Talk about self-serving pablum. Let's go to the tapes, shall we?
SPOILER ALERT: Flash just vibrated through the floor)
(SPOILER ALERT: The Flash on the ground is really an evil Flash from a "mirror dimension.")Look, the Rogues claiming that they never tried to kill the Flash has all the credibility of Luthor bawling that he never tried to kill Superman. The Rogues, individually or together, left him in death trap after death trap (after death trap) in virtually every issue of the Silver Age. We just saw them above making great merry because they thought they had blown him to kingdom come!! I could have posted panels from about 100 issues if mine Flashes weren't all buried right now.
So the big question is this: is this Geoff Johns writing the Rogues as experiencing extreme cognitive dissonance at finally succeeding at killing a Flash? Or is this Geoff Johns actually retconning 25 years of Barry Allen Flash stories, arguing that the villains never really were trying to kill him, that the Silver Age shenanigans were only just "a game?" That they "let" Flash escape all those dooms?
Either way, it's kinda lame, isn't it? Plus, of course, the title of the whole series is ridiculous. "Rogues Revenge?" The person they're getting revenge against is Inertia. Why? Because they helped him kill the Flash. HUH???
Silver Age panels from Flash #155 (1965) & #174 (1967), as reprinted in Countdown Special: The Flash.
3 comments:
I'm not sure but I think it was Waid, or possibly Michael Jan Friedman in a run of Legends of the DC Universe that suggested the Rogues had a bit more of a code of honor than the other villains and n'er do wells of the DCU. There was a notion that the Rogues tended to do their best to challenge the Flash as more of an exercise in showing off the cleverness of their particular motif rather than being out for profit or just killing for it's own sake. Now I defy any amoral soul not to be tempted to eradicate their number one enemy when they've got him (seemingly) dead to rights, but apart from Gorilla Grodd I think most of the Rogues went from captial-E evil to more of a fun-lovin' criminals mode.
Most likely this is due to writer fiat. Most Silver Age villains have long since been retconned into a more Serious frame of mind, but the Rogues are a callback to a more innocent time in superhero comics, when you could call a guy Captain Cold or the Weather Wizard in a writer's meeting and not get laughed out the door.
Then again, maybe an in-character explanation could be that all those years of squaring off against a straight-shooter like Barry Allen might've rubbed off on those knuckleheads.
Yeah, but Johns' is trying to have it both ways. He wants the Rogues to be a callback to more innocednt times, but then he goes out of his way to give them all troubled histories and mental illnesses (with all the subtlety of a trip hammer).
Johns lays it out not once, but twice in FC:RR #1. Mirror master is a junkie who "uknowingly murdered his father and couldn't stand living in reality." Heatwave is a pyromaniac. Weather Wizard is "delusional about the truth behind his brother's death." Captain Cold's "father was a disgraced cop who abused him and his sister for years."
You see what Johns' is doing? He wants to claim they were all just on a lark, playing a "game." But then he gives them all Batman villain motivations. He wants us to believe that they wouldn't kill (on purpose) but they're all scary. They're all Arkham candidates now, but somehow just fun-lovin' criminals.
It is, at best, an uncomfortable fit. He wants dark and gritty simultaneously with innocence and sunshine, and i just don't think it works.
Oof, put like that I'd have to agree. I much prefer the Rogues as a more mercenary type of villain; they were never out to rule the universe or kill everyone who looked at them funny, they were just about the score and maybe putting one over on the Flash II. Assigning them Arkham-style disorders is a poor fit at best, and why try when it's clearly been done better?
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