The Flash S01E01: City of Heroes

[coffeeandink]

Barry Allen: how adorable? SO ADORABLE. I'm sorry, this is actually my primary reaction to the episode. SO ADORABLE.

Comments

[marfisa]

Off the top of my head, I can't think of any major superheroes who wore full-face masks before Spider-Man. (I don't think Iron Man made his first appearance until a year or so later.) t suspect Golden and Silver Age creators thought completely hiding a character's face made him look unrelatable and even villainous--i.e., as if he had something incriminating to hide. Spidey and Iron Man's full-face masks were probably prompted by Marvel's self-consciously "more realistic" approach.

At least Barry's helmet covers a lot more of his face than most DC heroes' masks--or lack of them, in the Superman family's case. And it's certainly a major improvement in the recognition-prevention department over the Golden Age Flash's get-up. Jay Garrick didn't wear a mask at all, just a Mercury-style metal winged helmet. He supposedly kept everyone who saw him from immediately discovering his secret identity by constantly vibrating slightly so that his facial features were blurred--which I guess is at least more plausible than Clark Kent preventing people from recognizing him as Superman by slouching, tucking his spit curl away, and putting on a pair of glasses. (Much later one of the writers came up with the idea that the lenses of Clark's glasses were salvaged from the Kryptonian materials in the rocket he arrived in, and had some sort of mildly hypnotic property that brainwashed people into not putting two and two together re the Clark/Superman resemblance.)

The whole fridging of Barry's mother/"I must hunt down her real killer" aspect of Barry's new backstory (the whole dead mother idea didn't appear in the comics at all until five or six years ago, and even then there was nothing about his dad being suspected of killing her) struck me as obviously inspired by the show's Tuesday-evening time slot companion "Supernatural." Although the whole "tracking down Mom's killer and getting revenge" arc was resolved so long ago for the Winchesters that this will probably seem a lot less copy-cattish to many viewers than it would have if SPN were still on season two or three instead of season ten.