Woofus: Well, she’s their daughter, so that’s why it makes sense. Dressing like Jay would be a bit random. Unless you just mean she should get jeans. I would be behind that.

I am intrigued by the suggestion a few posts above, that the Silver Age Flash costume was inspired by Captain Marvel’s. I have long wished that the two characters did not share such similar colorations and symbols, making it aesthetically awkward for them to work alongside one another.

To me, the ideal Flash costume is Kid Flash’s “classic” look. (Wally should have just kept it after Barry died.) Adding a white circle diminishes it, IMHO (“metal upon metal” being a combination avoided in heraldry).

“Justice League” Wally is drawn in such a way that every lightning-bolt has exactly one kink in it. Works reasonably well, but the chest-symbol might be mistaken for an “S.”

Part of me wants to see Jessie Quick dress more like Jay Garrick. But I also like her Johnny Quick variation and the Liberty Bell costume (complete with Jodhpur’s–another Raj reference!), so I’m torn.

Thanks, Alan! For some reason, I was thinking it was a one shot.

What are your thoughts on the variations on the wings? There’s Jay’s original, semi-realistic ones, the later art deco ones, Barry’s streamlined wings, and later the almost lightning-bolt-like earpieces like the ones on Walter West’s, costume the split identity costume, or Flash: Rebirth. (Or the JLU costume, for that matter.)

Personally, I like the art deco look for Jay, the streamlined look for Barry, and the lightning bolt look for Wally.

Overall, really nice piece. The Flash is kinda unique among major characters in that they never really change costume very much. Jay is still sporting the same costume 71 years later, Barry has his classic (And Bart did too), and Wally has only had two major costume changes. Nonetheless, your piece did a nice job with smaller differences and obscure characters. I’d never even heard of that JLA story with the split identities- what was it called?

Fashion-wise, it’s interesting to compare the Barry Allen costume to Captain Marvel’s, along with a mask definitely inspired by Captain America. I read a long time ago that the silver age Flash’s look was based on a character Carmine Infantino was playing around with called Captain Whiz. Has anyone ever seen any sketches of Captain Whiz? The name and the red-and-gold costume would DEFINITELY link him to Fawcett’s Captain Marvel, if that were true.

Historically, and I’ve read comics for near 30-years to back this up –, artists have screwed up the lightning bolt and inverted it. Happens all the time. Not just for particular runs of one artist or writer.

Just because you’re the “go-to” expert doesn’t make your interpretation right, either. I call B.S. on that, too.

Byrne’s inverted the Flash emblem, Guice Jackson — the fellow who drew the first few issues of the ’87 Flash revival, and even Carmine Infantino screwed up the Flash emblem on the dust jacket art for the hardcover version of the Greatest Flash Stories Ever told. Carmine’s the guy who designed the Barry Allen outfit for goodness’ sake! You mean 34 years after he designed the damn outfit he decided to change the emblem on purpose? That’s silly!

Mistakes usually don’t become canon until a geek or overzealous writer/editor decides they are.

Roy Thomas was the one who decided the 1950s Captain America comics counted as canon even though Stan Lee purposely avoided those stories when he and Jack Kirby revived Cap in the mid-1960s. Then again Thomas was known to be anal about canon to the point of reintroducing some silly character nobody but him remembered from years back. I salute him for doing his part in keeping Golden Age characters alive but he was one of the first editor-fans to get crazy about authentic canon, too.

Mark Waid, who ran out of good ideas on his next-to-last Flash run, decided Wally West had green eyes (Hypertime B.S.) even though the character had blue eyes for most of his existence up to 1994… Even the George Perez issues of Teen Titans had the character with specifically blue eyes. That was backed up by the first few editions of DC’s Who’s Who.

SOME GUY: I didn’t. I explained the criteria.

GRAZEEM: This article, you’ll notice, is PART 1 of 3. Not everything is here.

DOMINIC: John Fox was covered in our JLA 1 Million piece a couple months back.

My Blue Lantern Flash tee is my all time fave underroo!!! ^_^

I hope you include the one-panel only Reverse-Golden Age Flash from one of those Grant Morrison issues in the Wally volume.
The Bronze Age Zoom…always looked bad-@$$

No hotlinking Kelson Vibber okay? ^_~

crea shakti,

And I always loved the Dark Flash outfit too – and the John Wesley Shipp outfit which given how hard it is to translate costumes on screen, could have been terrible but instead utterly worked.

Missing for me is John Fox – given his multiple appearances I think of him as one of the main Flashes (rather than the flashes in the pan). Also, would love to see you comment on his use of blue as a key colour in one of his key uniforms – I remember being shocked that a Flash didn’t use red (or even yellow) as a main uniform colour. But blue totally worked… The hope uniform was certainly further proof of that.

I think you’re overreading the occasional flipped lightning symbol on Barry’s and Wally’s outfits.

That’s NOT meant to distinguish the characters or signal a change in costume. It’s a common artistic mistake that’s made more often than most people realize. The artists either rush through their work and don’t realize the mistake they made, or they just aren’t following the style guides that DC editorial is supposed to enforce. It could be that the artists are just slightly dyslexic, too. It’s not an intentional artistic decision meant to separate/distinguish characters.

Hal Jordan’s outfit was altered a bit in GL: Rebirth a few years ago… Artists today still occasionally make mistakes drawing the outfit. Some people who’ve been out of the loop (and not reading the current comics) draw his outfit the way it was drawn from the mid-1960s to 1994. Call it laziness, lack of research on the artist’s part, or editorial oversight, it still happens all the time. Likewise, people draw GL/Hal stories meant to be flashback stories and draw him wearing the current revised GL uniform. Again, it’s artistic laziness or oversight on the part of artists and editors. This sort of thing happens all the time with different characters depending on when costumes get altered.

I don’t mind minor costume tweaks myself but a lot of times the costume changes are completely unnecessary and don’t raise comic sales or the profile of lower tier characters. For characters with iconic looks like Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and the Silver Flash and Silver Age GL, costume changes are for the most part unnecessary.

The heck you don’t.

“Barry.”

“Yes, Wally.”

“Oh good, I wasn’t sure it was you.”

“It isn’t. It’s Bart.”

“It is NOT!”

“Gotcha!”

————

“Hey there goes The Flash!”

“A Flash.”

“Huh?”

“One of them. You said THE.”

“Well, there goes a Flash with The Batman.”

“That isn’t THE Batman.”

“It isn’t?”

“No. That one’s a Dick.”