Review: A stumbling start for Flash: Rebirth #1

After reading Flash: Rebirth #1 I'm ... ambivalent.

I'm glad to see Barry Allen back in the DCU, and for the most part Geoff Johns seems to have a handle on Barry's sense of duty and responsibility. But — as was mentioned in some recent comments — Johns has a seemingly growing obsession with the Silver Age as well as the increasingly in-continuity future laid out in Kingdom Come (originally an Elseworlds story).

He can lay in on pretty thick, which is the reason I stopped reading his Justice Society of America. And I don't know if it's my own paranoia or not, but I got the same sense of relentless nostalgia from parts of Flash: Rebirth #1. There are references and asides a reader would need a strong knowledge of Flash history to understand, and I can't help but see hints of Kingdom Come in the story.

In Kingdom Come Wally West is the Flash who is constantly moving, always running after melding with the Speed Force made his molecules unstable. If you've read Rebirth #1 already, you'll know this sounds familiar but with Barry being the Flash who won't stop, who seems to be connected to the Speed Force in a new way.

Frankly, that's annoying. I'm hoping it's a matter of reading too much into it, but I keep having flashbacks (no pun intended) to Geoff Johns' JSA/Kingdom Come storyline. It is only the first issue, though — I'll be sticking with it to see what direction the story takes.

There were some other, nit-picky stuff that jumped out at me:

• Johns is often chided about is his apparent love of gore, so the blood-spatter on page 3 ended up being a distraction more than anything else. I'm not a prude, but it came across as gratuitous and self-indulgent. And that new (as far as I can tell) backstory for Barry? Even moreso. Doesn't the character have enough tragedy in his background to make him interesting without giving his a traumatic childhood?

• The art by Ethan Van Sciver is great, with detail that informs rather than overwhelms. Hardly anything Van Sciver puts in a panel is static (no pun intended — dammit!), and he brings a heroic-but-human sensibility to Flash. But man, what's with all the Flash-lightning? Is it just me, or does it remind anyone else of the way Todd McFarlane would draw Spider-Man's webbing? Seriously, that lightning effect is getting waaaaay out of hand.

I did enjoy the banter between Barry Allen and Hal Jordan, and one thing I really liked — it might be my favorite part of the whole issue — is Bart Allen's scene. In it he's at the Teen Titan Tower grousing and basically tells his teammates, "Barry Allen, Schmarry Allen; who cares? Wally's the real Flash."

Because that's another way to read this issue: It not only reintroduces the characters and puts the pieces in place for the coming storyline, but it's also very, very meta. It's a fairly clever and gentle way of acknowledging the hand-wringing fanbase, and in a weird way it gives me some hope for the future of Flash.

Has anyone else read Flash: Rebirth #1? Let me know what you thought of it in the comments.