#to help them mature. wally’s runs by loebs and waid /were/ written with his developing maturity in mind

[roobylavender]

parroting off of that post but it’s truly a fascinating phenomenon that wally is so thoroughly developed a character in his own runs and arguably miles more mature and possessive of the accountability to deal with certain emotional situations that the other members of the fab five continue to flail at and yet every time he’s in a titans book the greatest extent to his characterization is dumbass dickhead who doesn’t know how to do his job without someone (dick) telling him how to do it

[longitudinalwaveme]

How Not to Write the Flashes and Their Rogues, Part 2 (Geoff Johns’ First Run, Rogues’ Revenge, and Blackest Night)

Geoff Johns is another character who did some characters really well and other characters poorly. I liked his Linda quite a bit. His Jay and Joan were good. He does a fantastic Captain Cold, a good Heat Wave, and a very distinct and interesting Weather Wizard. I liked aspects of his McCulloch and applaud his creativity in the creation of a bunch of new villains (collectively, the new Rogues). His handling of Grodd and Abra Kadabra was  good. He invented the second Trickster and Zoom and was also involved in crafting the second Captain Boomerang (but more on Owen later). He understood Piper’s character. And his characterization of Keystone and Central City was really good. He breathed life into them like no other writer. That being said, he’s not perfect, and there are aspects of his writing that I dislike.

First, I find that his Wally is a bit too similar to Barry. I don’t hate his take on Wally, but I do find it to not be as good as Messner-Loebs’ or Waid’s . Johns’ Wally seems just a bit too serious and mature.

Likewise, I’m not crazy about his Bart. Again, I find that he makes Bart a bit too stoic and serious. I’m also not a fan of Johns having him take the Kid Flash identity (I like him calling himself Impulse better).

I can’t say he handled the Piper improperly, because he didn’t, but I do feel like the trauma conga line he put the character through was a bit much (although it wasn’t his fault that subsequent, much worse writers put him through even more trauma.)

I’m not crazy about the direction in which he took Magenta; he made her much more murderous than she had ever been before. It was also strange that she started teaming up with various supervillain groups, because before Johns’ run all of her criminal activity was linked to her mental illness and her anger at Wally for their bad break-up. She wasn’t ever 100% out-of-character, but she seemed off compared to how she had been previously written.

His treatment of the Top seemed mean-spirited. Everyone has characters they don’t like, but the fact that he made all the other characters share his distaste for the character to the extent that he did was unnecessary, since the character does have fans who don’t appreciate having him arbitrarily treated as though he’s a much bigger jerk than the other Rogues when he really isn’t (or at least wasn’t prior to Johns writing him). The fact that he used the Top as a plot device to justify a retcon that I don’t like doesn’t help matters, either. That being said, he did at least give the Top some extra powers, so that’s cool...and the idea that he thinks of himself as more sophisticated than the other Rogues is an interesting distinguishing trait.  

His Golden Glider was...kind of a mixed bag. I appreciate that he gave her a backstory and established that she and Cold were very close, but at the same time, he took away a lot of the character’s strength (treating her primarily as a victim rather than the strong-willed villain she was during the Bronze Age)  and kind of fridged her posthumously. He used her death, even though he didn’t write it, to motivate Captain Cold, and he also refused to bring her back for that reason. He also strongly downplayed her relationship with the Top (probably because, as previously noted, he really seems to hate the Top). 

I don’t actually dislike the backstory he gave to McCulloch or the retcons he gave to the backstories of Heat Wave, Weather Wizard, and (later) the original Captain Boomerang, but I do think that they display a slightly worrying trend with Johns’ work: namely, that he appears to think that the best way to make sure the Rogues are taken seriously as characters is to have them kill a lot of people (especially their relatives and particularly their fathers, for some reason). I’m not particularly fond of this method, but that’s largely a matter of personal taste. 

In speaking of McCulloch, I will also note here that Johns’ McCulloch is a lot more grim and unhinged than Morrison’s McCulloch, being more in-line with the McCulloch Waid wrote in #105. 

And then there’s the stupid Identity Crisis tie-in retcon. Not only does this retcon make Barry rather morally-ambiguous by revealing that he had Zatanna alter the Top’s mind, but, more annoyingly, it also completely undoes Trickster’s character development under Waid, undoes some of Piper’s character development under Messner-Loebs and Waid, and makes most, if not all, of Heat Wave’s choices post-COIE not the result of his own agency. If Johns wanted to undo the redemption arc of Heat Wave, fine (James really should’ve stayed semi-reformed), but it would’ve been better served by a different narrative choice. Pretty much anything would be better than saying that the Rogues’ redemption arcs were the result of the Top tampering with their minds, in fact, since doing that basically undid about 80% of the impact the choices Heat Wave, Trickster, and Piper had made since COIE. 

And finally (for now) we have what happened with Owen during Blackest Night. While I don’t begrudge Johns wanting to bring back the original Captain Boomerang, I do wish he had done it in a different way than having Owen turn into a child-murderer and then be killed by Captain Cold. Poor Owen suffered both a figurative and a literal character assassination there.