The Flash Artist Reveals Best Look Yet at Villain Dark Flash

The Flash may have stumbled and fallen at the box office – but hey, by now we know there will be a second wave of interest in the film when it inevitably hits MAX streaming (sooner before later). Warner Bros. must know this because official concept art and other design details for The Flash are making their way online faster than we usually see, re-stoking interest in director Andy Muschietti's concept of The Flashpoint timeline and its variant characters. 

Case in point: one of the most "mysterious" (and ultimately divisive) elements of The Flash was its "villain," The Dark Flash. Artist Sam Williams has revealed the best look yet at The Flash movie's version of the villain – check that out below! 

"I was quite proud of this one," Williams wrote in the caption. "Challenging for me as it was a bit more of a creature project than props or costumes but actually a nice change. I thought he was one of the more successful things we did on Flash. 

Designed by Alexandra Byrne. Costume supervisor Dan Grace. Again Domachowski did the initial conception. Practically this was a collaboration between Kristyan Mallett and the costumeFX team. We made the patterns and molded them and then he ran them in foam latex. It worked well. He also did the prosthetics."

DCEU Dark Flash Explained

DC has its fair share of character concepts for a dark version of The Flash; however, the DCEU movie version became something else entirely.

 (SPOILERS!) When Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) creates a variant timeline of the DCEU, he trains his younger variant self to become The Flash, in order to help defend the alternate Earth from General Zod's invasion. Unfortunately, Barry's makeshift Justice League can't get the job done, and Zod prevails. But Young Barry can't accept that kind of loss and pain as he's never experienced before. Young Barry tries to run his time loops, trying out different ways to stop Zod's Kryptonian forces and save his friends Batman (Michael Keaton) and Supergirl (Sasha Calle) from dying. Young Barry runs the loop over and over again until he devolves into a monstrous version of himself, covered in hard-shell armor and spiked weapons, built to take on the Kryptonians. 

It was that "Dark Flash" that originally stranded Barry in the Flashpoint timeline, thereby guaranteeing his own existence. However, Barry finally convinces Young Barry that their mutual obsession with avoiding loss is the real enemy, and when Dark Flash tries to stop them from correcting the timeline (by letting Nora Allen die) Young Barry sacrifices himself and saves Barry, simultaneously erasing the Dark Flash from existence. 

The Flash is now in theaters.