The Four Color Media Monitor

Cowboy State Daily tells the history of the 2nd Flash volume's storyline where the villainous Vandal Savage antagonized 3rd Flash Wally West, in a storyline written by Mike Baron at the time the Scarlet Speedster series was being relaunched in 1987:

Former Thermopolis resident Brett Belleque was shopping for comics at a Goodwill store in Salem, Oregon, when he picked up the oldest one it had: 1987’s The Flash (Volume 2) No. 2: “Savage Showdown!,” written by Mike Baron.

“I’m a Batman and Flash guy, so I picked it up and started looking through the pages,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “Lo and behold, there was Thermopolis, Wyoming. I had to read it twice. It blew my mind.”

Thermopolis is a genuine point of contention in this comic book clash between Wally West, the third Flash, and perennial DC Comics villain, big-bad Vandal Savage.

In a story where a supersonic speedster fights an immortal caveman, Thermopolis might be the strangest thing in the story.

I own the whole tale myself as part of a paperback titled "Savage Velocity", and it's pretty good (one day, I may want to buy an omnibus reprinting this and some of William Messner-Loebs' followup work). Baron's work on Flash at the time was impressive, though some may understandably question the wisdom of depicting Wally West running an affair with Christina McGee, a scientist who was possibly a dozen years his senior. (This of course was subsequently dropped, and Linda Park, who was more around his age, became the girlfriend when Messner-Loebs took up writing.) The run was also notable for depicting Wally developing a massive need to eat, in order to keep his superpowers working properly. This would continue under Messner-Loebs, though afterwards, it was certainly downplayed.

When the reporter takes to interviewing Baron, Nexus and Badger are brought up:

Baron’s other comic achievements include Nexus, an award-winning comic series he co-created with Steve Rude, the costumed crimefighter Badger, a Vietnam War veteran with multiple personalities that he continues to write for today, placing it among the most successful and longest-running independent superhero comics.

“Badger’s only superpower is that he can talk to animals,” he said. “Jeff Butler wanted to draw Druids, but Capitol Comics wanted a costumed superhero. So, I thought, ‘why would anybody put on a costume and fight crime? They have to be crazy.’ And bam!”

Regarding the former, one can only wonder if it would win awards or any kind of positive regard today from leftists, since there were some who turned against Baron later, and refused to give him any kind of support, moral or otherwise, when he developed Private American as a crowdfunded independent comic. Nexus was a sci-fi metaphor for the Communist era, and in the past decade, Communism became more acceptable among leftists, ironically or not. I wouldn't be shocked if the same bunch had no interest in Badger either.

When Mike Gold was hired as an editor by DC Comics, he hired Baron to write for Wally West’s version of the Flash. With an immense toy chest of characters, settings and plots at his disposal, he wrote Flash with the same approach he always used when writing comics.

“I take their characters very seriously, try to stay in character, and honor the heritage,” he said. “I approached Punisher as a straight crime comic. There was no time travel or dinosaurs or nonsense like that.

“I ripped stories from the headlines, so Punisher went up against drug smugglers, serial killers, motorcycle gangs, and crooked reverends and bankers. He fought Daredevil and Kingpin, but those are also fairly realistic characters.”

Baron took Flash seriously too. Even with the superpowers, magic and the immortal caveman, the story is pretty grounded for a comic.

Though depending how you see it, the storyline with Chester P. Runk (Chunk), the chubby engineer who gets combined with a matter transmitter that enables him to become a human teleportation device was surreal as you can get. If there was something I appreciated about Loebs' followup run, it's that he brought back Chunk, and made use of him as a recurring cast member for some time, and it's a terrible shame that later writers like the overrated Geoff Johns forced Chunk into a mighty awful story or two years later.

As for the Punisher, a shame they don't get into how, by the turn of the century, Marvel's contributors by that time were ruining everything the Punisher was all about, including Garth Ennis and Jason Aaron, whose stories should be avoided at all costs. It's decidedly also a shame if Baron never wrote about topics like Islamic terrorism, unless maybe Marvel editorial refused to accept any such story pitches. Nor do they get into the whole issue surrounding Private American. But, here's why Baron stopped writing Flash after a year or so:

Baron wrote 14 issues of The Flash before moving on to other projects. Even in the infinite possibilities of the DC Universe, there were only so many places he felt he could take Wally West.

“The only reason I gave up Flash was that I didn’t know what to do with the character,” he said. “That would not happen today, but I gave it up because I didn’t know what to do with the character.”

This brings up an interesting subject that's not really new: writers who don't know what to do, or what kind of storylines they can write employing specific characters. IIRC, it was the reason given by Gerry Conway when he was writing Spider-Man in 1973 that led to Gwen Stacy dying at the hands of the Green Goblin at the George Washington Bridge in NYC, and I think Marv Wolfman once said he left writing Superman after a year or so in the late 80s because he didn't know what else he could write for the Man of Steel. There's something worrisome about saying you don't know what to do with a major or minor character, because it may have led to later, corrupt editorials exploiting such notions for casually killing off any character they thought was expendable, which is objectionable, because it's not like writers are or should be obligated to make massive use of a character they can't think of what do with. All they and the editors need do is just put the characters in limbo if it really matters, or they can just relegate them to minor use like brief conversations around an office.

That said, I'm convinced such a notion as not knowing what to do with various characters was really a shield for taking character drama apart, by the very same who pretend they do want to specialize in character drama. Such laziness has to cease, and editors/writers who defend such reprehensible conduct have to be called out for it.

Anyway, that said, I highly appreciate that a press source is drawing attention to one of the more overlooked storylines in comics history, one that writers post-2000 did not respect in any way. And those who'd like to read Baron's take on the Scarlet Speedster are lucky it's been available in trade collections for some time.

Labels: animation, dc comics, Flash, good artists, good writers, history, indie publishers, marvel comics, Punisher