Saturday, April 14, 2007
Comic Art
Continuing the every other week look at speedsters, today we turn our attention to an evil nemesis of a speedster, the Reverse Flash. This is one of the those characters that had enormous juvenile appeal, but has survived as a much loved part of the Flash story.The juvenile appeal is, of course, the color-reversal, evil twin thing, but I think the color reversal is the secret to the general appeal as well. As with sidekick, Kid Flash, the yellow caught your eye as a kid and just had that "cool" factor. As the comics grew up with us, this was simply a character we wanted to come along for the ride.
The story is simple enough, Professor Zoom in the future uses Barry Allen's costume from a museum to give himself the Flash powers then comes back into the past to take Flash's glory. Which may also explain part of the appeal. I don't know why, but everybody wants to be the Flash. Other heros there was always somebody that wanted to be them, but it seemed like everybody wanted to be the Flash. Maybe it was because any kid that into comics was gonna be slow and therefore picked on a bit....
Worth noting in this page from the Silver Age are two things. First note the extensive use of narration boxes in the panels - they are there because of the second thing to note - the very stilted nature of the drawings themselves. The narration was there to convey the action that the drawings could not. It is not that artists of the Silver Age were less capable, but that the technology did not permit the reproduction of art that would convey action like it can now.I miss the old days to some extent. One must work very hard to read a comic now, looking at all images closely to follow the story. In the old days, with pages like this you essentially read the story with illustrations. It is higher art these days, but with bifocals, it is not easy for me to take in the art like it should be. I often find myself panning and scanning with my head which means I never get the full impact of the image and the story is harder for me to follow.
And here you thought it was simple kid stuff.
Related Tags: comics, comic books, comic art, speedsters, Reverse Flash
