#earth 1

Flash #123 didn't just create the DC multiverse, it might well have created the very concept of a multiverse. It existed as a theoretical physics exercise, of course, but those don't move the needle. Outside of Portal Fantasy stories - which the kids today call isekai - such as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz or The Chronicles of Narnia, one of the first writers to use the concept of a network of interconnected alternate universes was Michael Moorcock, who made it the basis of his sprawling Eternal Champion series. Moorcock was the first to use the term "Multiverse" in a story published years after this issue, but speculation about who originated the theory is an errand far beyond the scope of this fool.

Before we actually get to the starring feature, we have some ado to do. I want to briefly touch on issues #121 and #122, because they're actually pretty alright. I was a bit hard on this series in my last post, which I think might be a symptom of overexposure. Watching one Michael Bay movie can be a fun evening, watching Michael Bay's entire filmography can make your eyeballs bleed. Whatever faults these comics may have - and there are many - when done right, they can be a fun kind of dumb and a dumb kind of fun.

Flash #121 features the return of the Trickster, who's always fun to have around. There's a very different dynamic than Batman has with the Joker because the Flash has enough of a sense of humor to trick him right back. Flash always seems to enjoy encounters with the Trickster, which foreshadows the congenial relationship he has with most of his recurring villains, one of my favorite characteristics of Flash stories.

I also believe this issue is the first time that the Flash uses his speed to effectively appear in two places at once during the same conversation, an ability that strains credulity to the point that I have to laugh at the unrestrained audacity of it. Like, the other guy should be able to feel the wind, right? I'm not the only one who sees the secondary effects? Whatever, Speed Force did it.

Flash #122 introduces a new supervillain, Roscoe Dillon, AKA the Top. For the most part, he's just a gimmick villain with weapons and traps hidden in kids' toys, but he has an amazing superpower: spinning! That's a good trick! He apparently was able to teach himself how to spin at speeds comparable to the Flash on his own, because apparently it's as easy as riding a bicycle.

Over the course of an singel isseue, the Top escalates his schemes from spinning real fast and robbing armored cars to constructing a spin-powered atomic bomb capable of destroying half the planet and then being fully prepared to let it end the world. The Top does not give a single fuck, my dudes. Flash defeats this maniac the only way he possibly could: even more spinning. He spins so fast it flies out into orbit.

I enjoyed these issues a bit more than the last few. I don't know if I just needed to get something out of my system, but I think these are doing more things right. There's just that bit more focus on Barry's chemistry with Iris, and on Flash's chemistry with his villains. There's a kind of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure quality to Flash's villain encounters, where they each have a narrow ability with a lot of potential applications and it's all about each character navigating the mechanics of their powers to gain advantage over each other. I love reading that, and it's magic when it works.

With that out of the way, we proceed to our main event. Flash #123, The Flash of Two Worlds. The story begins as Flash is doing a demonstration of super-speed stage magic, when, in an attempt to vibrate himself invisible, he instead vanishes completely. Which, according to international standards of magic, is a separate thing entirely. Flash finds himself not in his hometown of Central City, but Keystone City, a city he's never heard of, where nobody recognizes him as the Flash.

Flash soon puts the pieces together and realizes where he's heard the name Keystone City. He goes to a phone book - which was a kind of hard-copy doxxing database available on every street corner in small kiosks called "payphones" - and looks up the name Jay Garrick, the Golden Age flash. Do you remember how Barry Allen was reading an issue of the Golden Age flash all the way back in his first appearance? Foreshadowing is a literary device-

Unlike many stories of a similar genre, Barry Allen hasn't just stepped into an issue of his favorite old-school comic, he's actually stepped into a living universe. Jay Garrick is presented as a person every bit as real as Barry Allen, and his universe isn't treated as a work of fiction, but a parallel and valid universe. Barry Allen creates the hypothesis that Gardner Fox, the real writer who created the Golden and Silver age Flashes, and wrote this very issue, was receiving telepathic visions of Jay Garrick's earth - and by extension the same thing is happening on the real world, a thing that is true in DC Comics.

What sells Jay's world, later referred to as "Earth-2" is that the world hasn't just been in limbo since the golden age comic stopped. The world didn't stop existing just because the comic was no longer being published, the comic stopped being published because Jay retired. He got married to his longtime girlfriend Joan and settled down to live a quiet life in a peaceful world. He's aged a full twelve human earth years in that time! Look at the sides of his hair! Later comics would flesh out Jay's private life to a greater degree and make him a distinct character from Barry, but that's for later.

Coincidentally, while all of this multiverse nonsense has been happening, three of Jay's old supervillains have broken out of prison. I guess the Speed Force brought Barry to help. We have the Shade, who controls living darkness; the Fiddler, who controls minds with his hypno-violin; and the Thinker, whomst thinks real good. The Flashes split up to investigate, but the villains get the better of both of them. The Thinker is able to use his mental powers to confuse Jay with his illusions, having him run around in circles until he runs out of stamina, because he's an old man with tired old man knees. Meanwhile, Barry is able to use his superior speed to counter the Shade, but wasn't prepared for him to have a second gimmick in his arsenal.

This is very much the antithesis of the powerscaling question from last time. On paper, all three of these villains - together or separately - should be no match for a single Flash, let alone two. But they're able to get the better of their respective speedster through clever strategy and an understanding of their foe's capabilities. These may be old white men in silly hats but they've been fighting the (a) Flash for over a decade and they know what they're doing.

By the time the villains figure out that there are actually two The Flashes, Jay and Barry have joined up to fight the Fiddler as a team. However, it looks like they were defeated so quickly and easily that they didn't even bother to show it. Despite able to move faster than sound, the Flashes are somehow weak to hypnotic sound. Look, I just review this stuff. The Fiddler hypnotizes the two Flashes to rob the museum, and then commands them to not to move at all for 24 hours. How do the heroes get out of this fiendish predicament? Through the flimsiest of loopholes.

See despite having apparent complete mental control over the Flashes two, they were able to escape because the Fiddler didn't explicitly tell them not to try to escape. That is just bullshit. You could sooner fit a camel through the eye of a needle than you could fit this plot through that narrow justification. But honestly, it almost doesn't matter, because the venn diagram of dumb and fun for this story is a perfect circle. I'm honestly able to overlook everything for the sake of the pure joy I get from this issue.

I wanted to recapture the experience of a silver age audience reading this comic without assuming any knowledge of the golden age Flash. To that end, I didn't go back and look at any issues featuring Jay Garrick, and relied on my existing cultural osmosis of these characters. I wanted to be completely free of nostalgia. And I had an absolute blast. You can tell that Gardner Fox has a lot of affection for these characters he created and is loving the chance to bring them down off the shelf. Jay and Barry have such a great chemistry, and all of the villains are absolutely dripping with charisma. I wasn't just entertained, I wanted to see more of them.

I naturally compare this to what I am reluctantly going to call "slopstalgia" that's been showing up in a lot of Superhero movies of recent years. Spider-Man: No Way Home, Deadpool & Wolverine, and ironically, The Flash (2023) all feel like nakedly pandering attempts to appeal to the familiar by propping up the corpse of long-defunct intellectual property like some necromarionette. We're not going to get another movie with Michael Keaton as Batman. That ship has sailed, docked, been put up into a museum, and had every individual component replaced with identical copies five separate times by now. Theseus would not recognize this ship if you read him the VIN number.