So in The Trial of the Flash, the Flash kills the Reverse-Flash, who is from the future, as supervillains are wont to be. The Reverse-Flash had a hate-on for the Flash, I forget why originally, but it was retconned around a few times. To make it plain that he was the anti-Flash, not only was he evil, but his costume was the literal reverse of the Flash's—mostly yellow with red accents.

So, The Flash #323, "''Run, Flash -- Run for Your Wife!'" opens on board the JLA satellite, with Firestorm and Wonder Woman talking about how no one knew the Flash was getting married. Cut to the Flash, racing to the chapel, where the Flash meets his parents, and it turns out it's not just the other JLA members who didn't know he was getting married: neither did his parents until 48 hours before the current page. Indeed, they've never met "this Fiona-person," as his mother calls her when the Flash goes to change. Lest you think Barry Allen was on distant terms with his parents, his father is his best man and his parents are helping him get ready for the ceremony. So it seems no one knew much about "this Fiona-person," including the Internet, which basically goes "WHO WHAT WHO" when you Google "Fiona Webb."

So Flash is now getting ready when his mirror fades out so that he can get a message from a Guardian of the Universe, the Green Lantern Corps guys. The Guardian wants to tell the Flash that a deus ex machina happened, a giant-ass energy discharge that took out a lot of planets and stars, gaining speed until it "surpassed the velocity necessary to break through into the swirling miasma of the time-barrier," at which point it broke up, but not before releasing the Reverse-Flash from the "obscure dimension" where the Flash had "left him stranded for all eternity" (italics all in the original). It seems Flash is kind of a dick, but all things considered, I'd probably also leave a super-fast evil guy stranded in some nether dimension for all eternity—though why the evil guy doesn't just die there is beyond me, since nether dimensions don't come with supermarkets. Anyway.

Now we've already seen the first of the many inexplicable things that happen in this series, which is that the deus ex machina by which Flash stranded the Reverse-Flash in has been trumped by another deus ex machina. I can ignore many such background events, though, the insane physics of the super-hero universe, as just what happens: I take them as the god-level events they're supposed to be and pretend they make sense. What I can't ignore is what happens next, which is that the Flash tells the Guardians of the Universe that he doesn't want help from the Green Lanterns. Why? "It's because of my emotional stake in this matter that I must confront this foe above all others alone! You Guardians must promise me—from this moment on you won't interfere or aid me in any way ... no matter what happens! No matter what?"

What?


Okay, fine, I guess the Flash is just crazy. What the hell, Flash? This isn't a public safety issue as well as your own vendetta, this guy who wants to kill you who has your exact powers but no conscience? You're going to fight this guy and it's okay not to get help, even though he might take out a whole city's worth of people in the course of nailing you, because you're too emotionally involved. Good one.

Anyway, so the Flash races off to find the Reverse-Flash and has a flashback (ha) to what's bumming him out, which is that the Reverse-Flash killed his first wife, Iris Allen, four years ago with "a vibrating karate blow which inflicted lethal and instant damage to the molecules of her brain!" In other words, the Reverse-Flash vibrated his hand through Ms. Allen's head. Immediately after this, the Flash fought the Reverse-Flash and trapped him as mentioned above. So the Flash runs to the Flash museum—yes, there's totally a museum devoted to the Flash, which as I recall is a key gathering point for all Flash-hating supervillains—and finds that the Reverse-Flash has rigged his own statue to deliver the message that he's going to get revenge for his entrapment by killing Barry Allen's new bride. Finally, the Reverse-Flash tells Flash to "home in" on the Reverse-Flash to continue the chase.

Two things:

One, yes, the Reverse-Flash knows who the Flash really is. It's part of his being from the future, or maybe he just super-followed the Flash around. I don't know. Why he doesn't just make use of this information, I also don't know.

Two, yes, the Flash's primary foes get statues in the Flash museum. You know how people want to stop naming mass killers because they want to stop glorifying them and thus encouraging new ones? Well, the same principle applies here: way to go, morons, you just made being a super-villain look sexy. Idiots.

