My name is Eric Burns-White, and I have almost always hated Barry Allen.
My name is Eric Burns-White, and I have almost always hated Barry Allen.
This is, believe it or not, not a hatchet job on the character. You’ll see. Though I should mention that there will be spoilers for… well, the last seventy odd years of the Flash in pretty much every incarnation. Just for the record.
Hate is, perhaps, too strong a word. Honestly, that was always the crux of the problem with Barry Allen. It was hard to feel strongly about him, because he was only barely a character. He was a series of aphorisms and science lessons applied badly or broken on the very next page. In a cosm that formed the foundation of our understanding of what a hero even was, Barry Allen lacked enough of a foundation to care.
As perhaps best put by David Willis, Barry Allen was a stunningly boring “white Republican” — which, given he came to prominence in the tumultuous, chaotic, and very not Republican 60′s, is far more of an indictment than you might think.
I pause, because some Republicans felt offended at the time that Willis had implied it was bad to be Republican. This wasn’t actually about Barry Allen’s politics, because for Barry Allen to have politics he’d actually have to have enough of a character to possess a political opinion. Barry Allen wasn’t really a Republican — he was a caricature of the Upstanding Citizen, right at the time when those caricatures were letting Marvel stomp all over DC.
In a world of shaggier and shaggier hair, Barry kept a crew-cut. In a world where authority was increasingly questioned, Spider-Man and Marvel Comics underscored the power of the human flaw and corruption from above was a trope across comics and society as a whole, Barry Allen worked for the police. In a world where Allen’s equally old-school superheroic conservative friend Hal Jordan found himself thrown into a now legendary story alongside his radical pal Oliver Queen, finding America, hope, despair, drugs and truth in a beat up old truck, Barry Allen foiled the Mirror Master and explained to kids that the speed of light was the fastest anything could go — followed by running faster than light one page later. Because of a reason.
In a world where the Legion of Super-Heroes were written by an actual teenager and began to have teenaged conflicts and teenaged dialogue… where Batman was portrayed at first as silly-60′s-Batmania and then as the Jim Aparo-drawn resurgence of the dark power of what Batman really was in our consciousness… Barry Allen stayed exactly the same.
In the ever-so-mod 70′s, Barry Allen flirted with Robert Redford hair and teased at character development, but nothing really stuck. Which makes sense, honestly, given he was essentially the most powerful being on the planet. And yes, I count Superman in that. Anyone who ever thought “geez, Superman’s too strong, he can’t ever lose in a fight — he’s boring! What’s his point?” missed the actual point of Superman, who ‘lost’ every time his power had to solve the problem instead of finding a way to help us solve it ourselves. But Barry Allen? Barry was more powerful than Superman. He could move at seemingly infinite velocity with seeming infinite reserves of power. He could run up any wall, unravel tornados and tidal waves, vibrate anything apart and then vibrate even more so he could walk through it. Of course no character development stuck to him — he vibrated straight through it without even leaving the wind in his wake.
And unlike Superman? Barry Allen was straight up fighting crime. He was all-powerful, un-conflictable, un-developable and just. Plain. Dull.
And when we hit the 80s and actual Republicanism and Conservatism was on the rise, Barry Allen was… not on the rise with it. He wasn’t a small government conservative, or a crusader against the Soviet bloc, or a State’s rights advocate, or anything like that. He was bland.
I know. I was there. I read everything on the newsstand. And Barry? Didn’t interest me even slightly. In fact, he was so bland they killed his wife, then had him kill the Reverse-Flash, then put him on trial, and then cancelled his book anyway.
And then, in Crisis on Infinite-Earths, Barry Allen died.
And for the first time, I actually liked Barry Allen.
