In 2014, it’s getting pretty difficult to live without superheroes being an occasional part of your media consumption. It’s hardly just comics anymore, as superhero movies, TV shows, video games, animated series and much more are popping up perpetually, and the next several years look to only see that frequency increase. In the process, some comic fans and pundits are lamenting this, either saying we should focus on the comics or that there is simply too much superhero related media.
I am not one of those people.
Or, at least, as long as they’re good. To me, a good story is a good story. I’m not going to begrudge something’s existence simply because it happens to be adapted from a comic book, and that there is “too much of it”. If it’s good, it’s worthwhile. There are a lot of comics I don’t buy because they aren’t of a sufficient quality. There are some movies or TV shows adapted from comics that I don’t enjoy for the same reason. But I look at comic adaptations as something akin to an Elseworlds tale, giving us an angle on a familiar story that we hadn’t seen before, and I’m open to whatever they do as long as it works. But sometimes I – like anyone – can be skeptical about what we see in advance.
And I was very, very skeptical of TV’s “The Flash”. I mean, a guy from “Glee” as the lead? The CW airing it? Cheesy images coming out from onlookers spying on the production? As a person who loves The Flash, or at least at his best, I wasn’t sure how I felt about how this show was coming together. But I’m more than willing to give anything a try, and give it a try I did.
I couldn’t be more happy that I did.
I’ve wrote about this before, but the experience I’m most eager to have when reading superhero comics is one that delivers the boundless enthusiasm I had when I read them as a youth. When I was a kid, I felt the excitement and fun and fear and anguish of Marvel and DC’s comics so much more, and it was always hard to decide whether or not that was because they stopped producing comics that generated those feelings in me or that, as I aged, I just lost the capacity to feel that way about what I was reading. Whatever the answer was, I still enjoyed them, it was just never the same way as it was in my childhood.
Until “The Flash”.
When I sat down to watch the pilot, wearing a Flash t-shirt because that’s how I roll, I was ready for anything. What I got was a rollercoaster ride of emotions that left me quite literally squeeing and fist pumping as my wife looked on and wondered when the nut took over the nuthouse. I couldn’t help it. That pilot, and the episodes that followed, are everything I want from my superhero comic experience delivered in an unexpected form.
I wrote about how I miss good natured superheroics and stories giving reasons for why heroes fight, something that Darwyn Cooke depicted in “DC: The New Frontier” very well. It’s true, I do. That feeling is still all too rare in comics, but “The Flash” has that in spades. A big reason for that is simple: the show is “The Flash”, sure, but it’s about how Barry Allen became The Flash, and how it wasn’t his powers that made him a hero, but who he was underneath. It was a small thing, but something that made the difference in the world.
Through the first nine episodes, Greg Berlanti, Andrew Kreisberg and Geoff Johns helped build a world around the innate goodness of Allen, showing a young man who, when faced with great darkness, chose to stay on the side of light. They built a cast around him in Jesse L. Martin’s Joe West, Tom Cavanagh’s Harrison Wells, Carlos Valdes’ Cisco Ramon (secretly the best character on television), and Danielle Panabaker’s Caitlin Snow that provided not just partners-in-crimefighting, but a family as he looked to use his newfound powers for good. Sure, that didn’t always turn out well – a stunning amount of the metahumans Allen has come across so far have ended up dead – but Barry’s heart was in the right place, and it gave the show a very warm feel that is impossible not to love. It grounded it in a place that didn’t remind us of all of the darkness in the world, but of the wonder and magic that would come from someone getting superpowers.
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And the superheroics! Oh man! Whether it’s squaring off against Captain Cold, Cisco naming all of the metas, or simply seeing Barry learn about his powers, this show is filled with everything I love about the genre. The midseason finale with the fight between the Reverse Flash and Barry was a stunning example of it, and the fact that Barry was saved by Firestorm could have been cheesy, but instead, it was a joyous blast of pure deus ex machina. Not only that, but they didn’t just make characters like the Reverse Flash, Captain Cold, and others work, they made them frightening and irresistible. Sure, the formula is still more or less the freak of the week set-up that “Smallville” used to have, but it works so much better because it’s built around the boundless enthusiasm of Gustin’s Barry.
I was always a Flash fan, but personally, Wally West was my Flash and Bart Allen/Impulse was my favorite speedster. Mark Waid’s run remains my favorite to this day, and the show being Barry was part of where my skepticism came from. Can I love the show without loving the character who is its lead? But Gustin has made me love Barry, bringing out the very best of the character without any of the qualities I didn’t enjoy in the character in the comics. He’s the guiding light in a show that’s easily the most enjoyable 60 minutes of my television viewing week.
Not everything is perfect, of course, as Candice Patton’s Iris West hasn’t been given a chance to be interesting, and she hasn’t really shown that much chemistry with Barry so far either. Beyond that, Rick Cosnett’s Eddie Thawne is fun but pretty one-note for the most part and, as I said, they keep killing off metahumans. They’ve referenced it, but they don’t spend nearly enough time with Barry carb loading at superspeed in my book. But that’s not much of a list of complaints for a show that has absolutely no right being as good as it is.
And it is good. Tremendously so. I could go on and on, but it really just boils down to the fact that I adore the show. “The Flash” is everything I want from a superhero story, and in a place that I never expected to experience it: on television, or more specifically, on the CW. In a year that featured multiple events, moments that would change everything forever, character deaths, character resurrections and more, it took a TV show to help me find what I had sorely missed in my superhero comic reading experience.
