Father Christmas
Ian Boothby – Writer
Giuseppe Camuncoli – Penciller
Lorenzo Ruggiero – Inker
John J. Hill – Letterer
Hifi Design – Colorist
Rachel Gluckstern – Associate Editor
Joan Hilty – Editor
Cover by Howard Porter
Our cover shows each of the main characters in all seven of the stories in this issue. It is nice to see Bart standing next to Superman and Green Lantern. It's one of the few validations we've seen that he really is the Flash for the DC Universe, and not some awkward character on his own isolated title. Unfortunately, I can't say I'm a fan of this painted style. All the characters just look slightly off.
Bart's story begins with him feeling a little blue on Christmas Eve in Los Angeles. Jay calls him on the phone, inviting him over to the Garrick household for the holiday, but Bart lamely says the snow in Keystone makes his artificial knee sore. Joan tries tempting the young adult with some homemade butter tarts, but Bart just runs over there to grab some tarts and immediately returns to his Hollywood apartment.
After Bart hangs up the phone, he tells himself Christmas just doesn't mean anything to him. He quickly reviews his previous Christmases, starting with him spending the holiday in a virtual reality program in the 30th century, as his mom and dad sadly looked on from the other side of a window. On Bart's next Christmas, he and Max Mercury battled the Mirror Master, who had trapped Max inside a shiny Christmas tree ornament. The next year, still as Impulse, Bart helped Wally take down Captain Cold, trapping him in a giant snowman. And most recently, as Kid Flash, Bart joined Superboy, Robin and Cyborg in defeating Insaniac — the Joker possessed by Brainiac and given the ability to make anything mechanical go crazy.
Bart becomes even more depressed by the memories of his old friends Max, Wally and Conner, so he heads out to try to find something to do. Bart visits the police station, asking if he can go on a ride-along or something, but he's told they're all booked up. As he walks home, Bart briefly considers using the Speed Force to travel two weeks into the future to skip the holiday season, but he realizes that's too risky a proposition.
Suddenly, Bart's hit in the side of the head with a snowball. Since this is Los Angeles, Bart assumes this snow must be the work of one of the many cold-related super villains. So he turns into the Flash and quickly tracks down the source of the snow — a small apartment with a huge hole blasted through the wall. As he approaches the dwelling, he's hit with a bolt of lightning, followed by a whirlwind. Believing this to be the work of the Weather Wizard, Bart angrily fights through the wind and prepares to attack.
But once Bart manages to get inside the apartment, he instead finds a middle-aged man with a young boy begging the Flash not to hurt his dad. Bart does snap the man's weather wand in half and demands a good explanation for the chaos. The man introduces himself as Rick Thompson, formerly Tweak, a tech consultant for the Rogues. He was never around for his son, but after his wife was killed by an OMAC he decided to go straight. Rick thought it'd be fun to give his son a white Christmas, so he tried to build his own weather wand, but he had a hard time controlling it.
Looking at his destroyed apartment, Rick realizes he and Jimmy are now essentially homeless, and he blames himself for being a deadbeat dad overcompensating for lost time. Bart tells Rick he's no more of a deadbeat dad than Saint Nicholas, who, according to some legends, had 10 kids and left them all to live the life of a hermit. And those legends say St. Nick, aka Santa Claus, spent his time delivering gifts to other children to make up for abandoning his own. Jimmy says his friend's brother told him there's no way Santa's fast enough to go around the whole world in one night, but Bart says he can do it in a minute.
Bart tells Rick that he saved a hotel from a fire last week, and he believes they'd allow Rick and Jimmy to stay there until they get back on their feet. But in the meantime, Bart believes a hotel is no place to spend Christmas, so he runs the two of them to Keystone to have turkey dinner with the Garricks. Jay and Joan give Bart a signed first edition of Mark Twain's "Following the Equator," which Jay picked up on one of his time-travel adventures where he saved the author from drowning in the Mississippi River. Jay then turns on the radio to find some Christmas carols, but instead finds a report of Murmur holding a choir hostage. So our tale ends with Bart and Jay battling one of Wally's old villains.
This was a nice story. Yeah, it's your typical holiday special story, but at least it wasn't overly cheesy. I do wonder, though, why Bart didn't rebuild Rick's apartment. I mean, two free weeks in a hotel is nice and all, but fixing their existing home is better and shouldn't be outside of Bart's skill set. But really, this was a quality story with much better art than we normally get on The Fastest Man Alive.
The most interesting part was Bart's flashbacks to previous Christmases. None of those things happened. Impulse did have a couple of memorable Christmases, one involving his time-traveling mother and another where Max literally took Bart to the North Pole to show him Santa didn't exist. However, these new adventures with Mirror Master, Captain Cold and especially the Joker/Brainiac hybrid look really fun, and I kind of wish they actually did happen. Or maybe they did? We are in a new post-Infinite Crisis continuity with lots of subtle and strategic changes to the past. So I guess the Insaniac adventure is now an untold, yet canonical story in the Teen Titans continuity.
Next time, we'll begin covering comics with a March publication date (even though they technically came out in January), starting with The Flash: The Fastest Man Alive #8.
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