The Flash #794

The One-Minute War – Part Five: Thunder in Her Heart

Script: Jeremy Adams

Pencils: Roger Cruz

Inks: Wellington Dias & Roger Cruz

Colors: Luis Guerrero

Letters: Rob Leigh

Cover: Taurin Clarke

Variant Covers: Taurin Clarke, Marco D’Alfonso, George Kambadais, Eleonora Carlini

Shazam! Fury of the Gods Variant Cover by Jerry Ordway & Alex Sinclair

Editor: Chris Rosa

Group Editor: Paul Kaminski

Superman created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.

By special arrangement with the Jerry Siegel family.

Once again, our cover doesn’t quite fit with the story as well as it could. Yes, Irey is the main focus of this issue, and she does explore the idea of forging her own identity rather than merely being the female Impulse. But she doesn’t get this new costume here. I hope she does get this costume soon, though. I never liked the idea of her being Impulse. Mainly because Irey never really had anything to do with Bart.

For the first time in this storyline, Impulse appears on a variant cover. This rather unique image by George Kambadais does a good job of capturing the frenzy of the One-Minute War, while taking a novel approach to visualizing characters running at super speed. I don’t think I like it, but I’m happy to see someone use a variant cover to experiment.

Our story picks up with Miss Murder attacking Irey at Mr. Terrific’s lab. Unfortunately, Bart and Ace didn’t tell anybody that Miss Murder can’t track you if you clear your mind. Fortunately, Irey has the ability to sling around her super-strong and still-frozen brother, Jai, as if he were a wrecking ball attached to an invisible chain. Also, Superman manages to twitch his fingers fast enough to grab Miss Murder’s dogs. The injured villain hastily retreats, and Irey recklessly decides to leave behind all the frozen people to regroup with her family.

Irey blasts up to Jay, Max, Bart, Ace and Barry, somehow causing a large shockwave that knocked down most of the Fraction troops. She randomly announces her new hero name will now by Thunderheart, causing Bart and Ace to idiotically shout out “Coooool!” like a couple of 11-year-olds.

On the other side of the wall, Jesse and Linda are captured and loaded up into a transport, which conveniently is being driven by the young man Bart and Ace rescued. That’s right, the still-unnamed interdimensional corrections officer somehow snuck behind enemy lines, disguised himself as a Fraction soldier and commandeered a vehicle.

Anyway, Irey’s sudden arrival did help the rest of our heroes, but not enough to prevent the Fraction’s admiral from carrying away the injured Jay and sealing the wall behind him. Jesse and Linda soon arrive to drive everybody back to Barry’s lab, which is an especially odd choice, seeing as how Jesse pointed out how the Fraction now knows where Mr. Terrific’s lab is and who’s in it. But I guess everybody was too busy mourning the apparent death of Wally to think too rationally right there. Barry, however, gets a crazy idea to not only win the war, but make it so that it never happened in the first place.

Jay is tortured for a little bit and taken to an operating table to be studied before being placed in a battery. Luckily, Jay manages to break the surgeon’s Speed Force processor and engineer a violent escape.

There’s always a fine line writers have to balance when using characters as comedic relief. You want them to be funny, but not too stupid. Or immature. Adams slipped into that realm in this issue with Bart and Ace. And he’s also unfortunately fallen into the trope of having two comedic reliefs constantly speak in unison. I call it the Weasley Twins Effect. I get that Bart’s big moment is already done for this story, but I’m really sad to see him be reduced to this.

I’m also worrying that the story is starting to unravel. It made no sense for Bart and Ace to learn Miss Murder’s weakness and not tell anybody about it. They should have defeated her for good, and Adams should have sent a different villain to battle Irey — ideally someone tailored to her unique skill set and position in life. And I’m very worried about Barry’s plan to travel back in time. If that was always the end goal, then why not go a little bigger with the destruction and mayhem? Have another couple of speedsters be killed — you’ve got plenty. And don’t make Wally’s apparent death so ambiguous. Do you know how many times Wally has disappeared in a flash of light?

I don’t know. I was having a lot of fun with this story, but this issue is giving me second thoughts. We’ve got a couple of issues left of One-Minute War … hopefully Adams can stick the landing. Especially as this is literally the only Impulse content I have this year.

To be continued …