The Greatest Flash Stories Ever Told by Mike Gold

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book from the early 1990s takes a look at the best Flash stories ever told. The introductory materials are solid. The stories themselves are a bit of mixed bag and not quite as good as either the Golden Age, Superman, or Team Up greatest stories book from this era.

The book features four stories from Jay Garrick's Flash including the widely reprinted origin story from Flash Comics #1. One of the nicer ones was, "The Slow Motion Crimes" which showed the golden age version of the Silver Age Flash's first villain, "The Turtle."

The Silver Age version of Barry Allen defines the book, with pages 68-243 being stories from the Silver Age of comics. While I usually think these books tend to stack the books with too many modern stories this one almost has too few. Still, it has fun with the Silver Age concept with stories featuring top flash villains like Gorilla Grodd, the Mirror Master, and Captain Boomerang (who joins a truce and teams up with the Flash and Elongated Man.) At the same time, the Flash's key allies including Kid Flash, the Green Lantern, and of course, Jay Garrick, the Golden Age Flash (this story has them teaming up against Vandal Savage.)

The weakest of these was, "The Trail of the False Green Lanterns," which had the Flash and Green Lantern teaming up against three duplicate Green Lanterns who are committing crimes. It's confusing and hard to follow story that's not really a highlight for either character.

The best of the silver age stories is "The Flash-Fact or Fiction" which has the Flash travelling to our universe in an accident caused by fighting a strange alien. A lot of fun, particularly when the Flash comes to DC comics Editor Julian Schwartz to get a treadmill built.

The book then features one single story from the 1970s which really feels like an imaginary story and is kind of weak. The Flash took many historic and memorable turns in the 1980s before Crisis on Infinite Earths, but it was decided not to actually show any of these stories but to have writer Cary Bates do a 10 page text summary of the last 75 issues of the Flash Volume 1. That's really a ripoff for readers who don't buy these books for text summaries.

The book closes with the second issue of the Wally West Flash comics which has Wally fighting Vandal Savage, winning the lottery, and inviting his girlfriend to shack up with him. This wasn't even all that good of an issue and definitely very flawed for what's supposed to be just Issue 2.

Still, if you can get this cheap enough, the Gold and Silver age material make it a worthy read.



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