Review: The Flash #19

This month’s issue of The Flash is the conclusion of a two-part fill-in by Brian Buccellato and Marcio Takara. One would think, given that Buccellato is the regular co-writer on the title, that the story would read like a normal part of the series, and that it would feel more substantial than most fill-ins do. Unfortunately, the only thing likely to be felt at the end of The Flash #19 is a desire for Francis Manapul to come back as quickly as possible.

After a first part that had a lot going on, none of which was particularly enthralling, this latest issue has the task of wrapping up all of those dangling storylines. In no particular order: 1) Trickster has been jailed for a murder he didn’t commit, and The Flash has to find out who did the crime; 2) The Outlanders, a rogue ‘nation’ of which The Trickster is a member, have attacked Iron Heights, where Trickster is being kept; 3) a duo of new heroes, Sprint and Turbo-Charger, have arrived on the scene; and 4) Barry, after breaking into Iron Heights as part of his investigation into the murder, has inexplicably lost his powers.

So that’s a lot for one issue to resolve. The result is a comic that would have been terribly unsatisfying had the reader had much to get attached to in the first place. It’s a pretty typical jailbreak story, and the stakes, as mentioned in the review of the previous issue, are not very high. They’re actually pretty much nonexistent once the Outlanders get into the prison and find the Trickster. At that point the only danger is to anyone who gets in their way, and the only people who do that are Turbo-Charger (his partner, Sprint, is mysteriously nowhere to be found), and Barry. And even then it turns out that the Outlanders are more of a danger to themselves than to anyone else.

The piece of the story that felt like it was most wasted, though, was the murder mystery. The way that Barry ‘solves’ the crime is weaker than a wet piece of paper, and is completely shoehorned in at the end. It’s as if Buccellato realized he’d forgotten to get to that part, so he threw some bits of dialogue in to cover it and then moved on. It’s a real disappointment, too. One of the things that DC has promised since Barry Allen’s return in Final Crisis is a focus on his career as a forensic scientist, but that hasn’t really happened yet. A murder mystery seems like it’d be a great place to showcase that side of the character. Instead it’s just a missed opportunity.

The issue is not altogether uninteresting. It’s entertaining to see Barry making his way through Iron Heights without his powers, avoiding trouble and using the rogues’ old weaponry to deter the Outlanders break-in. Even that, though, has its problems. In one panel, Barry’s thoughts remind the reader that “the rogues’ weapons are genetically coded to their owners,” meaning he shouldn’t be able to use them at all. And yet, in the next panel, he uses the Weather Wizard’s wand, and goes on to use Trickster bombs, boomerangs, and Captain Cold’s cold gun. So why establish that the weapons are genetically coded so that the rogues are the only ones that can use them, and then just ignore that for the rest of the issue? Marcio Takara’s art helps elevate the writing throughout the issue, but it’s hard to ignore when the writing is that blatantly sloppy.

The final two pages of The Flash #19 are drawn and co-written once again by Francis Manapul, and they offer a glimpse of what’s in store in the forthcoming Reverse-Flash arc. Very little is known about this new Reverse-Flash, including who he or she is under the mask, but based on these teaser pages that story is already shaping up to be more compelling than this two-part fill-in was. Buccellato squandered some interesting ideas and a solid fill-in artist in Marcio Takara for a lot of unexplored, if not entirely wasted, concepts. Here’s hoping Manapul doesn’t take another break from co-writing for a while.