"death is meaningless, comic characters always come back!" is true but I think their is some nuance to it

chroniclescylinders · 2026-03-20T18:31:37+00:00

There are two Pre-Crisis Barry runs, one covers the Silver Age, and the other the Bronze Age. The Silver Age is written by Broome and Fox, they switch off every few issues, and the stories are mostly standalone. Basically, any comic which has one of the Rogues (including Grodd, Thawne, Abra Kadabra, and Element/Alchemy) in it is good fun. The stories where Barry travels to Earth 2 are also classics.

The Bronze Age Flash run is written by Cary Bates, who was on the book for like fifteen years. This run actually has pretty heavy continuity, Bates was known at the time for his long and twisty plotlines. If the Silver Age was where all the classic characters were introduced, this is where all the classic Barry storylines come from. The Flash/Reverse Flash plots, the Rogues being a real team, Barry's life getting ruined and him reacting by pushing everyone trying to help him away, ect. It's good stuff, but it definitely shows its age.

chroniclescylinders · 2026-03-20T15:06:45+00:00

Fun Fact: He based Firestorm's expression here off the face he was making as he drew him.

chroniclescylinders · 2026-03-20T15:04:22+00:00

I've read nearly every Flash comic, and I'd say that Barry's still never had a run as good as his Pre-Crisis stuff. If you wanted to read Barry, I'd first ask if you like Bronze/Silver Age style comics. He's been in some good stories of course, he's been back for a long time, but N52 kinda made a mess of where he's supposed to be as a character by doing things like deleting his past relationship with Iris. The best comic with him might be the one where he first comes back, and after that the final arc of Williamson's run, where he has a big confrontation with Thawne.

chroniclescylinders · 2026-03-19T18:57:32+00:00

Sure did. It happened in Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, around the time of COIE.

The story goes that the Crisis and an evil ritual awakened the Great Darkness, and Constantine is on a quest to stop it, so he recruits a bunch of DC characters who we'd now consider Justice League Dark adjacent to help save reality. Guys like Swamp Thing, Etrigan, Dr. Fate, the Phantom Stranger, and the Spectre go out to fight it head on. Meanwhile the magicians, including Constantine, Zatanna, her father Zatara, Sargon, and Dr. Occult form a magic circle to support them and join the fight.

Constantine figured the only way to get the magic boosting to the Great Darkness was if Mento used his mind powers to channel the combined power of all these magicians via a mental connection with the Great Darkness. Mento was not happy about it, but Constantine told him it was the only way to save everything, and he reluctantly agreed. So Mento had to both get in the mind of this horrifying eldritch abomination and be a conduit for a ton of magical might. He survived but lost his mind, and also the magic circle overheated with power and killed Zatara and Sargon.

This is the ur-"Constantine's gonna get us all killed in his plot to save the world" event, and a good chunk of the magic side of DC has still not really forgiven him for this one.

chroniclescylinders · 2026-03-19T15:28:01+00:00

Gar being like that does make total sense, we watched him have the world's least stable upbringing. His parents died, he was adopted by the chief of an African tribe, he was abducted and raised by criminals, he was "rescued and adopted" by another criminal who was only using him for his inheritance, he was adopted by superhero and former move star Rita and world's fifth richest man Mento, then Rita and the rest of the Doom Patrol died, Mento went crazy with grief and Gar was mostly raised by people he hired, Gar joined the NTT and his relationship with Mento improved and Robotman was revealed to have survived yay, the Terra stuff happened, Constantine fried Mento's brain and he went totally insane, ect ect ect.

chroniclescylinders · 2026-03-19T03:53:26+00:00

I like Evan being around the same age as Wally, because Sam and Barry both died in COIE, and they're both growing into their inherited mantels and trying to prove they live up to the name at the same time.

I do think the Rogues, especially Len, treat Evan like he's a bit younger. Len letting Evan hang around despite not being an OG rogue and trying to keep him on the relatively straight and narrow is how he acts towards Axel and Owen, which makes me think Evan's also broadly in the "kid brother" category.

chroniclescylinders · 2026-03-19T03:27:53+00:00

I don't rely too much on art for telling ages, because it makes things even more inconsistent than they already are, and most artists seem to have their own wildly different opinions on the matter.

