Why Tonight's Episode of The Flash Is Important

10/13/2015 09:15 pm EDT

Why is tonight's episode of The Flash so awesome and important?

Because it brings crazy -- really f---ing crazy -- ideas into the living rooms of everyone who wants to watch.

And amazing ideas. And fun. And, yes, silly. Still.

Mainstream superhero comics are often criticized for being difficult to penetrate, in part because of the big, crazy ideas involved. And most of the time, the publishers try to "fix" this by removing some of those ideas and stripping characters and concepts down as simple as they'll go. But ultimately the complex ideas creep their way back in because while simple and stripped down might work for a movie or three, the beauty of serialized entertainment is in its complexity.

You can replace "complex" here with "crazy" or "silly." It's all roughly equally true.

Here's the thing: I hate the exclusivity. I can't stand the fans who are forever bemoaning how things are getting mainstreamed and marketed to a broader audience. I don't want comics to be an intimate cabal of hardcore nerds. I want to open the universe -- ahem, the multiverse -- that we love to everybody.

I'm 35 years old. When I was a teenager, it was incomprehensible that Rocket Raccoon and Groot would appear in a major motion picture. It was laughable that, even with successes like Lois & Clark, a live-action series would be so true to the DC Universe as to have an award-winning actor playing Professor Martin Stein and explaining The Multiverse to Barry Allen while Jay Garrick looked on.

I hate exclusivity. I hate the fact that some of our best, most fun and amazing stories have been hidden under a bushel for decades. I love the idea that the Marvel and DC Universes -- for real, or as close to real as we can get right now -- are now appearing on screens large and small, being appreciated by millions of people who have never read the comics.

And, the things that have always seemed the least likely to see the light of day? Those are the things that thrill me the most. My wife, my sister-in-law, my non-comics friends all love The Avengers and The Flash, and there will be hundreds of thousands or millions of new people getting to enjoy some of comics' best stories for the first time through other media.

Hopefully, some will make their way back to the source material and support the industry that made these characters great. But even if they don't, there's something wondrous about bringing those stories to people who never, reasonably, could have been expected to see and enjoy them just a generation ago.

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