Customer Reviews

Showcase Presents: The Flash Vol. 3

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've always thought DC's Flash had the greatest bad guys, called the Rogue's Gallery. This collection of comics, almost every issue, Flash tangles with one of them infamous bad guys. Either it be Captain Cold, Heat Wave, Trickster, Top, Gorilla Grodd, Abracadabra, Reverse-Flash, Mirror Master, they all have plan to defeat Flash. But Flash's super speed is showcased in various forms and talents. And we can guess who is the winner. Some of the stories, the bad guys team up. We also get in these collections, Kid Flash stories. Only annoyance, is that certain stuff gets repeated a lot, since originally these stories were in single issues, and not all readers read past issues, so they explain things a lot, like how his costume expands when ejected from ring. A lot of stuff that happens is faraway incredible and corny, but nothing wrong with that, all in fun.

I love these Showcase reissues. They take me back over 50 years to when I was more innocent and life had a future. I REALLY wanted to be the Flash!! I miss the old anthology-type comics like Mystery in Space and Strange Adventures. They don't write poetry like that any more. I wish other imprints would do anthologies of their old stuff.

In my review for volume 2 of the Flash's Showcase Presents collections I wrote that it was perhaps my very favorite of all the DC Showcase Presents books. Volume 3 I will tune down just a slight notch (really I'd like to give it a 4.5 star review) because the stories don't seem as innovative and historically important as those in volume 2. Still, all the things you would love and expect in great DC Silver Age comics are right here. Flash consistently battles his famous rogues gallery of villains, deals with his romantic interest Iris West and teams up with Kid Flash for all sorts of adventures. Every page is penciled by the legendary Carmine Infantino who is as responsible as any one individual for what we think of as the Silver Age of DC Comics. The most interesting thing to me is the two stories collected here based on the same cover image! One is written by Gardner Fox and the other by Robert Kanigher. It is well-known that many stories from this era were developed based on cover images first. This is the first and only time I'm aware of that it was actually acknowledged in the pages of the published comic and they even produced two versions of a story to match a single cover! Very interesting I think!