handles a variety of different visual dynamics quite well. The warmth of a family in a hospital gathering around a newborn DOES have its power, but it feels almost a bit cloying with its emotional energy. That being said, a variety of different shades of drama hit the page in a variety of different ways that all seem to work. The positively overwhelming sense of the danger in Terrific’s engineering lab is made painfully clear in massive Kirby-esque, high-tech, architectural perspective renderings that launch some impressively dizzying action into place. It all works effectively.
The Flash has dealt with so much over the decades. It’s a natural place for him to find himself in as he approaches the big 800th issue milestone in the near future. Adams and company will have their work cut out for them in trying to make it all feel new. Flash has been across time and space so many times in ways that have really shaken the DC Universe. It’s going to be difficult to do it in a truly new way.