So ... cut to the wedding, where everyone's waiting for Barry Allen, including Ralph Dibny, rich guy and superhero, who is for no reason that I saw friends with Barry Allen (well, they're both superheroes, and Dibny's a public superhero, but what public excuse he has for befriending an average police department forensic scientist, I don't know). Fiona Webb, the bride-to-be, is nervous, which wouldn't be helped if she knew her boyfriend was the Flash—oh, I forgot to mention that she doesn't know he's the Flash. This is a key plot point.

Just think for a minute about dating a guy who can run at the speed of light or faster. Wouldn't you notice he had really good reflexes? Screw the "oh, Barry's always out and around where we can't reach him!" shit; wouldn't a guy who can outrun bullets give some sort of clue in his daily life? Twitchiness? A lot of completed crosswords lying around, or maybe seven billion origami swans? The neatest or the messiest house ever? A blurriness about the edges when sitting still? Something? No? I guess not. Either that or Fiona Webb is as dumb as a bag of hamsters, which is my guess based on how she behaves later on. Anyway, she's so thrilled to be marrying Barry, whom she apparently only agreed to marry about 48 hours ago. She can't believe it's true!

Cut back to the Flash, who figured out that the clue meant that the Reverse-Flash is waiting for him at his old home, the one he shared with the now-dead Iris Allen. It's been standing empty for the four years since the murder, and now people are coming to look at it to consider buying it, just as the Flash and Reverse-Flash trash the place in a moment of seconds.

Back to the chapel: Fiona Webb is starting to think she's been stood up at the altar. She's starting to cry! Cut to the Flash, who's trying to throttle the Reverse-Flash. And ... end issue #323.
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Depressive thinking

One of the things about depression is how boring it is. Especially when you're getting better, you find yourself bored shitless and don't know what to do: nothing you think of sounds good, ever, or it seems like so much work for an extremely unlikely reward, or it seems stupid and a positive waste of resources.

And yet you can't just sleep—that's what got you into this mess in the first place. Watching TV is like being asleep, but it makes you stupider. Playing video games is okay for a while, but then it makes you stupider and it's also enervating. Reading is good if you have the attention span, but depressed people don't focus well. Oh, and you're probably broke, not that shopping for shopping's sake isn't also enervating and wasteful. Cooking and eating makes you fat; cleaning is depressing in itself for many people, plus it all gets dirty again so fast.

Excuses, excuses, you say. Right: that's depression. In the same way that a normal person might look at graduate school and say "maybe later," so do I view filling my days with something besides sleep and minimal work.
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So when you're writing stories for kids, your brain may want you to write dialogue for a character that goes, "That's some straight-up bullshit right there, man."

Thanks, brain, I love you, too.
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Because I am intensely bored

and I have no one else to tell this to, I'm going to write about the Flash. No, I'm not obsessed with the Flash—yes, this is that Flash, the DC superhero who runs super-fast—but I picked up a trade paperback called The Trial of the Flash, which covers about two years of the Flash comics from 1983 through 1985. In this "epic," which I'd heard called a classic, Flash goes on trial for killing a supervillain nemesis of his, Professor Zoom, AKA the Reverse-Flash.

This entire series of stories was so full of lunacy that I seriously wondered what the so-called creative process was like for it. I mean, at what point do you say that the best way to give Flash a change of facial features is to invent an intellectually challenged super-punchy guy for a few issues just to bust up Flash's face so that he has to get plastic surgery from super-intelligent gorilla hermits? Because I straight-up want that job, no matter how badly it pays: I want to invent things that make no goddamn sense and run with them, damn the torpedoes. Now, you may think that this could be made to make sense, but maybe this will make you think differently: no one notices the Flash has a new face. Seriously, he's been sitting in court with cameras on him for weeks on end and no one says, "Hey, Flash's face looks different today!" I mean, you can see his nose and the entire lower third of his face in his mask, and not one person says, "Wow, that's weird, let's pull up a file photo." This is writing for prepubescent rhesus monkeys hopped up on Red Bull and Twizzlers, readers with no long-term memory or sense of how normal people of average intelligence behave.

So here, then, is a recounting of The Trial of the Flash. This is one more instance of the completely useless nature of the Internet, as I'm basically writing a book report on the Flash's early-'80s adventures. Why? Because it would be really funny if this were the only document that survived into the deep future, and accordingly this was the only information future intelligent beings had about humans in the early twenty-first century. If somehow this is true, I'm not sorry, future persons, but neither am I especially proud.

And the rest …

And the rest …