#source: any Waid Flash comic featuring the twins

[givemewallywestorgivemedeath]

Hello! Kinda comic reader here, I was wondering if Don not liking Wally came from like, an actual thing, or is it a headcannon? If it is an actual thing would you pls lemme know where I could find it (it you can’t remember or anything that’s totes fine!)

Yeah so Wally was Barry and Iris' son. Not biologically or legally, but he was their kid regardless. Barry and Iris loved Wally more than anything.

So then take the twins, who grew up never knowing their father, being raised by their mother who had nothing but glowing praise for her 'eldest son'. The same eldest son who had a historically legendary relationship with the father they never knew. The same eldest son who had an entire museum dedicated to him and was treated like a mythical being, like an all-red King Arthur or a masked Hercules.

Not to mention that the twins were hunted down from the day they were born and lived in an era where having powers was akin to a death sentence. The two of them watched 'the golden boy' get praised for his heroic deeds and powers, and yet they were forbidden from doing the same.

Needless to say, the twins were not very happy when Wally accidentally time traveled to their era.

And Wally, the little insecure baby he was, was equally unhappy to be with Barry and Iris' real children. Not the fake pretend child that Wally pretended to be. Not the mockery of their legacy that Wally was. Dawn and Don were their actual legacy, their actual flesh and blood. These were the two kids that Barry and Iris actually loved.

Now obviously that's bullshit but Wally was incredibly insecure at the time and he wholeheartedly believed it.

It didn't help that the twins walked away from someone who needed help. The twins had been taught their entire lives by Iris to hide their powers. Wally had been taught his entire life by Barry and Iris to help people. These two ideologies really butted heads when push came to shove.

Thankfully Wally was able to inspire them to be heroes and the three of them had a heart-to-heart.

They're still... uncomfortable around each other but they don't want to murder each other anymore.

(but, because of time travel, if the twins are pre heart-to-heart with Wally then they will probably still hate him)

[thisiscomics]

I was worried I would hate “The Button”, with its return of the Comedian’s badge and the promise of returning to the mystery introduced in DC Universe Rebirth, as I didn’t really want two of my favourite characters dragged into this and the likelihood of unnecessary continuity altering nonsense that suggests.

Instead, for the most part, the titular button (I hate that word. I hope in Moore’s Watchmen script it was a badge. Buttons are a whole other thing, dear American cousins) is little more than a MacGuffin to set up a reality hopping Batman and Flash adventure. Cosmic treadmills and time travel have long been a part of the sci-fi science of The Flash, so it fits with the character. Batman is a little less of a good fit to this sort of tale, but a detective is needed, and the story plays to his stubborn determined streak rather well.

It really shows where my continuity interests lie when the appearance of Jay Garrick matters so much more than the final 7 pages of foreshadowing and advertising. The Flash to me has always been a legacy hero (something that Mark Waid in particular really built on)- Barry was inspired by Jay, Wally by Barry, and a legacy was built from the ‘present’ of the Silver Age back to the Golden Age and then on into the future, running from Max Mercury in the 19th century on to John Fox, Impulse, XS and the Tornado Twins 1,000 years later. The New 52 wiped this out, as the first heroes the world had seen were the current ones, therefore there was no Justice Society. A Flash future was seen, but no past.

Now Jay appears to be back, although his appearance is brief. The implication is that he, like Wally, was erased from their history, but he’s still there. And if he is out there, then perhaps the DCU’s history is still out there too- a little messy, a little in need of cleaning up to resolve key contradictions, as was first tried 30 plus years ago in the first Crisis- waiting to get back in to the stories again. If nothing else comes of this, maybe we will get the Flash family back together again.

After this, the story falls into the ominous foreshadowing that editorial seems to love, but I can’t figure out who it’s aimed at. Watchmen is over 30 years old and, although it’s widely viewed as a classic of the medium, I don’t think new/younger readers are clamouring for those characters to become part of the DCU, and I imagine older readers either think they should be left alone to exist as part of that one ‘graphic novel’, and wonder why DC don’t just use the Charlton heroes (which Moore based the characters on when DC wouldn’t let him use them) since they already feature in the DCU for the most part.

But nonetheless, foreshadowing is the order of the day, so a three panel page has a glow approaching the badge as it lies on the ground, then a page of a blue hand picking it up, captioned with Dr. Manhattan words about how he perceives time and knows we are all just acting as we are meant to. Zoom in to the red splash on the badge and fade to blue.

Now a black page with ‘Epilogue’ across it in the familiar Watchmen font leads into 2 pages using the nine panel grid structure of the source comic, and the trick of zooming in on a detail and pulling out again as a transition device. Close on a quote and the image of the doomsday clock familiar from each chapter of the original.

What’s that you say? Doomsday clock? Well, cue a two page ad for a series of that very title, where the Superman logo is at midnight and the minute hand is only a couple of minutes away from midnight. All very portentous. And while Moore’s doomsday clock motif was very firmly centred on the fear of Nuclear War that dominated the period, and the gradual ticking down in each issue symbolised how the plot that underpinned events was drawing closer to its apocalyptic end, there’s no sign of that here. Of course, Doomsday means something else in the DCU, and the battered S-shield on the previous page suggests that someone thought a pun based on the Watchmen motif and the Superman villain was the height of wordplay.

None of this intrigues me. The Doomsday Clock story may be good when published, it may not, but I am not eagerly awaiting an explanation of a great mystery, because I don’t feel that there actually is any mystery. Instead I am just waiting for the justification of the presence of/references to the cast of Watchmen.

Unless he killed Eobard Thawne, Dr. Manhattan has been a completely neutral presence in the Rebirth universe. Similarly, this insistence on mining the visual and typographic vocabulary of Watchmen has, so far, yielded nothing of value (and shows a strange sense of page design history, as though that grid could only mean Watchmen and nothing else. Giffen’s “Five Years Later...” Legion of Super-Heroes used it with no connection to Moore & Gibbon’s work. And people seemed to regularly complain about it back then- I doubt they like it any more now if they’re looking for action and splash pages in their comics). There are no real echoes of the series, and the story would work with all of these elements stripped out, which just leaves me asking ‘why?’.

I suppose the main question is really ‘Will all this hype pay off?’ Who knows? I am sure I will follow it to find out, but it’s just not grabbing me the way I feel DC assume it is. I remember wondering what Zero Hour was and what it would mean when it began to be advertised and, to a lesser extent, wondering what a Grant Morrison instigated Final Crisis would leave us with. Now, there is only fatigue with all of this hype and false mystery, and the vague hope that someone will finally set the DCU back on course and then just leave it alone as a world in which people can tell stories, instead of a world that they can reset whenever they want in order to tell the same stories and claim it as a massive exciting event full of mystery and excitement, when really it is nothing of the sort.

From The Flash 22, by Joshua Williamson, Howard Porter & Hi-Fi