With last month’s issue of Flash I walked away so impressed with Peyer’s direction and set of decisions. Wally West’s daughter Iris had seemingly been murdered, and the cliffhanger just let that possibility set in over the course of a full month. I had closed the book then so thrilled with the gruesome death that The Flash had become one of my favorite series instantly. Just like that, Peyer had my respect as a writer willing to do something terrible to one of DC’s favorite heroes.

That changed with #243. This one puts all fears of horrific drama to bed as soon as Iris shows up. Spoiler alert: turns out she isn’t dead. Seems it’s all a hallucination brought on by the twisted mind of Grodd. OR is it just another cop-out. Here we had readers on the ropes, confused and shocked at the possibility of real death in the DC Universe. But no, only kidding, the girl’s fine. What’s more, Wally saves the day at the end of this one. Go figure, returning to the status quo is what superhero books are all about. Pretty much lame.

Turns out she isn’t dead. Seems it’s all a hallucination brought on by the twisted mind of Grodd. OR is it just another cop-out. Here we had readers on the ropes, confused and shocked at the possibility of real death in the DC Universe. But no, only kidding, the girl’s fine. What’s more, Wally saves the day at the end of this one. Go figure, returning to the status quo is what superhero books are all about. Pretty much lame.

So Wally figures out that in order to save the lives of his children he needs to find the speed force and remove death. Yeah, that’s right; he needs to physically remove death from the equation. Who knows? Nzame the sacred gorilla doesn’t help them, Grodd doesn’t hurt them and at the end of this we have two perfectly healthy children.

Wally also has to come to grips with the fact that the members of Keystone City hate him now. They don’t want him around and they certainly don’t believe in him as a decent person. This, of course, is the result of Spin’s scheme that opened up this six issue arc. But even this moment of high drama falls flat when compared to the rest of the story so far. This one had so much potential coming in and the ending just felt forced down upon us. It was enjoyable, yes. But by the time the final page came up I had this horrible feeling of, “Oh great, that’s it.” Like I wanted Peyer to take me back to feeling awful. It was good that way, I liked feeling awful, I liked being afraid and confused.

All is not lost, I suppose. I’ve really liked the family dynamic that Peyer has come up with for Wally. It works on all sorts of levels and adds depth and much needed personality to an extremely one dimensional character. He will be vacating the series with the next arc, and one can only take a blind stab at where the next team will take the West family. It doesn’t have to be brutal in order to be good…just take some scary family dynamics and mash them up with super speed and we’ve got a wonderfully entertaining comic. This one, however, a little disappointing.

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