Oh, I don’t mean I took pleasure in his dying in the comic. Honestly, it was a wrenching scene — one where I could truly empathize with the man who was outrunning existence itself, to save reality and those he loved. But in Barry Allen’s death DC gained its first true Patron Saint. More than Ferro Lad, Supergirl or any other comics death before him, Barry Allen’s death symbolized the evolution of comics… and the shining ideal that modern, flawed heroes could look up to. Every weakness as a character that Barry Allen had in life became a strength in his death. He was the hero who always tried, who only did good, who wanted the best for everyone, who never misused his power, who never hurt anyone intentionally, who never asked for recompense or even credit, who never stopped trying.
And who died so that everyone could live. Screw the Superman Messianic metaphor. Barry Allen lived a perfect life and then died in place of the entire multiverse. Boom. Drop the mike.
And DC leveraged this beautifully, thanks to Barry’s successor. Wally West. The sidekick who became the hero… and who had to live up to the impossible ideal at the same time.
Wally West was, in one sense, the perfect 80′s superhero — at first selfish, self-centered and self-pitying — having come off of one run where he walked away from the Teen Titans because he didn’t think they paid him enough attention, only to have his mentor die on him. Early on, he essentially charged for his services. He won the lottery. He lived in 80′s success — though despite having millions he essentially moved in with his mother. And the two lost everything in the process.
West evolved further, going from the perfect 80′s hero to the perfect Generation X 90′s hero. If Barry Allen was the best of the Baby Boomers (or even the Greatest Generation), Wally West was a slacker trying to live up to it. And they played off that. Wally constantly questioned himself, and compared himself to his martyred uncle and mentor. In one of my favorite quiet stories of the era, he’s talking to his therapist (who before then had been played for mean laughs), and talking about how he couldn’t possibly live up to Barry Allen.
The therapist begins to talk trash about Barry Allen — how he was a hardass who was always running people down. Wally comes to his defense, and the therapist turns it back on him. If Barry Allen was such a great guy, who believed the best of everyone, why do you feel like you’ve failed him?
The story counterpointed off of Rudyard Kipling’s If, which is one of the greatest paeans to Macho and impossible ideals ever written. The story was powerful and brought the reader back around to the strength of Barry Allen and his presence in Wally West’s life. An inspiration who was also a millstone.
And right about this story, I started to really like Barry Allen. Though the second story in the annual — Barry Allen’s origin story — reminded me why I hated him so much in the first place. Smug bastard.
This aspect of Barry-Allen-As-Standard-Bearer came to a head in one of the best comic book story arcs I’ve ever read, “The Return of Barry Allen,” in The Flash (Vol.2) #73–79. In this truly amazing story, Wally West sees his uncle, Barry Allen, reappear after seemingly being dead for so long. West and his supporting cast — who included Jay Garrick, the original Flash — struggle at first to believe this miracle, but slowly come around. Here he was, in all his too-good-to-be-true glory. Barry Allen.
The Flash.
Leaving Wally West to feel — after years upon years of struggling to become the Flash and live up to Barry’s legacy — like he was back to being plain old Kid Flash, the fastest man alive unless you counted Barry, who was so, so much faster than Wally — and who had all the wind-bending, vibrating-molecules, pre-Crisis omnipotence the Flash had always had, while Wally was mostly a guy who ran pretty fast and had to eat a lot of protein bars.
And then, it all came unravelled. Barry started to act strangely. He demanded people acknowledge him as the true Flash. He got less and less stable — less and less perfect in comparison to the heroic ideal people remembered. And in a shocking and climactic moment, he literally left Wally West to die, just to make sure no pretenders to the throne of the Flash remained.
Needless to say, it wasn’t really Barry Allen. It was Eobard Thawne — the Reverse Flash — who had come back from the dead.
It was actually brilliant how they pulled it off. Thawne is a time traveler, you see — he came back from the distant future and from day one bedeviled Barry Allen as his evil opposite. He (apparently) killed Iris Allen, Barry’s wife and true love. He was going to do the same to Barry’s fiancee, only Barry killed him first (and went on trial for it — I mentioned all that above. This was the last ditch effort DC made at making Barry Allen not dull as paint, and it failed.
