The Flash #32 – Ryan North, Writer; Gavin Guidry, Artist; Adriano Lucas, Colorist
Ray – 9.5/10
Ray: Ryan North wasted no time making his mark on this title, with an issue that firmly brought Wally West back to being a family man and a hero of the people. The problem is, the people like him a little too much. A shady online content creator has started a contest for people to film themselves getting rescued by the Flash, and now they’re throwing themselves off rooftops and doing other risky stunts to force the rescue. Wally is being run ragged, has to cut out of family dinners every fifteen seconds, and he’s getting increasingly frustrated. But then something weird happens. He recognizes one of the people throwing themselves off rooftops – it’s his long-time enemy, Captain Cold. At first, I assumed that it was a guy in a costume, but no – it’s the genuine article, and he knows something that he needs to get Flash’s attention about. He knows about the bigger threat facing the city – and it could be cataclysmic.
This issue feels like a hard reset for Captain Cold’s characterization, ending his time as an A-list supervillain and bringing him back to the work-a-day crook with a sense of honor he used to be. That’s very welcome, especially as he and Flash are hilarious as they snark and insult each other through their investigative mission. With a new priority, Flash starts taking pre-emptive measures to keep people safe – essentially yanking people out of the way of streets and off rooftops before he even knows if they’re jumping or not. This leads to a lot of hilarious visual gags – but even the fastest man alive can’t be everywhere, as he learns the hard way. North does an excellent job of getting across just how stressful this situation is for someone like Wally, and the stakes escalate massively at the end of the issue. This feels very much in the vein of the best Flash runs, particularly those by Johns and Waid so far.
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GeekDad received this comic for review purposes
