So my mention of Cary Bates in my last post got some of you talking about the storyline that got Barry “Silver Age” Flash marked for death in the soon-to-follow Crisis on Infinite Earths , “The Trial of the Flash.”
As I am once again getting a late start on the ol’ blogging yet again, I’m just going to say a few words about this series and we can pick up the discussion in the comments or maybe later as another full post.
I’m taking the issue numbers that comprise this run from the one (and I think only) time it was all reprinted under one cover, the black and white Showcase Presents thick paperback. The book includes #323-327, #329-336, and #340-350 (the last issue of the series.) Why they skip #337-340 is something of a mystery, aside from the issues themselves maybe not referencing the trial in-story. (#328 was a reprint issue.) The first issue is a Pied Piper story, and then the next two are the first appearances of Big Sir. The latter omission is most puzzling given that an event in that story leads directly to a dramatic reveal in the trial itself.
For the uninitiated, “The Trial of the Flash” is a story about our hero killing (accidentally or not) his enemy the Reverse Flash as he attempted to murder the Flash’s new bride. As a consequence, the Flash enters the legal system as the courts try to decide whether or not the Fastest Man Alive was guilty of…MOIDER.
At the time, apparently some people thought this was the Slowest Story Alive, as they quickly tired of this interminable plotline. To be fair, it was only a couple of years long, but still at this point at DC Comics, an extended storyline like this was the exception, not the rule, particularly in comics like The Flash which had mostly Done-in-One or the occasional two or three-parter stories. I remember, just a couple of years earlier, the story that opened Saga of the Swamp Thing got some pushback from readers for its length.
It seems a little odd to me, in that it wasn’t like we weren’t getting mostly standalone stories along the way, with the continuing subplots interspersed with the primary plot of the issue (both in Flash and Swamp Thing . Though perhaps in Flash , once the trial became the primary driver for the last year’s worth of books, it got to be a bit much, I suppose. Balancing the need between satisfying monthly reads and an extended plotline can be tricky, and for readers accustomed to a different sort of reading experience.
Personally, I enjoyed the trial storyline, which was something you really hadn’t seen in comics before…a superhero facing legal consequences for a fatalitiy committed in the course of his actions. And it kinda sorta played out in a real time, almost, in that in The Real World a trial like this takes for ever. I mean, most trials don’t end with, like, time travel, far as I know.
I have to do a little more research, but I think sales were…not great on this series as it reached its eventual ending at #350 (relatively speaking…I’m sure comics people now would push their own grannies off cliffs for the numbers it was getting). I’m sure that was one of the factors that went into deciding the Barry Allen Flash would be on the chopping block for the then-imminent Crisis on Infinite Earths .
But I still think it wasn’t a bad run of The Flash , that maybe was just a little too ahead of its time for the story it was trying to tell.
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