#part of what makes flash comics and particularly barry allen flash interesting to me is how often the character is used as a representative#of change both positive and negative#barry allen is the start of the concept of the multiverse in dc and therefore the end of that multiverse makes his death pivotal#you truly 100% will miss a lot if you don't engage with the crises and do it in a metatextual way#these are very literally comic characters who know that they are comic characters#and they're at the center of how everything Works on a basic level#anyway this is slightly besides the point but yknow. example of a title where it is Literally Impossible to just ignore this (tags by @vintagerobin)
No, it's not beside the point at all; I would say Barry and the Flash lore are exemplars of the point, both explicit and implicit.
To offer another, related example: Clark's Superboy is one of DC's longest-enduring screw-ups. From the time he was introduced in the 1940s, and especially once he got his own line and began adding new lore in 1949, Superboy broke the continuity. By the time Barry was introduced, Superboy (1949) had already introduced Smallville, Lana, and Krypto, who made appearances in the Superman mainlines not long after. All of that directly contradicted everything established in Action Comics (1938) #1 and Superman (1939) #1. It was only the decision to create Earth-1 and Earth-2 — a world with a Superman who had been Superboy and a world without, amongst other things — that halted the otherwise inevitable trainwreck from DC stacking contradictions and additions in Superman lore. I do mean that extremely literally; More Fun Comics (1935) #101, Superboy's first appearance, is retroactively the first appearance of Earth-1, even though Barry didn't show up until 1956 and Earth-1 didn't have a name until Justice League of America (1960) #21, 18 years after Superboy's introduction.
And you can do this with basically DC's entire publication history: COIE and subsequent changes decimated Earth-1 Superman's lore. (And don't get anyone started on Superboy Prime. Please.) Most people will tell you Batman's never had a complete reset at all. The exact Earth of the Post-Crisis era is technically nebulous, especially at its very beginning, because of the Earth merger and all of the alterations that came later. DC tried to fix it. Tried. Zero Hour, Infinite Crisis, Final Crisis, Flashpoint. You know, looking at the list, I think they actually screw up more nowadays...
I share all that to emphasize that at a certain point, just about everything folks (claim to) care about within the lore is a change and/or the product of a change. DC fucking up their lore is probably the most integral tool they have for building a canon at all. It's one thing to hate specific changes — goodness knows I do — but to hate changes as a whole, such that the mere prospect puts you off engaging with any source material, means that you almost certainly will never like any of DC's canon on principle. Again, the changes become the canon, and changing is how DC foundationally constructs canon. It just doesn't make sense to like DC but not hold anything in particularly high regard. [Moreover, the fact that things change/will change/did change makes the exact context and origin of a scene, panel, etc. more important, not less!]
I said in the tags of the first post that some folks might benefit from just picking an era/niche and sticking to it, and I maintain that. It's much easier and more understandable to bitch about changes with a coherent reference point. But anyway...