Seriously. Refrigerating Iris Allen wasn’t enough to make Barry Allen interesting at the time. But I digress.
Mark Waid, the writer of “The Return of Barry Allen,” managed to pull off kind of an astounding feat with this story — Thawne had been as dull as Barry Allen before this. Just like was written on the tin, Thawne was evil where Barry was good — the Reverse Flash, in every ethical and moral way. However, there had never really been given a good reason for this. Why would a far-future man go back in time and torment a guy who was just a historical figure as far as he was concerned? Even Abra Kadabra, the other time traveling supervillain in Barry Allen’s Rogues Gallery, was motivated by greed. Thawne just… hated. It would be like John Cena discovered time travel and used it to go back to Ancient Mythic Greece and become Anti-Perseus, the evil reverse Perseus who fought against Perseus while Perseus was trying to beat Medusa and save Andromeda. John Cena would have no reason to do this.
Mark Waid, after decades of the character’s existence, actually gave him a reason. He made Thawne a fanboy.
Seriously, more than a decade before DC’s ridiculously vitriolic attempt to castigate their fanbase through the creation of Superboy-Prime, Mark Waid had done the same thing but right. In the 25th Century, young Eobard Thawne idolized the legendary Flash — the real one, not that dumb Jay Garrick or that unworthy Wally West or anyone else who came after! He collected memorabilia. He used futuristic science to give him superspeed equal to Barry Allen’s.
And, because he was psychotic, he killed a guy who wanted more money for Barry Allen’s actual Cosmic Treadmill than Thawne had. Make no mistake, fanboy Eobard Thawne was a villain’s villain even then. He just thought he was the ultimate Flash fan.
Thawne even used plastic surgery to change his appearance until he looked just like his hero. Think about it. At this point, he looked just like his idol. He had all his idol’s powers. And with the Cosmic Treadmill, he could even go back in time and meet his idol, and have him sign his copy of Barry Allen’s biography. And they could be best friends and fight crime.
Yeah. I said fanboy above, in describing Thawne. That wasn’t quite accurate. Thawne was an obsessed stalker. Not nearly the same thing.
Anyway, as it turns out, trying to use a 500 year old treadmill-based time machine without knowing how it worked or how to fix or maintain it turned out to be a bad idea. Thawne was thrown back in time all right — but the stress tore his mind to shreds (along with the Flash costume he was wearing). Confused, he wandered into the Flash museum, and discovered he’d missed — he’d ended up years after Barry Allen’s death. And what was worse… he discovered the exhibit in the Flash Museum that depicted Barry Allen killing Eobard Thawne. Barry Allen’s ultimate fan, already psychotic, was confronted with his idol killing him as established historical fact.
It wasn’t a great death, either. Barry Allen literally broke his neck while they were both running. And yet he was still dull as paint. I don’t know how that was possible, but it was.
Confronted with a horrible reality, Thawne fell back into fantasy. In his head, already looking like Barry Allen, he became Barry Allen. He returned as Barry Allen. He was lionized and embraced as Barry Allen.
But he wasn’t Barry Allen. He couldn’t live up to Barry Allen’s ideal. And it all fell apart for him. And for Wally West — the sidekick who had been trying so hard to live up to his mentor — Thawne became his nightmare. The man who would destroy Barry Allen’s legacy, unless Wally West could finally embrace his destiny, and become the Fastest Man Alive, even if that meant running faster than Barry Allen ever did.
It was beautiful. It was epic. It was grand. And I loved every page of it.
I loved Barry Allen.
Right in the middle of all this, by the way, my second iteration of Beloved Barry Allen appeared: John Wesley Shipp as Barry Allen in 1990's The Flash. Here was a television show that tried to bring high speed superheroics to television. And I admit it — I loved it. I thought Shipp was perfect as Barry Allen. I loved (and love) Amanda Pays as Tina McGee — one of Wally West’s romantic interests, but eh. I loved the villain of the week thing. I loved the show.
