Flashpoint #5 – Review

By: Geoff Johns (writer), Andy Kubert (penciller), Sandra Hope & Jesse Delperdang (inkers), Alex Sinclair (colorist)

The Story: The Flash realizes sometimes it’s better to just start from square one.

The Review: And so we come to the end.  But what exactly is ending?  A misdirected war between races?  The atrocious perversion of an entire universe?  The tenuous existence of those brought forth in that universe?  A whole era of comics history?  The answer, of course, is all of those at the same time.  For those reasons, this final issue should be a testament to the last few decades of DC storytelling, and those same reasons assure that this final issue is anything but.

The war between Atlantis and the Amazons, by itself, deserved much greater focus from this series than it got.  As the major motivation for Barry to make things right, and as the most pressing conflict for pretty much every character besides Barry, it should’ve had more time to expand to critical proportions, to convince us of how dire the situation truly is.  Johns betted the tie-ins would somehow supply this missing tension, and that wager gets defeated big time.

Many of us probably assumed, with the appearance of Zoom at the end of last issue, that we knew who brought this mess into being.  But as Zoom himself crows, the real person responsible is actually a little closer to home.  Most of these revelations get told through rambling dialogue in the middle of a heated battle (and you all know how fun those can be), and in the midst of all that chaos, it seems a weak attempt to add one more “twist” to the story.