Joshua Williamson wrote The Flash for roughly five years without a gap, which in the modern industry is close to extinct. The result is the longest sustained run on the character since the 1980s and a shelf that rewards a very specific kind of reader: the one who wants a story that keeps arriving.
It is not the flashiest shelf here. It might be the most reliable.
What defines his writing
Plot every issue. Something happens on every chapter and it advances the story. After a decade in which the prestige move was to slow everything down, his books read as unusually generous with incident.
Speed written as a problem. His Flash is not about how fast Barry Allen can run. It is about a man who can do everything quickly and still cannot fix the things that matter, which is the only version of the character that produces real drama.
Villains with a structure behind them. The Rogues are written as a working criminal organisation with rules, and the run keeps returning to why they exist rather than treating them as obstacles.
Built for the long haul, honestly. Arcs set up the next arc without cliffhanger blackmail. You can stop after a volume and feel finished, which sounds small and is rare.
The Flash run
The Flash by Joshua Williamson Omnibus Vol. 1 at 1,008 pages opens it, followed by Vol. 2 at 968 pages and Vol. 3 at 928.
The run starts with a city full of new speedsters and Barry Allen having to decide what he owes people who have his powers and none of his experience. From there it builds steadily toward a confrontation with the character's central antagonist that has been earned across three volumes rather than announced.
It requires nothing. This is genuinely a run you can hand to someone whose only exposure to the character is the television series, and the first volume works as a complete reading experience on its own.
For a different approach to the same character, the Bronze Age and Geoff Johns material sits elsewhere in the catalogue, and the Geoff Johns guide covers the run that immediately precedes this one in influence.
The event
Dark Crisis Omnibus at 1,000 pages is the line-wide crossover he wrote, and the usual caveat applies with force: it is an event book with many tie-ins by many hands, and it assumes a working knowledge of DC's recent continuity. It is not the place to meet him.
What can be bought at any given moment changes; the Joshua Williamson page shows the shelf with those titles first. The wider DC catalogue lives on the DC omnibus page.
Where to start
One recommendation: The Flash by Joshua Williamson Omnibus Vol. 1. It needs nothing, it is self-contained enough to stop after, and it is the best modern entry point to a character most people only know from television.
If it lands, the second and third volumes complete the story properly, which is more than most modern runs can promise.
Who should skip this shelf
He is a craftsman rather than a stylist, and the honest version of that is: nothing here will surprise you formally. The prose is clean and unremarkable, the structure is conventional, and readers who collect for authorial voice or for ambition will find this ordinary. Its virtue is consistency across three thousand pages, which matters a great deal if you are actually going to read them and not at all if you are looking for a single astonishing book.
Comments
No comments yet. Be the first to share your thoughts.