After finishing a recent run of Flash comics, I have to say that I have been suitably impressed. Admitedly, Flash is not on my must-have list every month. I usually only get him because of crossovers. That is why I picked up the recent batch of Flash comics, all at once, from Flash #214-217 because they were Identity Crisis crossovers and I also picked up #218 because it was there. Flash was only in one panel in #218 and I couldn't have been happier.
The recent trend with DC is to make some really hardcore but extremely personal villains. They cannot be just one-dimensional, stale, flat, static characters anymore. Identity Crisis showed us a glimpse as to why Doctor Light was an idiot--the JLA messed with his mind. After peeling that back, these villains have to be impressive if they were to ever become "super" vilains. That is what #218 did.
Heat Wave sounds like a one-dimensional character on the surface, but you can tell that the author wants to really play his psychosis of pyromania and his guilt off of each other. There were a few cliches but once you put those aside, you really wanted to get inside that mind. At the end, you couldn't help feeling for the guy as a kind of anti-hero. If they had started a new book called Heat Wave, you would have been hooked into a new good guy that has some problems. The great part of this issue was that this was not the first issue of a new title. It was the re-introduction of a villain that you know is going to cause our main character Flash some grief in the next issues. It foreshadows some great tension for our hero in the issues ahead. When you like the villain, then the battle just becomes better. When you see the other side of the issue, it all gets muddy. But that is what makes it good.
Flash just moved to the top of my must-have list.
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