Flashpoint #3 – Review

 

By: Geoff Johns (writer), Andy Kubert (penciller), Sandra Hope (inker), Alex Sinclair (colorist)

The Story: Huh…  So this is Superman.  He’s shorter than I imagined.

The Review: There are essentially two important conflicts driving the events in Flashpoint: you have Reverse Flash’s alterations to reality, the consequences of which remain unclear; and you also have the oncoming final blowout between Aquaman and Wonder Woman, which threatens the altered Earth.  Johns has tried to give equal weight to both plotlines, but with mixed results.

It’s pretty clear Johns has relegated the Amazon-Atlantean brouhaha to second banana in the grand scheme of this series.  Maybe he assumes we’re reading more of the clarifying tie-ins than I suspect most of us actually are, because he only drops in developments on the war front through brief, interstitial asides.  Instead of letting us see things reach a fever pitch, he has Lois Lane cipher facts to us, and even then we cut away from her before it gets really interesting.

So despite Cyborg’s insistence that this war will be the end of the world, you really can’t take it all his forebodings all that seriously.  Besides the rare glimpses of devastated Europe, the war seems only to exist on the fringes of your awareness, especially since the rest of America seems (as it often does in real life) only dimly concerned about the doomsday about to visit them.

The rest of the issue once again centers on Barry striving to put right what once went wrong, in possibly the most ludicrous manner possible.  Only in comics could you possibly be expected to even consider suspending your belief enough to accept that after frying himself in his first attempt to regain his powers, Barry wants to have another go.  And here’s the even crazier part: spoiler alert—it works!  Why the second time around proves the charm, we don’t know.  It just has to for the story to get a move on, I guess.