But… and it’s hard to admit this… the show had flaws.
Not in the casting. Like I said, the cast was pitch perfect. Even the villains were perfect. But the tone was… inconsistant. It had numerous callbacks to the Tim Burton Batman movies (right down to a Danny Elfman theme song and a gothic-meets-art-deco design philosophy), but rather than embrace the darker edge of heroism, it felt almost 60's Batmania-esque in its execution. Still. I loved it. And I loved Barry Allen, the archetypical square jawed good guy hero, as only John Wesley Shipp could make him.
Between that show, the Mark Waid comics run, the continued leveraging of St. Barry of Central City and my own nostalgia for my youth, it seemed like I’d love Barry Allen forever.
And then, back in 2008, they really did bring Barry Allen back to life.
Why? Because they’d brought Hal Jordan back to life before that and it worked out, and they’d lost steam with Wally West (who at this point was married with twins) and didn’t know what to do with West’s own Kid Flash/successor (Bart Allen —who was incredibly fun and who was destined to be ‘The Flash’ on television’s Smallville, but I digress). And DC head Dan DiDio came right out and admitted he had never seen anyone else as being the real Flash anyhow.
And it sucked. Hard. Because for decades, Wally West had been the Flash, and had built up his own storylines and Rogues and had actually outdone his Mentor, becoming the Flash in truth. Hell, Wally West was the Flash in the DC Animated Universe, with appearances on Superman: The Animated Series and a main role in Justice League and Justice League Unlimited. For more than one generation of comics and superhero fans, Wally West was the Flash. Barry Allen? Only existed to be an ideal.
Having come back to life? Barry Allen quickly became terrible all over again. And, just like before, they desperately tried to find a way to make him interesting. That attempt was Flashpoint, where Barry Allen destroyed the entire multiverse, wiped Wally West (and the mentor form of Jay Garrick) from all of history, and created the New 52.
Seriously. Flashpoint took the very thing that Barry Allen sacrificed his life to prevent in Crisis on Infinite Earths and made him the agent that caused it. Barry Allen, in the New 52 — the current version — has consigned untold trillions of people to utter universal annihilation and indirectly set the stage for Marvel’s complete domination of DC again. It’s like a universal law. Barry Allen appears in a monthly Flash comic, and Marvel takes over the zeitgeist.
I hate Barry Allen.
I hate Barry Allen.
I’ve read the current comic, and I hate Barry Allen. I want to know when his untold victims will get justice. I want to know when someone will punch him in his smug face. I want to know what gives him the gall to — when confronted with the evidence that one of the Green Lanterns of Earth has been killed — his immediate response is to hope it was Guy Gardner. He doesn’t even do Barry Allen well.
And it pissed me off that that guy was going to get his own television series. Seriously. Nerd rage. You know the kind.
I love The Flash.
I love it so, so much. I love it the way I hoped I would love Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. or Daredevil. I love it more than I ever loved Smallville, which I thought was a darned good show.
I love it more than John Wesley Shipp’s The Flash. In no small part because Shipp, Pays (and yes, Mark Hamill and the police chief from the old show) are all in it, of course.
Honestly, it may be my favorite live action superhero show, ever. Including Shazam!, which had the advantage of coming on when I was six years old.
And while there are a lot of reasons why I love the show — the writing, the character banter, the growing story arcs, the execution of ‘villain of the week,’ any moment Harrison Wells is on screen, any moment Joe West is on screen, any moment Cisco is on screen — chief among them is the cold, hard, ineffable fact that I absolutely love Barry Allen… for the one reason I would never have expected I would love Barry Allen.I love The Flash’s Barry Allen, as portrayed by Grant Gustin, because he is absolutely true to the character of Barry Allen, as portrayed in DC comics dating back to 1958.
Seriously.
