Special: The Flash Volume 1: Move Forward Review

Hello kids and welcome back to your regular scheduled Sunday Special where I talk about whatever I feel like really, and this week to celebrate Easter we're going to review The Flash Volume 1: Move Forward. What this has to do with Easter I do not know but in any event it's happening... But first I'm sure you want to know how the bracket turned out.

So congratulations to Supernatural for winning this 2nd annual event, as for the rest of the entrants there is always next year... Onto The Flash!

Move Forward was The New 52 relaunch of The Flash in September 2011 and it quickly (heh) gained traction as one of The New 52 bright spots alongside titles like Batman, Swamp Thing, Batwoman and Aquaman. Move Forward starts off supposedly 5 years after Barry Allen became The Flash and all is going well as he's out on a date with his co-worker Patty when trouble happens. Quickly The Flash jumps into action and takes on this apparent military-esque unit and retrieves a portable genome re-coder and return it to it's rightful owner Dr. Elias. Though during the retrieval he sent one of the military men through a plate glass window and turns out he died.

When Barry gets to the scene of the accident there are questions as to whether or not The Flash was responsible for his death or if it was something else entirely, more shocking is the deceased is one of Barry's oldest friends, Manuel Lago. The plot thickens when later on Manuel appears at Barry's apartment and the two get chased by the same military folk as before. Barry of course checks out and The Flash enters the fray and that's when things get weird. Turns out the military folk that have captured Manuel by this point are Manuel... Every single one of them.

The Flash is subdued and The Manuel who call themselves Mob Rule grabbed Manuel and ran. With the help of Iris West, a reporter friend of Barry's, Barry is able to start piecing the puzzle together. Turns out Manuel was an army experiment and was given regeneration cell's. Unfortunately Manuel was captured and tortured repeatedly. They cut off all his limbs only to see them grow back, so they kept him there for weeks repeatedly cutting off hands and feet. After a while, the severed limbs regenerated themselves and become clones of Manuel, thus allowing Manuel to escape his torturers.

The only problem with these clones was they had a set life cycle, after a while they just expire. That's why Mob Rule wants him back they need to run tests on his genetic code to find out how to get his code into their bodies. There's also another problem The Flash has to deal with, there's a blackout throughout the Gem Cities so he's torn between helping his friend, doing his police duty and helping out during the blackout as the citizens have gone mad and finding out what's happening with the speed force since he's started using the speed force in his brain odd things have been happening.

With the help of Dr. Elias he realises that the more he uses the speed force the more likely he is to rip apart time and space as we know it and create worm holes. We also discover that this was the source of the blackout, not Mob Rule. Eventually Mob Rule enlist the help of Dr. Elias to allow them to survive and The Flash is upset to find this out but he must do what he can to help his friend.

Following the Mob Rule arc the rest of this book is filled out with three chapters that are not stand-alone and do not conclude themselves making this an odd way to break-up the story. First off we see Captain Cold trying to kill The Flash, it turns out that Cold's sister was sick in the hospital when the blackout came and she was unable to get the medical attention she needed without power and was likely going to die at any time. During his fight with Cold the boat his girlfriend Patty and his friend Iris was on split in half and Barry is getting dangerously close to hitting critical mass on the speed force which would open up a worm hole. After saving Patty and others from their side of the ship, which was falling, a wormhole opened up over the other side of the boat and Iris and others were sucked in the wormhole.

The Flash meets back up with Dr. Elias who gives him a giant treadmill he can use to expel the speed force that is at critical mass, best of all the power generated can be used to get the city back online. The Flash neglected to tell the Dr. however that his plan was to open up another wormhole and run through it in order to find Iris and the others and save them but upon making it through the wormhole he's met by Turbine, a WWII fighter pilot who has been stuck in the wormhole, which is really the inside of the speed force FYI. Turbine wants to go home and will fight The Flash every step of the way if he refuses to take him back to 1944.

Writers Francis Manapul and Brian Buccellato craft an intriguing story that although can be predictable at times, moves in a nice steady manner throughout. Although I had complaints about the collection of the book it was more that it ended abruptly and was collected badly than the fat the story didn't read well. If I had volume 2 in hand I'm sure this wouldn't be a problem but I don't so it's problematic. For example there are nods to Gorilla Grodd's origins but only a couple pages, by looking at the collection titles looks like we won't really see Grodd until volume 3 so why bother?

By far the best thing about this book though was Manapul's art. It's perfect from the layouts to the character designs to the panelling. What this book did more than anything was get me excited to get to the Detective Comics run that Manapul and Buccellato were on. DC was so impressed with their run on The Flash they gave them their flagship title. If that doesn't say enough about this Flash run, I don't know what will.

Score: 8 Speed rings out of 10