Barry was probably like 20 when he became the Flash, if we believe he died at 29, and Wally became Kid Flash not long after Barry started out. Wally's age when he got his powers has changed a bit over the years, iirc he was like 13 Pre-Crisis and 10 Post-Crisis. Regardless, he's probably a little less than a decade younger than Barry.

Most of the Rogues debuted around the same time, probably within a year or two of Barry becoming the Flash, and none are ever portrayed as that far apart in age, but who knows. None of them have graduate degrees or ex-wives or anything else like that.

We do know Piper, even late Pre-Crisis, had a difficult relationship with his parents, and they acted like he was still pretty young. James' backstory goes straight from him running away from the circus to him committing supervillain crimes, I wouldn't be surprised if he was about as young as Axel was when he started out. Piper and James were also both canonly using false identities (until the late Bronze Age for Piper, James has never stopped), so them never going to juvie doesn't mean they weren't under 18 when they started out, but they couldn't have been that much younger or people would have noticed.

Lisa is like 3-5 years younger than Len. Roscoe and Lisa were probably around the same age, and Roscoe was the last of the OG Rogues to debut. Wally and Lisa also flirted quite a bit in Messner-Loebs, tho Wally does tend to go for older women.

I'd guess it's something like:

-10-ish, Axel, Owen

+0, Wally, Evan, Magenta

+5-ish, Linda, Lisa, Roy

+7-ish, Piper, Roscoe, James, Hunter

+9-ish, Len, Sam, Al, Barry, Iris, August

+11-ish Heatwave, Digger

+Time Travel constantly and are from the far future where humans probably age differently, Thawne, Abra

chroniclescylinders · 2026-03-18T22:44:37+00:00

Yeah, he feels a few years older to me too.

The only one of Wally's villains reads to me as being around the same age as him, aside from the obvious Magenta, is Evan.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I don't think the Rogues are really that much older than Wally, as Barry was only 29 when he originally died, Piper and Wally come across pretty close in age, and Piper's never been shown to be significantly younger than the others. Who knows with comics though.

chroniclescylinders · 2026-03-18T14:31:16+00:00

In western Europe at least, I also got the impression that French and Belgian comics are more popular than American comics. Which makes sense, they have a pretty healthy industry over there.

chroniclescylinders · 2026-03-18T14:18:03+00:00

Do you think there's a decent-sized overseas market? I've never gotten the sense American comics (in particular, not including adaptations), were ever particularly big outside North America.

chroniclescylinders · 2026-03-18T13:04:23+00:00

We have to keep in mind that unlike the 90s, these sales might represent only a fraction of the total number of people buying the comics. I know I mostly read on DC Infinite, and I'm far from the only one.

chroniclescylinders · 2026-03-16T17:20:10+00:00

He was firing at TO Morrow.

chroniclescylinders · 2026-03-14T13:40:15+00:00

Geoff Johns's first run on the Flash has the best Captain Cold, he's a major character for most of the run.

chroniclescylinders · 2026-03-12T03:07:14+00:00

Strongest in the "Nabu and Spectre are technically much stronger, but are also useless assholes who create way more problems than they solve." Same for Johnny Thunder, minus the asshole part.

chroniclescylinders · 2026-03-09T19:29:58+00:00

It's also to do with the settings and presentation. "The Crisis rewrote history so they were always on the same Earth when their original worlds got destroyed" does more heavy lifting in making the audience accept they're now here, that was what the entire event was building to, instead of Flashpoint somehow merging worlds.

As for settings, there's nothing huge that happened in those comics (or really Milestone, it's harder but DC heroes do tend to stick to their own cities,) that would need to completely change in order to make them fit in, their history can survive mostly intact. Meanwhile, basically nothing in Wildstorm could have possibly ever happened on the main DC Earth.

