The Flash #339 - The Fastest Man Alive (Unless you count the five or six other people who can run just as fast as him.)

The Flash. Where do I start with a guy like this? Well, the Flash is another one of DC comics longest running characters. Interestingly enough, that's what the Flash does. He runs. He runs a lot, and he runs very fast. His power is being really good at running fast.

This is not just all he can do, but he's so fast he can "vibrate" through solid objects, "vibrate" to alternate realities and "vibrate" through time. I'm sure he's probably really good at "vibrating" really good in bed as well, but the CAC wouldn't ever let DC publish something like that.

Anyway, the Flash first appeared in the 1940's, and was a character named Jay Garrick who apparently got the ability to run fast through hard water vapors. If by that definition, I could boil the water that comes out of my shower and get super speed myself, at least then I wouldn't so frequently late for work.

At any rate, the Flash in his stylish winged pit-helmet and bright red and blue jammy-jams ran around and fought crime and fought the big bad Nazi's in the war up until the super-hero genre died in the 1950's.

When they decided to bring back super heroes at the end of the 50's, the reinvented the Flash as a guy named Barry Allan. A police scientist who got his powers when lightning hit a bunch of chemicals and was bathed in them. I'm sure if I tried the same thing, the only thing super-speedy about me would be how fast the cancer spreads.

Barry Allan was the main Flash character for a long time, he also found the original Flash from the 40's, who actually lived in a parallel world that is separated by a vibrational difference between the two world. So yeah, if you vibrate a certain way you can end up in another universe, why isn't this covered in A Brief History of the Universe? Stephen Hawking's should be on this shit like a mad man.

Anyway, we'll stick to Barry Allan for this review, because after a little something called Crisis on Infinite Earths happened, Barry was killed and replaced by his young ward, Wally West, as the Flash. Since then there have been all manner of Flashes, Scarlet Speedsters, Kid Flashes, Impulses, Speed Forces and all other sorts of convoluted nonsense trying to explain how someone can run really fast and not be totally burned away by all the friction.

Today we're going to be taking a look at Flash #339, which happened in the "Pre-Crisis" days as fans are fond of calling it. this was a period in time that the only universal constant in the DC Comics universe was unbridled stupidity! Stories didn't have to have continuity from one tale to the next, and any sort of notions of sanity was usually checked at the door.

Flash #339 was printed just before Crisis happened, when, supposedly, DC Comics became less goofy. As you can tell they milked the goof-factor up until the last moment with, this story is proof.