In a cultural context where heroes are almost universally portrayed as flawed and tarnished, where motivations are assumed to be sinister unless proven otherwise, where ‘heroes’ regularly kill their enemies all Dirty-Harry style, where Superman — Superman — breaks the neck of his enemy after being responsible for untold destruction and being set up as the villain of the next movie (seriously, that trailer’s not even trying to make Superman want to help people), Barry Allen has been given unimaginable power, which he has universally used to try to help people as best he can at all times. He wants to clear his father’s name, yes, but he also wants to save lives. To fight crime. To put himself in harm’s way to protect others. When one of his enemies — an actual bully who tormented him in grade school — is sacrificed by Wells’s cold pragmatism, Barry is outraged and aghast. “He didn’t deserve to die!” he screams — not quite saying “not to protect me — I was supposed to protect him!” Despite a tragic past, Barry Allen is a hero because it’s the right thing to do, period.
And he’s a doof. He’s loveable. When he screws up, he feels badly. He tries to make it better. He tries to be the better man. He tries to see the good in everyone. He tries to save everyone. He tries.
And I love that. Especially because we need that, right now.
When Barry Allen was so terrible back in the sixties, he was just yet another hero in a suit running around doing good deeds without a real personality. He was an also-ran. When Barry Allen returned from the dead in the 2000's, he came across as a combination of nostalgia and a repudiation of decades of heroism and heroic stories told about Wally West. He was, weirdly enough, a usurper. And when we look at the New 52? C’mon. Whoever that guy is, he’s not Barry Allen.
But right now, on TV? We don’t have anyone else quite like Barry Allen. The shift of medium makes the cultural context rich where before it was bland. The shift of time and place makes the boring lack of attribute of the 50's and 60's into a singular voice in the 2010's. If the Marvel Cinematic universe is as much about Captain America’s disillusionment with the modern era and Iron Man’s slow appreciation of the Greatest Generation’s ideals, then Barry Allen stands apart as a modern man with the sensibility we all wish we had: do right by others, always. Don’t misuse what you’re given. Try to help. Save people, instead of hurting them.
I love Barry Allen on that show, because despite what I said above (I keep doing that), he’s not the Barry Allen of the 50's and 60's. He’s not the Barry Allen of the 70's or the 2010's, either.
Instead, he’s the Barry Allen of the 80's and 90's. You know. The dead guy.
Only he’s not inspiring hope and behavior by his sacrifice. He’s inspiring it by how he lives.
I’m not the fastest man alive. I’m probably a contender for slowest. But when Grant Gustin runs as fast and hard as he can, throwing everything he’s got into it, because even a nanosecond’s delay could mean someone could get hurt — and even if it means he’s going to get hit by an ice beam or something equally terrible — my heart races. For that moment, I want to be there. I want to be him.
And since I can’t, I have to settle for just… trying to be more like him. Trying to treat people better. Trying to see the good in others.
I’m a middle aged Gen-X internet geek, like so many others. But despite my cynicism and my jaded outlook, this television superhero portrayed by a man almost half my age inspires me to be a better person — or at least to try.
And then, when I see a video of the cast of The Flash at Paleyfest, and they solicit questions from a packed audience, and a little boy — a little boy — uses his time to recite, note perfect, the opening to the show… and declare to Grant Gustin that he’ll always be his Flash…
Well, just watch:
I tear up. Because this — this is what superheroes were for me when I was that little boy’s age. Somewhere along the line, that stopped happening. Instead, they became what media companies thought middle aged men like me wanted. And sometimes that turns into great comics, or movies, or shows, or whatever.
But moments like this? They’re rare on the ground. And it happened because of great actors and writers and directors and producers.
And it happened because someone brought a dull as paint hero from the 60's to television, and brought everything that makes all heroes great with him.
My name is Eric Burns-White. And I love Barry Allen.
Eric Burns-White has been writing on the Internet since the 80's. Usually, superheroes have been involved. Generally, he has not been kind to Barry Allen. His fiction can generally be found at Banter Latte. His essays and other stuff sometimes show up at Websnark.
