Speedquest Chapter 2: Double or Nothing
Danny Bilson & Paul DeMeo – Writers
Ron Adrian & Art Thibert – Penciller
Art Thibert – Inker
Travis Lanham – Letterer
Richard & Tanya Horie – Colorists
Rachel Gluckstern – Associate Editor
Joan Hilty – Editor
Cover by Daniel Acuna
Our cover shows an evil red demon attacking a defenseless child in a green jumpsuit. Oh, wait. That's supposed to be Bart fighting Inertia. Then how come Bart looks like the spawn of Satan? I do like the Las Vegas lights in the background, but the characters in the foreground are awful.
Our story picks up with Bart excitedly (and stupidly) racing to Las Vegas to meet Val. Apparently Inertia had also told Bart that "Val" had rented out a penthouse and left a keycard with the concierge. And Bart doesn't find any of this suspicious. So he heads up to the massive, two-story penthouse and hears Val's voice calling him up to the hot tub on the roof garden. Surprisingly, Bart manages to keep his clothes on as he heads upstairs, only to discover that it was Inertia using his voice-changing device summoning him.
Bart almost begins fighting Inertia, but Thad convinces him to follow him out to the desert, where Val is being held hostage. Naturally, Val has a bomb strapped to her chest, and Inertia explains that he's created a "Lady or the Tiger" situation for Bart. He can push the green button on Val's bomb to defuse it, but once he does, he'll ignite a gigantic photon cannon that somehow targets the Speed Force. If Bart tries to disarm the cannon, Val's bomb will go off. And to make things interesting, Thad only gives him five seconds to decide.
Despite Val's protests, Bart decides to push the button, assuring her he can run faster than the speed of light. The cannon immediately fires, drawing all the electricity from Las Vegas to do so. Bart then leads the photon ray on a race around the world — literally. He eventually end up back where he started, guiding the ray to crash into the back of the cannon, destroying it. Inertia teleports away before Bart can catch him.
Bart takes Val to the hotel penthouse and helps turn on backup power for hospitals and emergency services until the rest of Las Vegas' lights come back on. He immediately returns to the penthouse to find Val stepping out of the shower, suggesting they enjoy their time together while they can. Bart sadly notes a temporary tone in Val's comment, and she says it'll be harder for them to be together now that he's living in Los Angeles. But Bart says he's always only a few seconds away from her. And then Bart and Val ... um ... have sex. As soon as they're done, the lights come back on and he decides to quickly check out the city to make sure there weren't too many accidents during the blackout. But he promises to hurry back to Val.
Meanwhile, Manfred Mota has finished slowly reassembling himself after Inertia blew him up. He realizes he was betrayed, but more importantly, he realizes how wrong he was to try to kill his daughter to restore his body. Seeking to make amends, he somehow tracks Val's atomic design to Las Vegas, riding on the power lines to the city.
In that brief moment of Bart's absence, Mota appears before his daughter, who has thankfully gotten dressed in a new outfit (don't ask me where the clothes came from). Val naturally panics when she sees her dad, and she even threatens to jump off the hotel's roof. But Mota manages to keep her calm and begins to apologize to her. Bart suddenly shows up, and Mota says he's said what he needed to say and will be on his way. Bart says Mota needs to go Iron Heights, but Mota refuses to return to prison. To make sure Bart doesn't follow him, he freezes the atoms around Bart, essentially trapping him in a cage.
Bart can't vibrate through the force field, but he does break out by creating a mini whirlwind. He easily catches up to Mota, and even though he can't touch the being of pure energy, Bart does figure out how to drag Mota in his slipstream, leading him to an electromagnet in a junkyard. Sure enough, this does the trick and traps Mota. And Bart notes that Iron Heights should have no problem setting up a magnetic cell for him.
Later, Bart takes Val to finally meet the Garricks, who urge the young man to return to Keystone City. But Bart instead asks Jay to help Val get her old job back at S.T.A.R. Labs and says he's planning on staying in Los Angeles. Inspired by his grandpa Barry, Bart has decided to apply for a job on the L.A. police department's forensics team.
Elsewhere ... well, in Inertia's lab ... Thad vows that the Speed Force won't save Bart next time. Next time, Thad will have an army behind him. He orders Craydl to give him the locations for February 2007 of Abra Kadabra, Mirror Master, Heat Wave and Captain Cold.
This was the final issue of Danny Bilson and Paul DeMeo. And you can tell they knew it heading in to this one. After seven issues of a sluggish, plodding pace, this one was a mad scramble to cram in all the ideas they had. After the first issue of this series came out, which sold extremely well, by the way, Bilson and DeMeo proudly announced they had a story for at least 12 issues. (In that same interview, they admitted to not having read any comics previously, which explains a lot, in my opinion.) But here's the thing: Bilson and DeMeo sucked. I don't know if their scripts were always late, but through eight issues, they never had the same art team twice. And their story itself was long, boring and frustrating. They took way too long to put Bart in the Flash costume and dragged out the Griffin storyline to an obscene length.
And then we got whiplash with this issue. After spending so much time teasing and building up Mota, Flash defeats in an astonishingly quick and anticlimactic battle. Don't get me wrong: I am not a fan of Mota at all. He was a boring and annoying villain they kept trying to hype up as some classic Flash arch enemy, which he was not. I'm just frustrated by the poor pacing of this series. And you know that Bilson and DeMeo would have spent four or five issues having Bart struggling to choose a career if they had the room.
Oh, and let me complain about the art once more. This issue was particularly lazy. As you saw from the one page I posted, Inertia's gloves routinely changed from panel to panel. All through the book. And there was one panel where Bart was supposed to be examining the bomb on Val's chest, but the artist straight up forgot to draw the bomb. I kind of get the feeling that just about everyone involved in this series had given up by this point. Sales were plummeting and DC had already put their new Flash plans into motion. Perhaps those plans were an overreaction to the struggles of this series, but that's a discussion for another day.
I will say I kind of enjoyed Inertia's interaction with Bart. Even though Bart is now older, taller and more powerful than Inertia, Thad is still much, much smarter than Bart. And it was nice to him smugly laying out his death trap that Bart blindly waltzed right into. Of course, I still crave the Inertia of Todd Dezago, who got a taste of what it's like to be in a family and struggled making sense of that with his years of being programmed as a villain. But I know I'll never get that Inertia again, so I have to make do with what little scraps of cleverness I can get.
Whew! What a tough stretch this has been! Let's check out the new ads:
Batman: Year One in a deluxe softcover edition.
Batman: Year 100 now in graphic novel format.
A two-page "comic" for the Nintendo Wii. (The art for this ad actually looks better than much of the art in this series.)
One magic word ... and a boy becomes the world's mightiest mortal! Shazam! The Monster Society of Evil.
The return of the greatest superhero team-up book ever! The Brave and the Bold by Mark Waid and George Pérez.
52 action figures.
The DC Nation page contains a clue about 52, which essentially says that the multiverse still exists after Infinite Crisis.
International Fight League.
Vinsanity by Carter. Body by milk. got milk? with Vince Carter. The 2006-07 season was actually Carter's final year as an All-Star, averaging 25.2 points per game for the New Jersey Nets.
Next time, we'll follow Inertia upholding his end of the bargain to Deathstroke in Teen Titans #43.
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