DC May Have Just Changed Everything We Knew About Heroes in Crisis

Heroes in Crisis, the series by Batman/Catwoman‘s Tom King and Clay Mann, started as a murder mystery but eventually evolved into a story about how Wally West, the onetime Flash, had lashed out during a panic attack and killed a number of his fellow heroes, only to travel through time, try to fix things, and leave his own corpse behind in an elaborate murder-suicide. That’s not especially complicated, actually, as far as superhero epics go — so of course, now we have to make it a little more impenetrable, and what better way to do that than to reveal, belatedly, that the Reverse Flash might have had something to do with the events of Heroes in Crisis?

Let’s call it the reverse-Flashpoint, a story where the assumption the whole time was that Eobard Thawne was the bad guy, but ultimately it was Barry Allen who had broken time. At least that’s how it looks so far.

In The Flash #761, from writer Joshua Williamson and artist Howard Porter, Barry finds himself squaring off with Thawne against the backdrop of a wider war between Team Flash and the “Legion of Zoom” that Thawne has put together. As the battle rolls on, Thawne teases Barry about the various things he has done over the years to make The Flash’s life worse, including the murder of Barry’s mother, attacks on innocent people that transformed them into villains like Godspeed and Zoom — and then something about Wally. Thawne has, apparently, been a voice in Wally’s head for a while, pushing him to square off with Barry during the “Flash War” storyline and perhaps even pushing him to his breaking point in Heroes in Crisis.

Before the audience (or Barry) can get any real closure, though, Wally — now possessed of the quantum powers of Doctor Manhattan due to his exposure to Metron’s Mobius Chair during Flash Forward — arrives and Thawne, scared of what Wally has become and baffled at how it might have happened without his noticing, makes his hasty escape.

If true, the revelation that Thawne was responsible for the events of Heroes in Crisis would be an extension of his hatred for Team Flash and an extension of his broadening war against all of the “good” speedsters rather than just Barry. It might also provide DC with a chance to retroactively give Wally West the same kind of “not my fault” redemption that Hal Jordan had when Geoff Johns revealed that his turn to Parallax was not his own deranged behavior but rather the result of a villainous parasite impacting his judgment.

You can find The Flash #761 in stores or online now.