In this story, Earth is visited by the Hyperclan, a group of super-powered aliens who appear to be good guys. The aliens immediately set about at massive public works projects with their powers, endearing them to the gullible common man. But the JLA aren’t convinced that The Hyperclan are good guys, a suspicion that is confirmed when the old JLA satellite is attacked by armored superhumans. This sets in motion a series of battles between the Hyperclan and the JLA, during which most of our heroes get their asses kicked and are captured by The Hyperclan. All but Batman, who learns their terrible secret… and then proceeds to kick alien ass.
But no! We’re not focusing on Batman kicking ass today! That’s too easy! Let’s look at the second most F*$% Yeah moment in the Hyperclan saga: Flash’s hyperspeed around-the-world duel with Zum, the alien speedster.
Here they go. Pay attention to the panel in the lower right-hand corner, where the startled guy in India drops the vase. It will come up later. Behold:
Morrison writes a damn good super-chase – you get the feeling that he had this sequence in him, waiting to get out, waiting for the right story. While I’m normally a little indifferent to Howard Porter’s work, I think he nails it during this sequence, and the blur effects and whatnot are well-handled and non-gratuitous.
Let’s keep going. Flash is gaining on Zum, who throws frickin’ bricks at Flash! Dick!
“He must have grabbed them from that building site in Beijing.”
I love that.
The chase continues:
Flash decides to get his game on and accelerates towards lightspeed. You can tell it's lightspeed because that's when you start thinking about hyperdimensional gels and trippy shit like that:
Flash realizes that he’s faster than Zum because I mean - please, he’s Flash.
That’s right, Flash accelerates past Zum, runs around the fucking world – again, he runs around the fucking world-- comes up behind him, and smacks him in the face!!! Check it out:
Flash is going so damn fast that he punches Zum off the planet. He gets hit at Mt. Rushmore, flies into space, comes flaming back down, and lands somewhere with zebras. Flash punched the dude to Africa! Sadly, the page in the comic where this happens is so hideously designed that I couldn’t bear to post it. It’s as if Porter’s urge to experiment with page design won out over the urge to tell a coherent visual story. Oh well, the rest of it is keen.
Then, as a nice little punch line, Flash runs back to India or wherever and stops the vase (remember the vase?) from falling:
That’s right – the entire battle with Zum took place in less time than it would take for a vase to drop to the ground.
Somebody give me a F*$% Yeah.
This sequence is so kick-ass that instead of Celine Dion, I’ve brought in some special guests to help me give it the props it deserves:
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Norwegian death metal band Immortal joins Dave’s Long Box in a hearty F*$% Yeah for JLA #3!
Norwegian death metal band Immortal joins Dave’s Long Box in a hearty F*$% Yeah for JLA #3!
31 comments:
I dug this fight back when I first read it, but since then I took a physics class and found that, according to the Theory of Relativity, mass does not actually increase as speed increases, which kind of screws up the outcome of the fight. I know, comic book science and all, but I like it when it is based in real science. Still a cool scene though.
There is no more F*@% YEAH power than superspeed, but both the superfasthero itself and the way it's been portrayed have been mishandled too many times to count. This is one of those rare instances that gets it right on both counts.
(singing...) He's the maaaaaster...of going faaaaaster...
Matt Brady's trying to make me cry!
Oops, that was me, crying.
What good examples of superspeed have there been? I am working on such a character and I want to go for that flip yeah momentum
Yet another example of the Arkon Axiom: if aliens show up saying they're our best buds, they're evil. If they show up destroying things for no reason, it turns out they're actually good guys.
Dave, I can't believe you left out that last page, if only for the final "Flash fact" punchline which is awesome!
Matt Brady, I can't believe you are bringing up physics here, don't you know Wally never went to college? Are you trying to embarrass the guy? Have a heart, Brady!
I gave that F*@# YEAH moment an 8.5 out of 10... until Flash caught that pot at the end. That made the moment a 10 out of 10. That made the fight so much better.
Let's think about how much time that fight actually took from the time he passed the Pot Man in India:
We will assume in the panel Pot Man dropped his pot that the very bottom of the pot is 1 meter from the ground, which would make the man about 5'10". Easy enough to assume. And, for the sake of rounding UP, we will also assume that Flash caught the pot the exact instant before the bottom of the pot shattered on the ground. That would mean the pot fell 1 meter exactly. Now, gravity's velocity is 4.8 meters/second2 (2 means squared). So, the pot, which fell 1 total meter, took .2083 seconds to fall before Flash picked it up (1 meter / 4.8 velocity). So that entire fight took LESS THAN (remember we rounded the distance up and assumed he caught it at the last possible instant) .2083 seconds. That's about a fifth of one second.
