Review: Speed Force trade paperback (DC Comics)

That DC Comics sees fit to publish the Speed Force miniseries starring Kid Flash Wallace “Ace” West and the Justice League of China’s Flash Avery Ho is auspicious in and of itself.

The Flash family has ballooned and shrunk and ballooned, with Wallace and Avery arriving at a time where we had Barry Allen but not late-post-Crisis stalwarts like Flash Wally West or Jesse Quick or Impulse Bart Allen or Max Mercury or Golden Age Flash Jay Garrick. Now all of them are back and could as easily have shunted Wallace and Avery out of the way; that DC gave them a miniseries instead of shuffling them off to limbo (or, at least, before shuffling them off to limbo) is better than letting the characters go to waste.

That said, I open the possibility that despite its potential, Speed Force is a book still in need or polish, or that perhaps I’m simply the wrong audience for it. Overall writer Jarrett Williams' work skews toward the younger set, and perhaps if I was more the generation of the characters involved, maybe the book would have more appeal.

[Review contains spoilers]

Speed Force turns on the musical shenanigans of a trio of villains; it’s peppered with snippets of rap lyrics that all read rather flat to me, but maybe they’re really good and it’s just not my jam? That Wallace pauses in the middle of a hunt for missing STAR Labs scientists to get a haircut didn’t seem quite what Batman would do, but then neither can I profess to experiencing the restorative power of a “fresh fade.” There’s an intentional levity to the series — the villains are the Fiddler, Mad Mod, and the Music Meister — that’s maybe too jocular for my tastes, but again I wonder if I’m just not the right audience.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

At the same time, other details made me wonder about the prowess of the creative team in general. There’s a scene that takes place at STAR Labs in Central City, but when the characters go to the basement, they seem to be at Terrifitech, and with a statue of Max Mercury for some unexplained reason. A character talks about a “Bluetooth login,” which I’m not so sure exists; the final, amorphous hologram monsters are called “Rap-Avis” and I’m not sure if that’s a portmanteau of “AI” or a take on video formats like AVI or AV1. That the art falters at the end, I can probably say with more certainty; increasingly we see main artist Daniele Di Nicuolo replaced by others, and by the final pages we’re losing backgrounds and other aspects.

I did think Williams wrote the Kid Flash character well (“Wallace” is used a bunch of times, but I didn’t notice at all the “Ace” nickname that the Flash titles have used). At one point, in the midst of a mission, Williams has Wallace duck under the ocean, taking essentially some quiet time. Wallace narrates, “I really like being alone. I feel a little selfish saying that,” but I think the introverts in the audience can relate, and this is a perspective we don’t often see among the superhero set.

With Wallace having lost both his mother and father, it’s not particularly surprising that his hangup is not relying on others, and Williams additionally writes a cogent mid-battle conversation between Wallace and Avery working out the issue. For a book that seems to me to skew young, the particular team of Williams writing Wallace (also in a Beast World short and DC Power) is very mature.

I also adore the idea of “Speed Force” as a team (using “force” for “team,” as in “a peacekeeping force”), what seems an underground collection of DC Universe teens who get together to play video games and fight crime. Over in Knight Terrors and Titans: Beast World, the big super-teen attention is on Robin Damian Wayne and Superman Jon Kent, but here we’ve got Wallace and Avery, Roundhouse Billy Wu (from Adam Glass' Teen Titans), Blue Beetle Jaime Reyes, and Superboy Conner Kent — teen heroes out of the mainstream and largely from diverse backgrounds to boot.

To think they’re all hanging out just outside the Justice League’s notice — that there’s also a group chat that also involves the largely forgotten students of Teen Titans Academy — is delightful, and I’d be happy to see them again somewhere, mentored by Mr. Terrific and with tech assist from student Cadence LaCroix. Indeed, Mr. Terrific Michael Holt mentoring a team of young heroes feels immediately more germane than the odd shoehorning of him into the Reed Richards role of Fantastic Four knock-off The Terrifics.

As well, for book that again may come off a bit flip, there’s a deceptively large amount of disparate DCU sources swirling together to meet in Speed Force — Sebastian Stagg from the aforementioned Terrifics; Mas y Menos, who jumped from cartoons to comics back before the New 52; Roundhouse; Dragonson, the Justice League of China’s Aquaman, who hasn’t appeared in a comic in six years; references to the events of Josh Trujillo’s recent Blue Beetle books; plus references to both current issues of Flash and the Jay Garrick: The Flash miniseries. That, I do like; take all these pieces no one else is using and build a workable premise with it. Jarrett Williams book didn’t blow me away, but I’m eager to see the Speed Force return.

[Includes original and variant covers]

Rating 2.0