Review: Flash Vol. 20: Time Heist trade paperback (DC Comics)

Though it’s unlikely this Flash run was going to end before the 800th issue, maybe the last volume would have been a good place to stop. Flash Vol. 19: The One-Minute War was a kicky mini-event spotlighting the whole of the Flash family; Flash Vol. 20: Time Heist, though exciting and surprising in places, just can’t rise to the same level. I am wholly unsure about what I understand to be a horror-tinged Flash title with the new team coming up next, but here at the 20th volume it very much feels like this version’s time has passed.

[Review contains spoilers]

There are a lot of reasons to like Time Heist, not the least of which is the West twins and Maxine “Animal Girl” Baker teaming up with the Super Sons — and I do mean, through time travel shenanigans, the classic young Jon Kent and Damian Wayne. It is rather fantastic, given events in a Super Sons miniseries that I never read, that young Jon is out there and available for issues like this, and I’m glad writer Jeremy Adams made this happen. (Also — Reverse Grodd!)

But the ways in which this issue is also lackluster sets the tone for the whole book. Villain Knives Maroney is able to abduct the kids because of the Eternity Mind — a sphere he just “found” that can “retrieve anything from time and space. No fuss. No muss,” never explained further, which is thin even by comic book standards. Similarly, whatever weird time-lost dimension the kids are in conveniently also houses Granny Goodness so she can conveniently also take possession of the Eternity Mind; I don’t expect great works of literature in every adventure comic, but Time Heist feels it’s not trying too hard right from the jump.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

That extends, for me at least, to the book’s art. Quite a few of the main “Time Heist” chapters start with artists like Sera Acuna, drawing manga-infused Flash kids, or the always stellar work of Fernando Pasarin — and end with Tom Derenick. Acuna’s figures have depth and movement, while the hair on Derenick’s Damian looks like it’s defying gravity, perpetually sticking straight up. Pasarin draws giant, detailed monsters; Derrick’s faces are locked in rictus, teeth bared in 1990s-esque fashion. It’s all Adams' writing, but the sheer difference between the great scenes of Omega-Bam-Man and Gold Beetle fighting monsters and the humdrum scenes of Flash fighting Granny Goodness (arguably the more important plot) demonstrate strongly the effect the right artist can have.

And believe me, I wanted “Time Heist” to succeed, especially when Adams brings the android Hourman back to modern continuity (Quick! Don’t let him get away again). Plus Mr. Terrific’s team the Terrifics, plus Gold Beetle and Omega-Bam-Man, plus an astounding splash page where Pasarin draws a hulking Anti-Monitor, for goodness' sake! (Not to mention the Titans references in regards to Granny’s other kidnapped kids.) But a lot of it comes to nothing — the Terrifics mostly stand around, the Anti-Monitor is vanquished totally off-page, and Hourman is at one point felled by water in his circuits, which you’d kind of think wouldn’t be a thing for an 853rd century robot.

Surely too there’s an answer for why Wally West is aged in his time-lost space journey but his new infant son Wade is not, though I think the book presumes too much by not asking the question even if it doesn’t answer it.

Time Heist ends with stories from Flash #800¹, each a welcome pairing of writer, artist, and character, and each, I’m sorry to say, also feeling like they missed the mark for me. Adams' final word on Flash Wally West is again wonderfully drawn by Pasarin, but still a “You Shoulda Seen Him”-type tale that ends mostly predictably. It’s fun to see Mark Waid write, and Todd Nauck draw, Impulse again (that “ask your parents” joke stings!), but for better or worse the “Bart’s smarter than he acts” gag isn’t much different than what Waid would have written in the heyday. Ditto it’s nice to see Joshua Williamson with Carmine Di Giandomenico, but the super-small panels are hard to parse — what’s Barry Allen pinching in his fingers in the top-left of the eight-panel page? What’s happening in the desert in the panel right below that?

To Geoff Johns' credit, his Hunter “Zoom” Zolomon story takes place in the aftermath of Williamson’s run, the only “relevant” short here. And of course Scott Kolins should be the one to draw it, which he does with aplomb, and nice psychedelic coloring form Luis Guerrero. But Zolomon seems like going back to a tired well for Johns, versus writing Wally or Barry proper here, or giving Jesse Quick some representation, or Captain Cold Leonard Smart, or Morillo and Chyre, or writing a Flash: Ignition-era story dedicated to late artist Alberto Dose. If at some point Johns will follow up on this Zoom story, more power to him, but for what we have here, Zoom ends in about the same place he began, and that seems less than it should be.

I flipped through the next Flash book up, Flash Vol. 1: Strange Attractor. I can’t speak for Simon Spurrier’s words quite yet, but Mike Deodato is certainly drawing a trippy, mature-looking comic, the kind a casual reader might pick up and think, “I can see why people spend their hard-earned money on these.” For me, Flash Vol. 20: Time Heist just isn’t that. All due respect to writer Jeremy Adams — he brings Hourman back! — but it feels like this run sputters out in the end.

[Includes original and variant covers]

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1. Unceremoniously. There’s no cover between the end of Jeremy Adams' Flash #799 and the start of his #800 story, such that at first I thought the #800 story was some kind of related epilogue to #799.  ↩︎

Rating 2.25