EXCLUSIVE: Joshua Williamson Reveals The Secret Origin of His Tragic Flash War

Joshua Williamson is not interested in your happy memories of The Flash.

The DC Comics writer of the Scarlet Speedster since the launch of the Rebirth era has been putting all of the modern characters to hold the Flash title through an emotional wringer in recent months. The Flash series and its recently concluded “Flash War” arc saw the 50th issue rocket the tensions between Barry Allen and Wally West. And things have only gotten more drastic since then.

But for anyone who’s wondering whether a happy-go-lucky version of the hero will be appearing soon, Williamson wants to remind readers that a no-hardship attitude has never been a part of the Flash legacy. In an interview with CBR, the writer explained the origins of his “Flash War” story from the simple debate of “Who is the fastest?” to his personal plan to set aside revisionist history in favor of high drama.

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STORY CONTINUES BELOW VIDEO  

CBR: You’ve done a lot of stuff for a lot of publishers, but are you purely focused on DC stuff for the future?

Joshua Williamson: Yes. I still write Birthright over with Skybound/Image. But right now, there aren’t any creator-owned books on the horizon for me. It really is all about the DCU. I love the DCU. I’ve been a fan of it since I was a little kid, and there’s also a lot of fun knowing that I’m in the room building a lot of the stuff they’re doing in the universe. I mean, I’ve worked on every event since Rebirth started. I worked on Justice League Vs. Suicide Squad. When that ended, I started working on “The Button.” When “The Button” ended, I started working on Metal. When Metal ended, I started working on No Justice. [Laughs]

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Like I’m talking, I’d literally be in the building and we’d be signing off on the ending to “The Button” and being “We’re good. ‘The Button’ is out the door.” But the reason I’m in the building is not that. We’re there talking about Metal. That’s how it’s been for literally every event. The day I come in to finish one story, I’m actually there because we’re starting another one. So I feel like I’m very tied into the DCU at this point. And talking to Scott [Snyder] and everybody – going to the writer’s retreats – it definitely has my focus right now. I think about The Flash every day. It’s been on my brain non-stop. But I think the DC Universe is where I’m going to be for the foreseeable future. I just resigned my contract, my exclusive. So they’re definitely stuck with me for a while.

Page 2: Williamson Planned To 'Mess' With Wally West From the Start

Ever since the New 52 launched, and even after his Rebirth return, Wally West’s status in the DCU has been uncertain. Did you want to use that status to mess with people a little bit with the “Flash War” storyline?

I don’t know if I wanted to mess with them, but I feel like from the moment it was announced that I was on The Flash – it was even before we knew that Wally was coming back. When I was announced, it was with Barry, and it wasn’t public that Wally was going to be part of DC Rebirth. From day one, there were people saying, “Who’s the fastest Flash?” You get in that thing where there is that fandom constantly clashing with each other, and that’s already there. The idea of taking that to another level and telling a story about that was definitely fun.

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It’s part of our job to try to elicit emotion – to move you. To really get you engaged with these characters. And with Barry and Wally, I feel like it was already a story written in there. It had already been constructed, but no one had been able to play or do anything with it. Barry and Wally have coexisted for about a year since Crisis On Infinite Earths. For one whole year, or a year and a half, they coexisted. But they haven’t been together since. So this has never been done before. We started talking about how we could actually do this story – how could we build the tension between them that was believable and didn’t feel abrupt where you wouldn’t buy it.

It was funny because at first we were like, “This is going to be a challenge.” But then we started to realize, actually there is a lot of tension between them. There was stuff about Iris. About Wallace. About how Barry is about certain things and how Wally hadn’t really built a life since Rebirth. He’d kind of been floating through. He hadn’t established anything. And it was interesting because it was in his character, but it was in the book. Nobody had been able to establish him as a character again, and we were able to use that as part of the story – Barry going to him and saying, “You haven’t done anything.”

Page 3: Fans Have Idealized Wally West, Which Is Why Williamson Has Handled Him The Way He Has

For years, Wally was the character who loved being a superhero and had no angst. Now that’s been flipped on its head.

With Wally, it’s interesting. I feel like he has the same problem that Barry has, which is that we remember everything with rose-tinted glasses. The way we remember Barry is not the way Barry was written. Everyone remembers Barry as the way Mark Waid wrote him. If you go and look at “The Return of Barry Allen” – which is just as much a Barry story as it is a Wally story – it’s about how Wally saw Barry. And not only that, but it was about how Eobard saw Barry and how he was obsessed with being this perfect hero. That’s how he saw him. And Waid wrote Barry from the POV of two people who idolized him. And what happened is that Barry started becoming that character. And no one speaks ill of the dead. So he became this savior. He became flawless. That’s how Wally saw him – someone who he could never come out from his shadow or escape or be as good as Barry.

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But if you go back and read a lot of pre-Crisis stuff, Barry was not perfect. He was a flawed individual who made mistakes. He’s also one of the heroes who killed their villain. It’s the thing you’re not supposed to do, but he did it. And I think there’s a part of us who now feel the same way about Wally.

If you go back and read issue #225, which is Geoff [Johns] and Howard Porter at the end of “Rogue War,” there, Wally is happy. He is with Linda and his kids. He has the Flash Family that he built. That was a Wally thing, not Barry. In the moment, I think people try to remember Wally as that moment. If you look at the last splash page, Wally is running towards the reader, and he has everything he ever wanted. And I almost felt in a lot of ways Wally’s story ended there. It didn’t really, but there is a point to it.

We all remember it as if that was the only way he ever was. But if you go back and read the first 100 issues, all the way up to “Terminal Velocity,” Wally struggled. He wasn’t always happy. He’s the guy who won the lottery and bought a mansion and was mean to his girlfriend. [Laughs] He was not this perfect character people try to remember him as. Even him and Linda had these struggles. He wouldn’t always win. He would lose, and he would panic. If you go back and read “Terminal Velocity,” he wouldn’t tell Linda the truth. He wouldn’t tell Iris why he was panicking.

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And me as a Flash fan, I was also guilty of this. I feel like now when I go back and read all this stuff, that’s the kind of feeling I want us to have – that idea of that struggle. The reason Wally and Barry are so great and why they made such great Flashes is that we did present these challenges to them, and they overcame them. That’s the kind of stuff I’m trying to do in the book. I’m trying to make sure that I continue to put them through these struggles. I’m going to do that kind of storytelling with them that isn’t always happy and perfect.

Stay tuned to CBR for more on the future of The Flash and Williamson’s DC work.

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