Welcome to my 10,000th essay on why Bart Allen shouldn’t have become Kid Flash or the Flash, where I retread the same arguments I’ve been making for the last 16 years.
Honestly, this is all coming about yet again because I find myself incapable of not arguing with people on the internet. “Becoming Kid Flash, and then the Flash, was a natural progression. Yeah it happened a bit fast, but it was gonna happen anyway, because he’s an Allen, he’s gonna end up as the Flash eventually.” Or he could not???
Bart has…a complicated relationship with his lineage. His grandmother couldn’t raise him, as she wasn’t really equipped to raise a hyper-fast toddler-turned-teenager for some reason, despite raising the Tornado Twins on her own. Then again, it was implied that Don and Dawn didn’t come into their superspeed until they were older, but who knows. His cousin Wally West didn’t want to be responsible for him. So Bart went to Max Mercury instead, who taught him the finer points of using his speed, and the best way to be a hero without sacrificing his own sense of self. Max could get irritated with Bart sometimes, a lot, but he also understood that his Impulse identity was something that was his.
By the time Bart came along, Wally had made the Flash identity his own. Yeah, we still had Jay Garrick zipping about, but Wally wasn’t acting like he was running in Barry’s shadow all the time anymore. Wally West was The Flash and based on their rocky relationship, Bart had no desire to be his sidekick, to be Kid Flash. He spent a lot of time being very adamant about not wanting to be Kid Flash. There’s still a lot of mystery over whether Bart becoming Kid Flash was decided by Geoff Johns (who made the switch in the 2003 Teen Titans series) or Dan Didio (vice-president and editor at DC at the time), as the blame seems to shift based on who is telling it. Meanwhile Marc Guggenheim, writer of the second half of Bart’s Flash series, Flash: Fastest Man Alive, has always said that editorial instructed him to kill off Bart at the end of his 5-issue run on the book and never deviated from the story, so I’m inclined to believe him.
In any case, Bart becoming Kid Flash was an attempt to re-brand him as a “legitimate” sidekick and part of the Flash family, and maybe it was just Geoff Johns’ innate dislike of Bart as a character, but all his Johns-penned appearances after he made the switch dropped everything that made him unique and appealing. And then he was aged up in Infinite Crisis and Flash: Fastest Man Alive happened, and it got even worse. Which is definitely why the decision was made to kill him off, there were too many abrupt character changes in way too short a time, and they needed to do damage control, so they just decided to shake the Etch-a-Sketch.
A big part of the other person’s argument was how the other holdover legacies from Young Justice were growing up, so obviously it was time for Bart to grow up too, right? To which I argue: he was already growing up. Bart had gone through a lot of personal growth (much of it brought on by trauma) in a very short amount of time: Max almost dying while Inertia kept him imprisoned in a VR simulation for weeks and impersonating him, watching his Scout die on Apokolips, losing Carol to the future, getting Carol back in time to lose Max to Rival’s possession, getting laid out by Indigo, nearly getting killed by the Superman robot, watching Donna and Lilith die…this sort of stuff changes a person. Bart had already learned to stop following his id and actually think things through (see: that time he figured out that he would be able to get out of the Impulse-proof bubble if he dressed up as Kid Flash and exchanged places with a Scout), even if he still rushed into danger, he wasn’t doing it as much. Bart Allen was maturing and, if put in the hands of a better writer, he would have continued to do so without losing his individuality, his bright personality, or his ADHD. As @skittering-roach once put it, “Bart was such good ADHD representation, but Johns tried to cure it with a bullet.”
The Johns version of growing up took the impulsiveness out of Impulse. He didn’t evolve into Kid Flash, he devolved into a blander version of what he already was. He didn’t get more mature, just less interesting. Bart under better pens was someone who loved the idea of superheroics running in his family, but still wanted to be his own person. Never forget, Batman giving Bart his name was a retcon, he decided what his superhero identity would be. Wally may have given him the idea, but Bart was the one that owned it.
Bart’s creator, Mark Waid, was always of the mind that turning Bart into Kid Flash was a bad idea, and he’s said even Geoff Johns agreed with him on the matter after a while. Here’s a quote from an interview Waid did around that time: “ In terms of sales they had on the first issue and the sales they posted by the fifth or sixth issues, it was just a crashing, crashing disaster. It was one of the most disastrous, embarrassing launches in DC history. And we were all “ I’m not trying to sound all “I told you so,” because it broke our hearts because we loved that character “ but we warned them. We told them, “Don’t do that, it won’t work.” Sure enough, six issues in, they realized they had a mess of a series they couldn’t make work, no matter what. At that point, Dan DiDio called me up, a courtesy call, and said, “So we’re going to kill Bart. I just thought I should let you know.” My honest feeling at that point was like, “Dude, you killed Bart years ago.” [mutual laughter] “That’s so not Bart in that suit. I don’t care. Everything in comics is cyclical. Bart’ll be back eventually at some point anyway so, sure, go ahead and put the bullet through his head. I don’t care.” I figured Bart would be better off dead than misunderstood and mishandled. ” Yikes.
