Matthew, while becoming a super-speedster may have been a good thing in Wally's life overall to the point when Barry died, Barry himself was dying as a result of having those powers and the responsibilities that came with them. It would have been extremely hubristic of Barry to decide that Wally must become a speedster and his heir apparent, in a sense stealing any other future from him and potentially condemning him to a similar end. It becomes worse when the backstage reason for this was to "fix a mistake" made by the original creators. Wally's origin is a phenomenal coincidence, agreed, but it exists that way by design, just as Barry's origin was an incredible happenstance from the start. The sheer unlikeliness of both events is almost thematic to the feature.

Flash #300 has a story in which Barry wakes up in a hospital, bandaged from head to toe and paralyzed as a result of chemical burns he received from the lightning strike. He never had a career as the Flash. He imagined it all, a fantasy born of his childhood fascination with Jay Garrick's comic book adventures.

The story plays out beautifully and works as a mystery which our hero must actively solve* rather than being a toe-in-the-mud, navel-gazing exercise in sustained dreariness as such a story would likely be today. The upshot of it all is that the world in which Barry Allen is a hero, the world in which individuals such as the Flash can appear does in fact exist. The obvious, predictable, & sensible result of extreme injury from being hit by lightning and covered in electrified chemicals is not necessarily the only possible result. Just as being bitten by a radioactive spider isn't likely to give one spider-powers or being caught in an experimental bomb blast isn't likely to give one super-strength, transformative capabilities, and untold muscle mass growth. Sometimes, however... it does.

I really hate it when IT mooks bleat the "It's not a bug. It's a feature," line, but in this case, the extreme unlikeliness of super-heroic origins is a hopeful, positive message that is far too easily drowned out these days by the tiresome, mournful lowing and disdainful chuckling of oh-so-incredibly intelligent, self-impressed cynics who feel that the original creators had no understanding of the characters and medium they made and must be constantly followed after, their mistakes, misjudgements, and general silliness tidied up at every turn.

Of course, it doesn't help in the case of the Flash that a couple of the creators themselves (Gardner Fox and Julius Schwartz) engaged in a bit of fanboy "logic" and came up with a method of "explaining away" the lightning-strike coincidence with the invention of the Heavenly Helpmates and their representative on Earth, Mopee (who was himself a fannishly-styled self-indulgent parody of Schwartz himself.) Hey, anybody can have an off month, right...?

I kept waiting for Cary Bates to assign himself the role of Heavenly Helpmate, Second Class (still hasn't won his wings yet, y'see) and appear as Mopee's designated successor, ("Moppett," perhaps?) the person responsible for Wally's lightning strike.

*No, it is not a parallel world or alternate timeline...

••

Or bad writing.

Regarding Harvey Dent, I believe the idea of his being a previously diagnosed MPD case was born from the fact that people who undergo extreme physical scarring and the loss of identity that comes with an altered appearance do not in fact develop alternate personalities and embark upon criminal careers. That Harvey Dent somehow did required in their minds an explanation.

They would rather have a sense that Dent was foredoomed, a victim of "Big Bad Harv" from the beginning, rather than endure the comic-book wackiness of an "instant origin" explaining his condition in a way that made no real world sense. The bottle of acid wasn't a catalyst, turning a good man bad. It was a solvent that washed away Dent's handsome facade revealing the monster that had always been there. See? So much more logical that way.

It's also a completely different story with a completely different message. I wonder, is there any character at all whose origins haven't been tinkered with, rewritten, reinterpreted and altered at this point?

JB wrote, "Or bad writing."

True. Barry had gotten out of any number of bad scrapes before. Dismantling an anti-matter cannon (or a tachyon cannon as it became in Robert Loren Fleming's story) shouldn't have been the end of him except that it was mandated to be. And that doesn't even take into account the awfulness of his cringing on the floor at the feet of the Psycho-Pirate for eight issues before that or the abominably bad year and a half Trial that made cancelling the book and killing the character so very "necessary" at the time.

Barry was not well-served by his writers; Not by the ones chronicling his life and certainly not by the one who orchestrated his death.

The stand-up comic origin of the Joker is made questionable as canon in the story that introduced it. The Joker himself as he's experiencing the flashbacks says that sometimes he remembers it one way, sometimes another, making what we're seeing the product of an unreliable narrator.

