Flashpoint #5 – The Con Job Revealed

Hope to make this blog a more regular posting experience, but as I said before life happens.

The hype, the excitement, the concerns over DC’s new universe have all been leading up to this week and the book to end the old DCU Flashpoint #5 comes out and it was all a terrible joke. The Emperor is walking the streets naked, but the crowd wants to love the new clothes (old fable reference). 

The grand reveal is DC threw this idea together to re-launch their whole universe very, very fast. Flashpoint was used to as a mechanism to make the changes, but the changes have no rhyme or reason and this series was never intended to be what DC turned it into. 

In a few years someone will talk about how Didio wanted make this drastic change to the DCU and came up with DC retroactive and the ancillary Flashpoint books to give the creative crews a three month break to pull together the entire re-launch. I was hoping there was more planning behind it, but Flashpoint was obviously written as a series about Barry and why you can’t try and change time. DC decided to use two pages in this book as some bullsh*t gimmick to reset the DCU into whatever they want it to be. 

This is why I have so much trepidation with the re-launch from DC. It is going to be way too fast and loose with history. I know it is all made up and most writers pick and choose what to use for the history, but if there was some grounding or reason for the changes it would be more fun to at least try and figure out as a fan.

Plus the entire disingenuous nature of the whole thing bothers me. Flashpoint made no sense, even no comic book sense and the reset button was as bad as Superboy hitting his cosmic TV back a few years. 

Flashpoint was a pretty book and a nice story about Barry wanting his Mom to be alive. The problem is Barry stops himself from changing time, because the Reverse Flash said Barry stopping him from killing Barry’s Mom is what made all the changes into the Flashpoint world. Really? How and why were left out of this book. So Barry learns he can’t change time and then goes and stops himself changing time and that changes the DCU into this new timeline with the help of some mysterious being, it maybe Didio in drag, not sure. Of course Reverse Flash changed time by killing Barry’s Mom and now Barry is changing time by stopping himself from changing time that was never suppose to be the right timeline. This is why time travel stories are all crap and never work because it just gets too convoluted.

So the new DCU is just now making up whatever they want it to be and we are jumping into the new DCU five years after the JL, not JLA, started. 

Flashpoint sucked because it made no sense and its “true” reason to change the DCU was an add-on. This book was never dreamed up with the intent to reset the DCU. Doesn’t mean the new DCU will be crap, just that there is no logic other then this is what Didio and company wanted.  It also means it was planned in a rush and that could spell problems.