Flash: FMA was a disaster of a series from start to finish. Everyone was OOC, there were retcons abound (do not get me started about the retcons involving the Rogues, I will not stop), and it really felt like the first half of the series was trying to give Bart his own Return of Barry Allen moment, where he would feel like the Flash, and it never happened. Instead, he spent issues scared to use his powers, reluctant to help people, and almost totally willing to let his suddenly superpowered roommate be the “hero” the city needed. Awful. And that’s before we bring up the shoehorned romance with Carol Bucklen 2.0, Valerie Perez. The character was not given enough time to be his Linda Park, his Iris West, so it’s not really a surprise that she resonated with exactly no one and has never been brought up again since the finale. I can’t even remember seeing her at his funeral, which Countdown dedicated an entire issue to. And that was the end of Bart Allen.
Until he was brought back as the being in the lightning rod that the Legion went back in time to retrieve during The Lightning Saga, in Legion of Three Worlds.
(I have an entire other decade-long beef with the decision to have the Rogues murder Inertia in Rogues’ Revenge while bringing back Bart in Legion of Three Worlds, as it felt like a big “we have gotten rid of everything that might remind you of Flash: FMA, please love us again” move and frankly, if I may be a toddler for a moment, it was stupid and I hated it.)
The post-resurrection Bart era was handled really poorly, to say the least. He appeared in Flash: Rebirth and the Brightest Day Flash series with a drastically different personality, one that reminded me of Wally in New Teen Titans for how snitty he was over the weirdest things. The books never actually tried to have him properly reconnect with Max Mercury, instead having him try to become Barry’s sidekick, only to get rebuffed at every turn because his grandfather, for some reason, has no desire to spend any time getting to know him. We had four years between Legion of Three Worlds and Kid Flash Lost, and absolutely nothing of any big importance was done with Bart in that time. But between George Perez drawing his big return and Nicola Scott drawing him over in Teen Titans, at least he looked good???
Another big change that came when Bart became Kid Flash was the…I dunno, sheer number of artists who where drawing him to look like Wally? He kept looking older, with green eyes and red hair and I hated it so much. I loved Nicola Scott’s version of Bart from the latter half of the Teen Titans series because he actually looked like a 16/17 year old? Groundbreaking! And the colorist actually gave him gold eyes?! Miraculous! But his hair continued to have that weird Wallyish red tint up until Kid Flash Lost hit.
I guess that’s also why the whole Bar Torr thing in the New 52 Teen Titans drove me so nuts? Because his personality, at least at the very beginning, was somewhat reminiscent of how Bart used to be (running head-on into danger without considering the consequences, not fully understanding what he can do as a speedster) and maybe even more importantly to me at the time, his eyes were gold and his hair was brown again! I need to point out: I had really low standards for what I was willing to accept in 2011. But then…literally everything else about the New 52 Teen Titans series happened and it was just like. Okay. This is a different guy. Bart is gone forever, this is fine. I can do whatever I want with him, my city now. And then my city was burned to the ground by BMB with his new shitty Young Justice series and I just. We can’t win.
Bart under Johns? An attempt at maturity undercut by the idea that he still had to be the childish, jokey character. Bart under Bendis? Complete regression to a version of Impulse that never actually existed. Bart is not nor has he ever been a LOL RANDOM character. Even when he thought in pictures, he wasn’t like this.
There’s a joke among comic fans that goes yeah, this is my favorite character. I hate everything they’ve ever been in. And it rings true for a lot of people, because they’ll love the potential a character shows, then get upset when the creative team never lets that character reach it. I don’t hate everything Bart has been in as Kid Flash. The Return of Donna Troy, one of the few mid-2000s Titans things GJ had no hand in, characterized Bart as compassionate and brave, the heart of the Teen Titans. He showed up in an issue of Action Comics, helping Kon and Cassie protect Smallville from Magog. He’s brattier in this one, more reminiscent of the Bart we saw in Young Justice and the earlier half of his solo series, but he’s more recognizably Bart than anything we were getting in Teen Titans at that time. Post-resurrection, I liked the issue of Superboy he was in, where the two of them raced. Kid Flash Lost, the Sterling Gates Bart ongoing we were promised and then denied, was the best we were going to get in a post-Flash: Rebirth, impending Flashpoint landscape, but I still wish he’d been allowed to take on the Teen Titans in the New 52, instead of Scott Lobdell. See? Not entirely a hater.
Bart could have grown into anything. That’s the thing about young heroes, they can absolutely change identities without becoming their predecessors. Wally West was the exception in this respect, not the rule. Dick Grayson went from Robin to Nightwing, Roy Harper from Speedy to Arsenal, Donna Troy from Wonder Girl to Troia…Bart didn’t need to become Kid Flash to signal he was maturing. In the long line of 90s legacy heroes, Impulse was one of the only really different ones. He didn’t take on someone else’s name and suit, he didn’t even fall into superheroics on purpose.
I guess the long-winded point I’ve been trying to make is, Impulse Bart Allen? Good character. Unique, an individual, very ahead of his time (not unusual for a kid born a thousand years in the future). Kid Flash Bart Allen? Had potential that went completely unmet, came about in the worst way possible, suddenly Very Horny For No Reason. Flash Bart Allen? No thank you, never happened.
We could have had it all, but instead, we got 16 years of confusing, unsettling, outright upsetting messes, one after another. Thanks, DC.
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