The Flash #796 // Review
Admiral Vel is having problems. That doesn’t mean that he isn’t in total control. He is, after all, quick to point out that he is the strongest conduit for the Speed Force. That doesn’t mean he will have his way, though, as writer Jeremy Adams concludes his “One-Minute War” storyline in The Flash #796. Assisting Adams is a massive art team, including pencillers Roger Cruz, George Kambadais, and Fernando Pasarin. The inking team includes Wellington Dias, George Kambadais, and Oclair Albert. Color comes to the page courtesy of Luis Guerrero, Matt Herms, and Pete Pantazis. The big climax has a great deal of energy about it, but it lacks the clarity of earlier moments in the story.
The Flash is convinced that he can send Admiral Vel and his crew away. It’s just a matter of getting to the central spire of his craft. Generating enough power could be just the thing to get it to move and send him back to where he came from. He’s not exactly in a position to do much about it at first. He IS handling a sudden crew mutiny. Since he’s the fastest being there is, it shouldn’t be all that difficult to do, but will he be able to do so in time to stop the Flash family from doing their thing?
Adams processes the end of the story in a way that seems like it’s trying to tie together too many loose ends. Somewhere in the midst of the One-Minute War, there were a hell of a lot of little elements that came to inhabit the periphery of the story, and Adams just didn’t have enough time for all of them. So in the final chapter, he settles in around the conflict between the Flash and Admiral Vel and...well...just lets the two of them have at it. There’s enough action there to carry the rest of the story, but so much of what crawls around the edges of that action feels like a distraction.
The massive art team does a pretty good job of moving everything around the page coherently enough. There are A LOT of people in play in many, many different corners of the war. It would be all too easy to simply allow it to melt into an unintelligible miasma of bright action. The art team keeps it all rushing around the page well enough. One can tell that there are things happening. And it would be really, really cool if some of what was happening actually had a chance to hang out in the center of the panel for long enough to make a solid impact on the reader.
One way or another, it all gets resolved. The sinister-looking villain does what sinister-looking villains do. The cool-looking hero does what the cool-looking hero does. There’s a combat. There’s a resolution. Things have shifted a bit by the end of the issue, but that much is to be expected when things move as quickly as they do in a story like the “One-Minute War.”
