The Flash TV Series Hopes To Introduce An African-American Flash

Will Wally West eventually be The Flash on The CW's The Flash?

Maybe, maybe not -- the character isn't introduced in the pilot and as far as anybody knows, hasn't yet been cast. But when a fan at the Paley Center for the Media tonight asked executive producers Greg Berlanti and Andrew Kreisberg whether we might ever see "a black Flash," the answers they gave were certainly very intriguing.

"We made the Wests African-American so that we could ultimately head in that direction, absolutely," Berlanti told the fan. "That's our hope."

Bear in mind that it's always difficult to discern tone, and Berlanti could have been joking -- but this reporter was watching the livestream of the event and it didn't sound that way to me.

Needless to say, that got a dramatic response from the audience, and Kreisberg followed it up with a confirmation of what many comic book fans had already assumed: that Wally West was reinvented as an African-American character in part to accommodate the TV series.

"What's very cool is in the New 52 they hadn't reintroduced Wally [yet]," Kreisberg said, adding that because they were working with DC Entertainment Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns on the show, "when they reintroduced Wally, they made him African-American. So now and forever, Kid Flash will be African-American."

In the comics, Wally West was the original Kid Flash during the Silver Age, and became The Flash following Barry Allen's death in 1985's Crisis on Infinite Earths. He kept that job until more than 20 years later, when Final Crisis resurrected Barry and reinstated him as The Flash.

Of course, Wally West hasn't yet become Kid Flash in the New 52...but this month's Future's End: The Flash #1 does depict the character (in the Five Years Later future) wearing a silver-and-red Flash-like costume. At the time of the issue's solicitation, we speculated that the color scheme might suggest he would become the new Impulse, but Kreisberg's comments seem to indicate otherwise.

Currently, a different Kid Flash appears in Teen Titans.