F*@% YEAH FLASH, F*@% YEAH GRAVITY.
Dave,
You're the King for bringin' out the Sons of Northern Darkness themselves to bring the majesty of Flash Facts!
I saw those guys open for Manowar, and it made me a fan ever since. Pity they broke up, or lay dormant--whatever they do in Norway.
This has also got to be the only time Flash is not JLA Tool #1.
Dear Matt Brady,
I have also taken my fair share of science classes and have a working grasp on Relativistic concepts, so I would like to point out that you are applying the wrong formula to the Flash's fight sequene.
While mass does not increase due to speed, force does increase due to acceleration. This is demonstrated by the standard Physics formula F=ma where F is "force", m is "mass" and a is "acceleration."
As you can see by this relationship, because Flash increase his acceleration, the force of the punch would proportionally increase.
The idea of a stronger punch due to greater acceleration is definitely in agreement with real science.
(If the concept still seems shaky, just take a second to think of it this way: imagine a car hits you at 1 mph. Now imagine the same car, with the same mass, hitting you at 55 mph. While the mass does not change, the force does due to greater acceleration.)
Regards,
Roel
Flash Fact: Grant Morrison can make even the lamest characters cool. Not to say Flash is lame, I actually like him. I'm just saying "Grant Morrison Presents Angel & the Ape" would probably be excellent.
Oh hell, this moment *is* totally Airwolf. I'd forgotten about it because the Bat-moment from the same issue tends to overshadow it.
But, yes; this is a kickass Wally moment.
Actually, Wally did go to college -- to study physics, IIRC -- but dropped out after he won the lottery. (There was no mention of him dropping out, but college was never mentioned again...)
Oh man. Immortal.
And that's how I know that Dave Campbell once spent three years as a sherpa to learn the secrets of the Himalayas, which he now applies to comics blogging.
Also, I really like the part where after punching the bejeezus out of Züm, the Flash goes: "That's escape velocity, by the way. It's a Flash Fact."
What a smartass!
F*@% Yeah!
I had forgotten all about this scene, and amazingly didn't recall it even during the Flash fight in the "Divided We Fall" episode of Justice League Unlimited, which is very clearly inspired by this sequence.
God, Grant Morrison is awesome. I've always viewed his JLA run as the spiritual end of the 90s, as the comic that basically said "you can come back now, comics don't suck anymore." It's sequences like this that illustrate why.
Kelson sez...
Actually, Wally did go to college -- to study physics, IIRC -- but dropped out after he won the lottery. (There was no mention of him dropping out, but college was never mentioned again...)
Huh. I didn't know that. That seems like one of those plot threads that someone should really pick up on. I think there's potential in the idea of Wally going back to school, especially now that he has kids.
Winterteeth sez...
I'm just saying "Grant Morrison Presents Angel & the Ape" would probably be excellent.
Two thoughts:
1) If Grant Morrison made Animal Man rock, I have no doubt that he could knock Angel & The Ape out of the park.
2) I'm pretty sure Bruce Timm and the Warner Bros. Animation guys were batting around the idea of an Angel & The Ape series. I bet it would have been neat. I also think Darwyn Cooke has done or considered doing some Angel & The Ape stuff. Obviously, there's some potential there.
Does anyone not love how with just two words - "Flash fact" - Morrison says everything anyone will ever need to know about Barry's relationship with Wally?
Simple. Elegant. AIRWOLF.
Stealing that thought from Patrick...
This was an awesome F*** YEAH moment and I'd like to add Flash manning up in the JLU Eps. "Divided We Fall" in a similar scenario.
Flash, after being one of the less useful characters thoughout the series, truly comes to his peak as a charcter in that episode. All the other original memebers have been defeated and their reinforcements have been fighting a minature war on the JL station. So who stands up to take out Lexor/Brainac? Flash. Round the world punch, not once, not twice, more like a dozen or so.
F*** YEAH.
-Josh
Lucky us that we're basically sorta getting "Grant Morrison presents the entire fucking DCU" soon, right? :)
Heck, he's already sorta doing it in Seven Soldiers (post-IC DCU, mark my words).
Give that man an Atom ongoing already. You know he'd go nuts with the potential for a big old physics bonanza.
And maybe one day, he can write the Avengers. I'm waiting for it...
(good catch about the force formula, Roel, saved me from posting it ;))
I actually just read that for the first time last week, definitely the highlight of that arc for me. I disliked the artwork for the series though, I can only imagine if a really great arteest worked on this.
The vase scene is genius! I think I laughed out loud and clapped my hands when I read it, but thanks to some Flash osmosis I caught it before hitting the carpet. That's some powerful F*@%k YEAHness right there.
