Wally West IS the Flash!
27. The Flash #1 by Mike Baron and Jackson Guice
When Crisis of Infinite Earths ended, it seemed to make clear that Wally West had inherited Barry Allen’s legacy as the Flash. As a reader that didn’t pick up an issue of Wally’s series until nearly issue one hundred, I was one of many people that had a particular view of the character and the series. Wally West’s run as the Flash defined the post-Crisis era in a lot of ways.
It’s crazy it took fourteen months from the end of Crisis until the first issue of Wally’s series. Like Man of Steel or Suicide Squad, it seemed clear DC editorial looked outside their regular players to find the creative team. At this point in his career, writer Mike Baron’s only DC work was years earlier on the final issues of Atari Force. Like John Ostrander, he was known for his work at First Comics, specifically on Nexus and Badger, and still months away from his launch of the Punisher ongoing at Marvel. Penciler Jackson Guice was a Marvel guy, with work on X-Factor and New Mutants before taking on the Flash. Unlike those aforementioned titles, neither creator would stick around all that long. Guice won’t last out the first year, while Baron didn’t stick around too much after his departure.
The first issue of the book does a lot to show us why that might be. The one thing neither writer nor…
