The Flash Gets New Creative Team--Venditti, Jansen and Booth--in April

Robert Venditti, Van Jansen and Brett Booth will take over as the new, ongoing creative team on DC Comics's The Flash starting with April's #30, USA Today reports. In what DC is calling the Year of the Flash, the apparent hope is to generate excitement ahead of The Flash's TV pilot, due out in the fall. There's a lot of talk in the article about how The Flash is an everyday joe, someone you can relate to, and that his character is lighter in tone and less relentlessly grim than most other modern superheroes. Venditti tells the newspaper that there's something almost primal about the appeal of The Flash. "From a very young age, one of the first things you want to be able to do is run fast," the writer said. "You don't want to fly, you don't want to have a ring that makes constructs out of light. It's just a simple, basic thing: 'I want to be able to run fast.' It's ingrained in our DNA, and here's a character that lives that out." Venditti has become one of the go-to guys in mainstream comics for a character you want to see succeed; after launching Valiant's critically-lauded relaunch with X-O Manowar, he took over Green Lantern when Geoff Johns left. In both cases, the pressure was high for those books to succeed--as it will be here, following on the heels of the fan-favorite run by Brian Buccellato and Francis Manapul, who move over to Detective Comics in March, and leading up to the TV pilot expected on The CW in the fall.