Wally using Barry's "Flash Facts" was informative, expositional, funny, and touching all at the same time. Why is it that the British writers always seem to turn caption boxes into literary art?
IIRC, wasn’t Wally an Accounting major? Or am I getting him confused with all the non-doctor X-Men?
Confessional: Waid's Flash was the comic that broke me from my Marvel Zombie rigormortis. And it was Morrison's JLA that made DC my preferred universe since then. So you can imagine what a kick this fight was for me. More than anything, it cemented for me the idea that the Flash--be it Jay, Johnny, Max, Barry, Wally, Jesse, [Flash Fact: Almost done...] Bart, XS, the Zooms, or Savitar--isn't just "fast." In a race, Superman can--and sometimes does--win. So could, I would guess, the other Supers, Wonders, Marvels, Green Lanterns, and J’onn (of course, I mean against normal Flash-types, not Speed Force-doping Wally). And Bat-Mite. No, what makes the Flashes unique is that they live speed, as though it was an instinct or sixth sense. Mozart could play a harpsichord better than anyone, but it was the unique talent for music itself that made him an Academy Award-winning movie subject. That’s why Wally beat Zum: the Martian was fast, but he knew practically nothing about what he was doing. And that’s why Wally, despite his superior power, still knows Barry would kick his ass in a second.
If it makes you feel better Matt, although mass doesn't actually increase with velocity, the rather handwaving relativistic mass does, so it's often thrown out there by folks like Hawking and Feynman when explaining relativity in less than rigorous way. Here's a more thorough explanation if anyone's interested.
(Of course, what always bugged me about that scene is the fact that Zum is shown crashing back to earth after achieving escape velocity. Escape velocity by definition means you're not coming back.)
And while I'm in T.A. mode, gravity doesn't have a velocity, it has a constant acceleration, which on Earth is 9.8 m/s^2. Integrate that twice to find position as a function of time starting from rest, and you get x=(0.5)(9.8 m/s^2)t
So to fall 1 meter would take a time of SQRT[2(1 m)/(9.8 m/s^2)], or 0.45 seconds.
And pedantary having destroyed everyone's love of a good Morrison comic book, I take my leave.
Give that man an Atom ongoing already. You know he'd go nuts with the potential for a big old physics bonanza.
After seeing the Atom and Green Arrow take out Darkseid during Morrison's run, I'd have to give that a big Fuck yeah!
Yeah. That was totally AIRWOLF. I never caught the bit about Flash catching the vase that was dropped earlier.
Goddamnedd F*@% Yeah Airwolf!
One of the keys to writing Wally, Grant gets, Waid got it and Johns gets it - is the internal dialogue Wally has.
Another great thing about this book is something you don't see anymore, and something a lot of comicbloggers have mentioned - thought ballons.
So Dave, turns out your as big a Flash fan as I am, huh?
Anonymous said...
Does anyone not love how with just two words - "Flash fact" - Morrison says everything anyone will ever need to know about Barry's relationship with Wally?
EXACTLY!
Peter:
And maybe one day, he can write the Avengers. I'm waiting for it...
Oh god, the sweet anticipation of the moment that Marvel realise Bendis is a hack and give Morrison a fat wad of cash to come over for an exclusive and do a few years of Avengerin'...
Do not torment me so...
F%$£ YEAH!!!
TWO JLA moments. I think these are the first actual comics you've reviewed in yr inimitable style, that I've actually read. Oh, no, there's Year One up above.
Nonetheless, I am delighted, even though you didn't select any of the 19 moments from the book I listed as possibilities.
I'm only gonna say this once, but Airwolf, Dave. Airwolf.
Oops, that's twice.
Remember, if you like Wally, it's largely because of what Bill Messner-Loebs laid down for him.
Pardon me while I pull my physics degree out of my ass... AH. That's better.
F=MA is not the applicable equation. I think people are confusing acceleration with speed. Remember, acceleration is the measure of the change in velocity, not the velocity itself.
The applicable concept when Flash nails Zum is the Law of Conservation of Momentum, where momentum (p) is expressed as P=MV, where M is the mass of the flash, and V is his FUCK YEAH incredible Velocity. Since momentum is conserved, then the value P(flash) + P(zum) remains constant. When Flahs clobbers Zum, he transfers a portion of his momentum, which results in a change in Flash's velocity (which decreases) and Zum's velocity (which increases).
We can then measure Zum's accelleration after the collision: A (zum)= V (old) - V (new), and use that value to calculate the force with which Flash hit him:
M(zum)A(zum)=F(uck yeah!)
It won't truly have effect, I suppose so.
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Well, I do not actually believe it is likely to have success.
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