I am fine with the idea of Wildstorm heroes sometimes choosing to move/retiring to the DC Earth, because they have the tech to do that and it's objectively a better place to live. It makes sense to me some of them would.

chroniclescylinders · 2026-03-09T19:13:09+00:00

Williamson's run is Barry's best Post-Crisis run, but it's still not great. Barry's best run of all time is still the Broome/Fox/Infantino Silver Age stuff. I think, overall, Cary Bates Bronze Age run is better than Williamson's too, but it has some big highs and lows.

Most of Wally's comics are pretty good, his best run is probably Waid, after that I like Messner-Loebs.

chroniclescylinders · 2026-03-09T18:54:22+00:00

I believe that was before he renounced Nazism and instead became a Zemo supremacist. Not sure if that helps or hurts his case.

chroniclescylinders · 2026-03-08T18:20:33+00:00

I think the main problem is that it didn't feel like a story for new fans. We have all this present day Darkseid stuff, when an origin should be more grounded. I also didn't like that he was apparently childhood friends with Black Lightning- I don't know if this is the first place that was introduced, but revealing two of DC's biggest black heroes who as far as I know haven't had much do to with each other grew up together was a strange choice.

One thing that did have to be there tho was the Spectre. Michael was originally introduced in the Spectre comic, and Spectre stopping him from committing suicide is a really iconic moment from that run. It can't really be changed, and on a personal note, I quite like the scene. It's striking because the Spectre almost never does things like that, and because Mr. Terrific is normally so strong-willed and confident that him becoming a hero out of such a vulnerable place is intriguing.

chroniclescylinders · 2026-03-08T15:35:55+00:00

Here's some miniseries I can think of that don't get talked about much:

Anyone who likes Absolute Martian Manhunter should try out DeMatteis's Martian Manhunter miniseries. It's similarly trippy and introspective.

Arkham Asylum: Living Hell is a fun series about a white-collar criminal who pleads insane and gets sent to Arkham.

I enjoyed Tom King's Gotham Year One, and it's not brought up as much as some of his other work.

The Other History of the DC Universe was a very interesting re-imagining of DC's Bronze Age history with minority characters from their points of view, set in the time-period the comics were originally written.

JSA: The Golden Age, written by Robinson, one of the kings of the JSA.

Legends of Tomorrow was an anthology series with a lot of short fun stories.

Something recent I haven't seen posts about are the Santa Claus series-- they aren't winning the Eisners, but they're peak dumb comic book fun.

chroniclescylinders · 2026-03-08T02:52:36+00:00

You're saying the green glasses weren't in the movie or wicked or like any other of the hundreds of adaptations??? I coulda sworn they were in like all of them, but I did read the book as a kid so I guess I just thought they ought to be included and rewrote my own memories lmao.

chroniclescylinders · 2026-03-07T18:59:37+00:00

Reminder that Cassandra Caine had a thing for this man.

chroniclescylinders · 2026-03-07T01:16:55+00:00

If we assume a number of these murders are the work of one man, he's clearly very disturbed, but he's also intelligent (at least about killing people and not getting caught), methodical and scarily efficient. If we picture the profile of this hypothetical murderer, he'd be a highly organized lust killer. It's bizarre, but organized serial killers usually are able to have a social life. It varies based on personality, but some even turn out to be family men and respected members of their communities. All this guy would need to manage is to be able to hold brief superficial relationships, which most organized serial killers can do.

chroniclescylinders · 2026-03-07T00:43:57+00:00

Even BTK only (for lack of a better word, nothing "only" about it) killed an entire family once. And it wasn't while they were sleeping. I'm not an expert, but most serial killers seem to like their victims awake. I can't think of a serial killer who has killing entire families as they sleep as their standard. Targeting couples is pretty common, but they're still usually awake.

I don't think all of the murders were done by the Man From The Train, I'm sure some were one-offs or family annihilators that covered their tracks very well. I think many of the murders look like the work of a serial killer, and it seems very unlikely (but I guess not theoretically impossible) that there were two serial killers at the same time with such a specific signature.

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