This is the part of the thread where I vomit nostalgia on your shoes:
Out of spite, I've been invading my old Flash stacks. You know who's great? Wally West.
FLASH #129: It's amazing: there's an issue Waid and Augustyn did with Neron that uses the exact the same plot device as One More Day, except it has a happy, if maybe awesomely ridiculous, twist ending: taking Linda's love makes Neron feel bad for all the people in Hell and he can't stand it! The power of love makes the Devil want to puke! It's a good kind of stupid.
FLASH #135: On the other hand, there's the bad kind of stupid. The courtroom battle for the fates of Heat Wave, Sonar, and some loser named Hatchet reminded me that Morrison and Millar tend to write in heightened reality because it's a lot easier than learning how anything actually works.
Since this is the climax of a Green Lantern/Green Arrow/Flash crossover that tells the ending of a
pure fight story as a bad courtroom scene--a device Marz and Dixon did not use and were almost certainly unaware of--it also reminded me that they don't know how to work well with other people and prefer to spend their time high-fiving each other in sex clubs in Glasgow or wherever it is they live.
FLASH #136-138: "The Human Race," however, is really great. Krakkl made me cry.
FLASH #130-163: Does anyone know whatever happened to Steve Lightle? Interior artist Pop Mhan might be the nadir of comic art in general and even the better Flash artists from the mid-100s weren't terribly great, but (with a few missteps, like the first and last, actually) Lightle did some really beautiful, because-I-love-the-way-you-lie covers. Interestingly, his style is really contemporary. He reminds me of somebody, but I'm not sure who--a cartoonier Jae Lee or J.H. Williams? An inkier Cassaday?
(He also remembers that Linda Park is Korean! Bonus points!)
FLASH #15: Then there's the even older, Messner-Loeb Flashes where Wally gets the living crap beat out of him constantly, loses his powers and all his money, feels guilty about adultery, still has his harpy of a mom around, and just generally mopes. If you weren't sure, you could probably be convinced they were Daredevil comics and Matt Murdock's just wearing his hair a little long.
This is great. Plus they're drawn by Greg LaRocque, who appears to realize panel layouts are important! Early Flash was a double threat!
It's a little clever, it's well-drawn, it spends five pages on Wally West having a fight with his mom and his girlfriend and two pages on Wally West getting his face kicked in by a man on drugs. Is this what they call the Golden Mean?
FLASH #16: Wally goes to a hospital to visit sick kids. I swear this is actual dialogue--
Small child who probably has cancer: If there was race 'tween you and Superman, who'd win?
Wally: Well... he would, I guess.
Small child who probably has cancer: What if there was a race 'tween you and the old Flash?!
Wally: He's dead.
Wally is desperately telephoned by his landlord, who has just thrown him out of his apartment for failure to pay rent. Again, actual dialogue--
Evil landlord: [Vandal Savage] took my daughter!... If I go to the police, he'll know! God, West, they're going to torture my baby! You're my last hope!
Wally: I'm sorry, Wally West doesn't live here anymore. He's been
evicted. [hangs up] Say, Mom, anything to eat? I'm starved.
Ladies and gentleman: I rest my case. Wally West is the best character in comics history.
