If you have a copy of The Flash #200 from a couple of years ago, go and grab it. As Scott Kolin’s last issue of The Flash, it’s the perfect example of his clean, thin line art style from that period. His linework was so precise, clean and calculated as he rendered Wally West’s world with such a high degree of clarity. Jim Sinclair’s bright and vivid colors added to the mood of that world. Wally West’s Central City wasn’t dark Gotham or futuristic Metropolis. With Kolins and Sinclair providing the visuals, The Flash and Central City were the bright parts of the DC universe, where almost anything could and usually did happen. But no matter what, the Flash was there to protect his city and his friends.
Now grab your copy of Final Crisis: Rogue’s Revenge #1 and turn to the first page. What a difference a few years can make. Kolins’s is back but his art is much heavier now, even dirtier. Sinclair’s bright colors have been replaced by Dave McCaig’s murkier tones. Even the characters, the Rogues, feel heavier as if they have been burdened with the weight of the world. Where Kolin’s first run was about brightness and hope, this return is about the loss of that hope. You see, the Rogues did something very, very bad. They broke their own cardinal rule: they killed a speedster.
Scott Kolins’s artwork perfectly matches the tone of Geoff Johns’s story. Like Kolins, Johns is making his return to Central City and the Rogues, the Flash villains that played a large part during their run on The Flash. A lot has happened since the each left the title: Wally and his wife had twins, Wally disappeared during Infinite Crisis while fighting Superboy Prime, Bart Allen became the latest Flash and the Rogue’s killed Bart just before Wally and the family returned. But the Rogues didn’t act on their own. Depending on who you listen to, they were either tricked or ordered to kill Bart by another evil speedster called Inertia. Since then, the Rogues have gone underground, realizing that you don’t easily get away with killing a hero, particularly on who is a speedster.
Rogue’s Revenge is the beginning of the perfect revenge story. You’ve got a group of characters who think they’ve been lied to and cheated. Now they want to just totally disappear but first they need to get the guy who crossed them before they fade into the backdrop. Johns did a lot to develop the Rogues during his run, focusing in on the leader Captain Cold. Cold is the type of mercenary that may be evil but he has his own sets of morals and rules that are the most important thing to him. As their ringleader, Mirror Master, Heat Wave and Weather Wizard have all sort of adapted Mirror Master’s rules.
Johns’s story is strongest when his concentrates on the four Rogues, a strange band of brothers that have grown to need each other more than most teams do. When focused on these four, the story has a purpose and direction but they are only the focus for the first half of the issue. Since the full title is Final Crisis: Rogue’s Revenge, this book has to have its obligatory Libra scene which is almost like every other Libra scene up to now: Libra spouting criminal philosophy to a gathering of villainous onlookers. The scene may help to build up the Rogues-against-the-world feeling to the book but ends up being too generic to lay those seeds. Luckily the ending comes back around to a couple of more Flash villains who happen to be two speedsters, Inertia and Zoom.
Rogues’s Revenge is a Flash book similar to the way that the late and lamented Gotham Central was a Batman book. None of the Flashes really appear in this issue other than through one or two flashbacks. Instead, they permeate every page with the threat and the promise of a Flash– that mixture of eternal hope that a Flash brings mixed with the dread that the Rogue’s feel about facing him. The book is about a world where the Flash exists without focusing on that specific character. Instead it turns the bad guys into the good guys for a story as we root for them and their desire to just fade away.
Geoff Johns and Scott Kolins’s original run on The Flash stressed the joy and hope that exists in the character and in his series. Even the spotlights on the Rogues showed how they weren’t psychos or would-be world rulers but just incredibly mixed up people. Johns and Kolins’s return shows how everything can go wrong and may even be questioning was it ever really all right. A Flash is dead, the Rogue’s are on the run and everyone from heroes to villains want a piece of them. For the Rogue’s can it ever be right again?
Final Crisis: Rogue’s Revenge #1
Written by: Geoff Johns
Art by: Scott Kolins
Lettered by: Nick J. Napolitano
Colored by: Dave McCaig
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1 response so far ↓
1 Maurice Kane // Jul 21, 2008 at 4:16 pm
This is why I buy comics! Whether one is discussing Barry Allen, Wally West, or Bart Allen, the Flash’ s Rogues Gallery is the best team or alliance of villains in any comic series or company; They are more fully fleshed out and developed as individuals and as people who, for all their ethical blind spots (to phrase it mildly), have a genuine affection for each other despite their conflicts and disagreements. This is better and more consistently interesting male-bonding than any “Wedding Crashers” or “Red Heat”or “Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid”. In fact, they’re basically members of the supporting cast of any Flash series and sometimes the most likeable!
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