Blogotional: Comic Art

Saturday, October 13, 2007

Comic Art

Here endeth the series on speedsters, but what a place to end - the zen-master-guru of speed, Max Mercury. Max is one of those obscure characters from the distant past that DC plucked out of its multiple acquisitions over the years to put to good use in the current Flash legend.

Older than dirt, Max Mercury has served as mentor to many of the modern speedsters. He is perhaps most notable for the theory of the "speed force." I would love to find out why the comic creators came up with that idea (too much Star Wars, I think) but Max is the speedster equivalent to Yoda.

I think, and this is a purely personal theory mind you, the whole speed force thing was cooked up to account for the lighting bolts that surround the Flash in the image below. I mean, you have to admit, they look pretty doggone cool and they only started showing up in the '90's, so this being comics and all, they had to be explained.

Anyway, Max is an inveterate time traveller and has therefore adopted any number of guises through the decades, reflected in the images you see here. It can get pretty confusing, kind of like trying to make sense out of the book of Revelations.

All I can say is as long as Max does not pick up the shattered syntax of the little green guy, he is kinda cool, and I hope they keep him around for the foreseeable future.