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The Flash 58
Aug. 13th, 2025 06:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
knight_movesWally is fighting a court case with a hot heiress over the Icicle's inheritance (it's a long story). When suddenly...
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The Flash 61: Loebs says goodbye
Aug. 9th, 2025 11:05 pmknight_movesSorry to post this stuff all out of order, but hey, at least it's not Barry Allen.
( How better to end a run than at a wedding? )
( How better to end a run than at a wedding? )
laughing_tree
The day my little boy came home from nursery -- and I've never shown him any my comics, he was three at this point -- and he goes, "Daddy, I'm a superhero," and he runs around the house punching stuff and breaking things. And I'm like, oh shit, I have appeared to have built a career around the fact that moral righteousness is who can hit the hardest, who can break things the most. And that really, really staggered me, and I had to really think about it. -- Si Spurrier
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laughing_tree
I’d be an eccentric choice for The Flash if the object was simply to - ugh - play the hits. But if I’m allowed to go delving for fascinating tales in cosmic horror, psychedelic revelation, 70’s adventure or (as per the next arc) ghastly trench warfare? Count me in. -- Si Spurrier
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The Flash #19 - "So the Soul"
Jun. 18th, 2025 07:13 pmlaughing_tree
When writing Big-2 books, unless you’re one of the handful of creators invited to plot the course of the entire shared universe, at some point you have to reconcile yourself to the notion that you are a cog in a machine. Some publishers, and some editors, are better than others at telling the cogs about the machine. Where it’s going, what it’s for. Who’s tinkering with it, and to what end. Why that new component suddenly appeared overnight, and what it means for your specific function. Ugh. More tortured metaphors. Point is, it’s easy to understand why the creative urge tends to carry a writer, when confronted with this reality, in one of two directions. They either a) aspire to become a driver of the machine, or b) focus so tightly on their own unique component within it - seeing it as a discrete device in its own right, with its own modes and motivations - that they can essentially ignore the rest. For myself, I’ve consciously tried to be in the former camp while instinctively falling into the latter. -- Si Spurrier
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Flash #18 - "As the Universe"
Jun. 1st, 2025 03:40 amlaughing_tree
One thing I’ve often found useful, working in shared universes, is what I think of as Featuring A Bug. What I mean by that is: think long and hard about the big Event Stuff going in, and there’s almost always gonna be plot holes, unanswered questions, uncertain pivots. So you simply make those things your story. Answer the question, plug the hole, explain the pivot. Hey presto: you’re being a good soldier, helping the wider universe retain its coherence. But you’re also doing so in a unique way. If you can also make that story support the threads you wanted to weave as part of your own book’s narrative, abracadabra: you’ve turned a bug into a feature. All of which is to say: I’ve been trusted to apply my own sideways-thinking weirdness to the book so far, and am therefore more than happy to field the curveballs from above, and sling them back with added glitter. -- Si Spurrier
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The Flash #17 - "So Within"
Feb. 23rd, 2025 03:14 amlaughing_tree
I read -- or reread in many cases -- a lot of the best Flash stories out there and I kind of slowly realized that there's this really interesting friction between stories which start from the perspective of "Well, he can run really fast and you don't need to understand why, that's not important, just watch him go and do some stuff." And there's another separate canon of stories which are all about "We need to lean heavily into understanding how and why he does this stuff," which relies upon a whole ton of cod science and really getting into the nitty-gritty and the detail of the why and the how of it. And both of those ideas, both of those approaches, have their virtues but they also annoy me for different reasons, and it kind of slowly came to me that there is a third route... -- Si Spurrier
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The Flash #16 - "As Without"
Jan. 23rd, 2025 11:19 pmlaughing_tree
What I wanted to do was tell a story in which we lean into [the speed force] but without it being this very sort of sciencey gobbledygooky sort of notion that boxes creators into a corner by being overly defined. And so the alternative is to get quite psychedelic, and for that the trappings of cosmic horror were really apposite. -- Si Spurrier
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The Flash #15 - "So Below"
Dec. 27th, 2024 02:47 pmlaughing_tree
The All-In initiative is taking DC Comics in bold new directions. But where other books are going orbital, Flash is...um...going camping. -- Si Spurrier
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Flash #14 - "As Above"
Nov. 27th, 2024 06:05 pmlaughing_tree
An exceptional jumping-on point. A wild new adventure. A family trip. A twist that changes everything. And feathery goddam dinosaurs. I've said it before: Flash is the most fertile marriage of wild ideas and human hearts. This arc is no exception. -- Si Spurrier
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The Flash #13 - "And Everything After"
Oct. 24th, 2024 10:55 amlaughing_tree
Some people have said to me, "It's like switching on your computer. Do you know how your computer works?" The answer is no, but I know that in this world, there are people who do, and I trust them that my computer isn't actually running on demon juice or whatever. When Wally, Barry, and the rest of them utilize the Speed Force and travel close to, or past, the speed of light, burst into alternative realities, or ascend to strange bubble universes, they don't know what they're doing or the consequences of it. -- Si Spurrier
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The Flash #11 - "Cutting the Pie"
Aug. 29th, 2024 09:22 pmlaughing_tree
Multiple times, writers have attempted to have authoritative, science-y people pop up in the comic and say, ‘Okay, we know what the Speed Force is, and it’s this.’ And then two weeks later, somebody says, ‘Okay, we know what the Speed Force is,’ and they never match up, and a lot of them make zero sense. What’s really fascinating about this whole paradigm is that, you’ve got all these characters who are whizzing around, tapping into this energy every day, and using it for, mostly, really selfless, amazing things, using it to be good people, to save the world, to help people, to do the right thing, and yet, none of them has a fucking clue where it’s coming from, what it is, whether there are consequences every time they tap into it. And that’s fascinating. And [chuckles] it’s very American, you know what I mean? -- Si Spurrier
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The Flash #9 - "The Crown"
Aug. 15th, 2024 02:30 pmlaughing_tree
Being inventive, fun, and a bit crazy, but at the same time, pivoting towards these slightly darker territories that I think are quite apposite with this IP, it could've been a mess and too many things in one place. But because it's all quite heightened anyway, it all fits together nicely. We're all steering toward it together rather than just leaving everybody behind and careening off in that direction. Grodd is great fun, and there's an awful lot more of that stuff coming down the pike, with big, bold villainy and crazy stuff, but always in service to this gradual shift toward creepy territory, and I think it works! -- Si Spurrier
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laughing_tree
I’ve never had a hard time generating ideas – if anything, one of the criticisms I get is that I try to fit too many ideas into a single page of comics, and I think that’s bollocks. I think there should never be too many ideas. But that appears to be okay in The Flash. I can get away with it. Nobody goes, ‘Hang on a minute, you’ve had too many ideas, calm down and chill out a bit.’ So yeah, it seems to fit. -- Si Spurrier
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