Welcome to 2007 at FiveMinute.net. There'll be a 2006-in-review article, but first I want to get some content out. Some really weird content.

See, a while ago I discovered the wide world of comics blogs. (This is comic books, not comic strips or webcomics, although all three interest me.) There are some seriously hilarious ones out there; among the best is Chris's Invincible Super-Blog by Chris Sims. All you need to know is that this is the guy who likened reading a particular comic arc to "trying to pull yourself out of quicksand on a rope made of punches to the face." Because that's how he rolls.

Anyway, a while back Chris posted a parody of DC Comics's maxiseries INFINITE CRISIS, done very much in FiveMinute.net's style -- except for the crayon, that is. He called it INFINITE CRISIS in 30 Seconds. It was a great success, so when the blog's second anniversary rolled around last week, he decided to celebrate with a contest. Readers were invited to come up with their own "30-seconders," and the winner would get stuff.

Naturally, I couldn't pass that up. This sort of thing is my bread and butter -- except the drawing part, but that was expected to be bad. So while I didn't quite make the deadline for the contest part of things, I did create a submission, which I submit to you as well. Here's FLASH: "Chain Lightning" in 30 Seconds. (Since we're not exactly a comics site, I've included some annotations in this update's LJ post to explain what's going on.)

Next update: stuff you've heard of!

ANNOTATIONS

First a little background. The Flash is my all-time favourite comics hero, so I wanted to do something from his book. "Chain Lightning" is one of Mark Waid's FLASH storylines. Waid is one of the superstars of the comics industry today, and it was his FLASH run that got him there -- but as much as I love his work, he gets a little silly sometimes. This story is a good example.

It takes place during the career of Wally West, the third Flash. Barry Allen, the second Flash and Wally's mentor, is dead. (Jay Garrick, the first, is still alive and active, but he's not the main Flash anymore.) What neither Wally nor Barry knows is that Barry had a twin brother, given to the Thawne family at birth for reasons I won't go into. "Chain Lightning" begins with his arrival on the scene as a supervillain called Cobalt Blue.

The panels cover most of the story, but here are a few notes to fill in the gaps.

Panel 1: "My name is Wally West. I'm the Flash," is how the narration begins in most of Wally's FLASH issues. People credit this to Mark Waid or sometimes even Geoff Johns, but it began in Bill Messner-Loebs' run -- which, incidentally, is where I came in at the age of 9 or so.

Panel 2: The gem's line is from Zod in the Superman movie, natch.

Panel 3: Standard procedure in Waid's big storylines was to get all the heroes with super-speed together to face the threat. The usual suspects were Wally, Jay, Bart (a.k.a. Impulse, Wally's not-quite sidekick), Max Mercury (the Zen master of speed -- I'm serious), and Jesse Quick (daughter of a Golden Age speedster, the late Johnny Quick). Sound like a lot of guys with super-speed? Waid thought so too, and came up with the Speed Force, a common energy source they were all drawing on. Wally discovered it in Waid's breakthrough story, "Terminal Velocity," and at this point he can manipulate it to great effect.

Panel 4: Yep, that's really how this worked. Over and over between the years 2000 and 3000, some descendant of Barry Allen or Wally West would take on the role of Flash, and eventually be challenged by a Cobalt Blue descended from Thawne. It's like Hatfields and McCoys, only stupid. Our heroes' task was to visit each of these Flashes and warn them or help them out. (The Flash shown here is Jace Allen, if you're curious.)

Panel 5: The speedsters had been carrying shards of the Cobalt Blue gem to act as homing beacons. Unfortunately, the evil essence of the gem gradually brought them under its control, ultimately amassing an army of Flashes. Oops. (Why was Wally spared? Because his Speed Force mastery was such that he could actually time-travel under his own power at this point, something not even Barry could do. And Barry was killed off partly for being too powerful....) Visible in this panel are crude facsimiles of Jay, Bart, Jesse, Max, and Barry's children from the future, the Tornado Twins. There's also a fat one, because there was always a fat one in these group shots. Not pictured: John Fox, smothered by a word balloon.

Panel 6: For some reason, modern depictions of Barry Allen always put him in a bow tie. He didn't wear them constantly in the old days, but it reinforces how straight-laced he was. So I put one on his costume just for fun. The guy about to kill him is Cobalt Blue, of course.

Panel 7: The gentleman who's about to step on Wally is the Anti-Monitor, a being so evil that "super-villain" doesn't begin to cover it. In the Crisis On Infinite Earths, he tried to destroy not just Earth, not just the universe, but all possible universes ever. It took thousands of superheroes to bring him down, and even they would have failed if not for the heroic sacrifice of Barry Allen... whom Cobalt Blue just killed early. Smooth move, Ex-Lax.

Panel 8: Wally tries to fight the Anti-Monitor at first, then tries some other things, and finally thinks of what any Trekkie could have told him on page one: just go back and stop Cobalt Blue from killing Barry in the first place. To do so, he has to grab him and run straight into the Speed Force. If you do that, you die -- but all speedsters are drawn to it, sorta like the Nexus or rapture of the deep. In "Terminal Velocity," Wally had become the first person ever to return from the Speed Force. But he can't do it now for a reason explained next panel. (The FLASH writers had already teased us about killing off Wally several times, to the point where it was almost a running joke. This death lasted only a little longer than the ones in #50 and #100.)

Panel 9: Bart is the only one who remembers Linda Park, Wally's fiancée. His love for her was the anchor that brought him back from the Speed Force last time. (Waid is an avowed romantic.) So without her, he's staying dead. The reason she's gone is that right before "Chain Lightning," a villain kidnapped her on their wedding day, stuck her in another dimension, and did his best to wipe everybody's memory of her. She and Wally both return in the next storyline, and in the meantime, Flash is replaced by the other guy in this panel -- the Dark Flash, a gruff, older Wally from a timeline where Linda was killed. Oh, and Impulse was always drawn with big feet.

Silly? You bet. But I prefer Waid to his successor Geoff Johns, who's a continuity master but wrote a much less interesting Wally West. And the less said about the current series, where Bart is the Flash, the better (because I may do fivers of that).

- Z