Like the first volume, Simon Spurrier’s Flash Vol. 2: Until Time Stands Still is ambitiously weird, and I’d as soon see a comic that challenges the reader as one that doesn’t try. But the suggestion Until Time Stands Still might be too weird for its own good is wholly valid, or at least too long — on top of six issues already, Spurrier’s got another seven here plus an annual. In the end, the who and what and why is not all that complicated, but the amount of time Spurrier takes to get there may not be equal to the amount of attention the audience is willing to spare.

Yet, insofar as writers have tried for years to define the Flash family’s Speed Force — another example of making things harder than they need to be — I think Spurrier has landed on one of the better Speed Force metaphors so far. And I’m curious to see how Spurrier handles what he seems to promise next, how the book’s bizarre sensibilities so far might mesh with some more standard superheroic stories ahead.

[Review contains spoilers for Flash, Titans: Beast World, and Absolute Power]

As I’ve said before, there’s a lot happening in this book. Arc Angles and the Stillness, the Deep Change, a new iteration of the Linear Men, various rogues including the Crown of Thawnes, the Cynosure. Between the lofty dialogue and irregular grammar, it takes a little while to finally get a hierarchy going — the main bad guys, the Arc Angles, using the Stillness and the rogues (and also tricking the Linear Men) to try to get control of Wally West, the connective cynosure between the Speed Force and the multiverse, in their mad quest to stop time and create an “orderly” universe.

In the end, we are not so far away from other “humanity is messy and a celestial force must control it” kinds of plots. That’s not always a negative; rather part of the joy here is decoding the book and finally understanding it, getting “in” with what the book’s trying to say. I’d be tempted to start over and reread knowing what I know now, though that goes back to the story, at 14 issues, not having necessarily justified its own length. We find that most of the heroic characters' bad behavior in Flash Vol. 1: Strange Attactor was due to the influence of the Arc Angles and their ilk. At least it wasn’t specifically the Reverse Flash and the Thawnes this time, though a hard look at why we keep getting stories about the Flash family influenced to act like jerks might be overdue.

Following from Joshua Williamson and Jeremy Adams before him, Spurrier’s Barry Allen is still a weak link; though some of his needy behavior from last time can be explained away by the influence of the villains, there’s still instances of the Flash family outright ignoring Barry or deriding him when he tries to rally the troops. It’s likely the right choice that DC chose to de-power Barry after Absolute Power, essentially benching him; in a way that hasn’t been the case with two Supermen or Batman and Nightwing, writers can’t seem to make Wally’s prominence not reflect Barry’s impotence, and probably the stories are better off with Barry away somewhere.

Spurrier’s Iris Allen, on the other hand, is a revelation, something I don’t recall from the previous volume. Among the book’s strange tangents is an issue framed by Iris on a radio show, joking she’s the “corn belt Lois Lane,” that ends up in the unlikely scenario of Iris telling off Amanda Waller. At another point, Iris is unconcerned about a possessed Barry standing right before her; reflecting the wisdom of all her years as a superhero’s partner, she notes that either Barry will beat the possession or her death will “be over before we know it’s started.” That’s macabre given Iris is holding baby Wade West at the time, but I admired Spurrier’s depiction of her gumption.

The Speed Force has variably been an elemental force, a place, and a fickle being, and its reasons for choosing the speedsters has been much teased and never quite addressed. Here I thought Spurrier did better nailing down the metaphor than most, suggesting a reciprocal relationship in which the Flash family gets superpowers and the Speed Force (“the Deep Change”) “breathes your love” — that the Speed Force is nourished by the connections between the speedsters and their families, that the heroes are chosen precisely for their potential to live connected lives. That doesn’t make the Speed Force sentient, but it bends it toward benevolence, and gives a comprehendible reason, provable by the characters themselves, for why each of those speedsters is in the room.

To that end, I was glad to see such a large swath of characters here, including Circuit Breaker as a full-fledged Flash family member, and also Pied Piper Hartley Rathaway, now among the otherwise-faceless scientists at Terrifitech. (I do hope Spurrier will at some point address Chester P. Runk’s death in Titans: Beast World.) There’s so many characters, indeed, that the art team loses some, as when Boom Judy Garrick is there one minute and gone the next. Artists Ramón Pérez and Vasco Georgiev more than make up for it with some of their gorgeous splash pages of Wally out in the interdimensional void.

There’s a flash-forward at the end of Flash Vol. 2: Until Time Stands Still and I actually thought that was our first glimpse of Wally meeting the Absolute Flash, though a little looking ahead tells me that’s not the case. But it does appear we’re in for a trip to Skartaris, and though that’s not as superhero-y as visiting Metropolis, it feels like it would lend itself more to a focus on the here and now than on the multidimensional and metaphysical. In that regard, does Simon Spurrier simply let go of Cynosures and primordial elemental space kittens (really!) and the Ickto, or is there a meeting in the middle for Warlord and this kind of weird? I’m interested to see.

[Includes original and variant covers]