The difference between the two origins, in answer to Stephen's question, is that the Joker snaps, but does not become a multiple personality case, as Harvey Dent is sometimes depicted. The Joker after his disfiguring accident is insane, ruthless, and cunning. Dent is still Dent but now with the criminal Two-Face identity driving his actions and decisions. Or so we're told. I agree that he seems like just your average criminal boss most of the time.

Since the modern comics wanted to treat Dent as a "split personality," they felt they had to lay the appropriate groundwork for such a diagnosis to appear credible, or as credible as such a diagnosis can be, given the current prevailing medical opinion on MPD.

O, for the days when a terrible accident could simply "drive a man mad" and that was all we needed to know!

Matthew, I get what you're saying, but there are differences in Barry's selecting Wally as a successor and the examples you cite.

In the case of GL, the ring chose someone fearless and presumably up for the job as well. Hal is the sort of high-flying adventurer who would take up the power and duty of the Corps and do well by the decision. There is also the fact that he could have declined or walked away from the Corps at some later date, as in fact he's done on a couple of occasions.

In the case of the Phantom, young Phantoms are raised in the family tradition. They also have the option of simply letting the legend lapse, should they choose to do so. They don't because they see the enormous good the Phantom does and wish to play their role in continuing that proud family tradition. The decision to put them in line for the skull throne is not their's, but the decision to actually do so is.

In the case of Robin, whose parents had just murdered by a criminal, the Batman knew what Robin needed in that moment: a chance to avenge his parents deaths and make a difference in a world that no longer had a place for him. Robin required less physical training because of his upbringing in the circus. He was also damn smart. As such, he was "ready-made" for many of the aspects of nightly crime-fighting as practiced in Gotham City. He still had much to learn, it's true, but he started a whole lot closer to the end than Batman did, and for all his talent and excellence, still will likely never quite get to where the Batman brought himself.

What did Wally need that day he was with Barry in the lab? Wally needed... Wally needed to stay away from windows during severe thunderstorms is what Wally needed.

In the three cases above, there is a larger context in which to place a successor, whether it be a family tradition, an interstellar police force, or the Batman's war on crime. For Barry to decide Wally's future for him based on nothing but his own good works as the Flash is comparatively hubristic.

I get what you're saying about the legacy character thing as a staple of the genre, but for Barry to unilaterally decide THAT'S what going to happen to Wally seems very unlike him. One of the first things he did when he had a little Flash running alongside him to take care of was give him a costume of his own. I think he felt uncomfortable with the idea of Wally subsuming his own identity to become a second lookalike Flash, ironically enough.

Also, he wouldn't just be choosing Wally's future career for him. He'd be altering his entire physiology, turning him into a being that others have characterized as not quite human. For the physics of what Barry does to work in the "real world" he can't be the human being he appears to be, according to some in-story experts. He has to be something else. Is Barry now the post-Crisis Chief from the Doom Patrol, casually deciding who has to be turned into a freak and who doesn't based on some self-assured greater understanding of what the world needs?

Not to mention that Barry's taking a big chance with the whole "hey, maybe I'M the lightning bolt that empowers Wally" assumption. What if he isn't, but just happens to hit the one that was already coming? Do both lightning bolts dissipate? Veer off? Double-charge Wally? Kind of a big risk to be taking with fate and what is already known about the events of that day. Shouldn't he make sure there isn't another lightning bolt already on it's way before undertaking this plan?

Fleming's story already has a beautiful circularity to it, with Barry unwittingly arcing back along his own timeline to become the lightning bolt that empowered him. That's a nice, tight little circle with no need for concious decision to turn Barry into a last-minute arranger of all things in the post-Barry future to come. Plus, it makes the story Barry's story.

Having him decide instead to hit the chemicals near Wally makes the story really all about how Wally came to be the Flash. I understand that for a couple of generations of comic fans, Wally is the Flash and Barry is simply an awkward, outdated warm-up act for the real show, but that wasn't the intent of the story Fleming wrote.

It's also worth noting, I think, that no one I know of has ever referenced Fleming's conclusion. Whether we use the set-up to illuminate Barry's origin or Wally's, the story only eliminates one of the two "coincidental" lightning strikes in the canon. There's still that other one left unexplained by it.

Mark Waid left the Flash at one point saying that he was still the only one who knew why Wally hated time travel so much. I wonder if somewhere along the way, there wasn't going to be a story in which Wally discovers that circular time event that Barry was caught up in is the same sort of arrangement he's stuck with...

It's unlikely in this day and age that one writer would go so far out of his way to service another's work, but I like the idea of it myself. :-)