Written and Illustrated by Scott Kolins
FLASH FACT! He loves someone he should not!
As a longtime fan of The Flash’s rogues, this was the Flashpoint tie-in that I was looking forward to most. Scott Kolins hasn’t exactly proven himself to me as a great writer, but as the primary artistduring Geoff Johns’ run on The Flash, he has experienced firsthand how these characters work, so I was willing to give him a chance with this series. Follow the cut to see if he proved himself.
When most people say that they love The Rogues, what they’re really saying is that they love Captain Cold. I mean, yes, Mirror Master is pretty cool, as are Weather Wizard and Pied Piper (and it’s quite amazing that enough writers have made these characters interesting enough that I don’t feel silly saying this), but Leonard Snart is an interesting character in that despite his extremely gruff personality and the fact that he is undisputedly a “bad guy,” he isn’t exactly evil. And it looks like his Flashpoint-counterpart, Citizen Cold, has the same sort of thing going for him. Yeah, he might save the day every now and then, but he certainly isn’t a good guy. So far, the most notable good/evil swaps – that is, Aquaman and Wonder Woman – seem neat, but not exactly true to the character. In this issue, though, Kolins shows us that while Leonard might be taking his life in a different direction, he’s definitely still the same person.
As I said before, I hadn’t really gotten a good gauge of Kolins’ ability as a writer before this issue, but I was pretty pleased with the writing in this issue. Most of what he deserves accolades for coincide with his skill as an artist. After years of working as a sequential artist, Kolins knows how to layout an issue on a page-by-page, panel-by-panel basis quite well. Every panel in each individual “scene” leads into the other quite well, giving the book a solid sense of flow. Now, I suppose it sounds like I’ve drifted off into art land when I set out to talk about writing, but I really haven’t. What Kolins is doing here is demonstrating that he knows exactly how to write with panels, which any good writer in comics needs to be able to do. There are plenty of great writers out there that have released comics with great ideas behind them but have failed to receive acclaim due to the simple fact that the writer didn’t know how to translate their ideas to the visual medium. As a great sequential artist, though, Scott Kolins avoids this fate.
In terms of story, though, Kolins falls a little bit short. But only a little bit! His dialogue is fine and dandy, and the actual story does seem neat. I’m not contradicting myself, I promise. The problem is that while Kolins is definitely able to think on that previously mentioned page-by-page, panel-by-panel basis, I’m not sure if he’s thinking on an issue-by-issue basis quite as well. He has dropped a few different plot points that are sure to be interesting, but we have yet to see much of a hint as to how they’re going to collide – and as smart readers, we know that they are going to, eventually. The cliffhanger at the end is just your standard “oh no, something bad has happened to somebody, I wonder what’s going to happen next” sort of thing, rather than a big plot development that can pull us to the next issue on its own. Sure, I’m interested in seeing where things go, but it is more built out of my own deductions of “well, this might have something to do with that, and she is probably going to reappear here” than anything that is hinted at by the comic itself. While there is an art to keeping things secret, you need to give your readers a bit more to nibble on when you’re talking about a serialized medium like comics.
Looking at the art from a stylistic perspective, as opposed to storytelling, I have nothing but good things to say. As much as I love Francis Manapul, Kolins is the definitive Flash artist for me, and he has only been improving as time goes on. He has definitely brought in a few different stylistic methods over the years, but at the core he still has that dynamic touch to all of his figures that got me to pick up The Flash in the first place – after all, what is the Flash without dynamism? The faces in this issue in particular are extremely expressive, really accenting the more emotional points of the story. Sure, his figure drawing isn’t always perfectly on the mark, but often times what look like flubs are actually stylistic choices to better convey something in particular. As any artist knows, you have to break the rules every now and then to achieve success.
Final Verdict: 6.3 – Hold off on deciding until the next issue.
