Flashpoint #5 Review

If you ask DC fans about recent events the company put on, such as Blackest Night, they’d tell you that they were great but the ending kind of fell flat in comparison to the epic story that came before it. Flashpoint, the event that leads into the company-wide DC Comics relaunch doesn’t follow that pattern and has one of the best endings to any big comic crossover in a long time.

Picking up immediately where Flashpoint 4 ended, Barry is face to face with Professor Zoom/Reverse Flash on the battlefield that will decide the fate of the messed up timeline he found himself in. It turns out that Zoom wasn’t responsible for the timeline, Barry was. When Barry went back in time to save his mother’s life (after finding out that Zoom killed her), he shattered the timeline causing the nightmare alternate reality.

Since Zoom was running through the timestream when Barry altered it, he became a living paradox who no longer needed Barry to exist. The side effect of that is that Barry can’t touch him or kill him, but someone else can. So not only does this issue mark the end of the post-Crisis DCU; it sees the end of one of the Flash’s biggest villains. Will he be back in the new DCU? Hopefully, as I’ve always liked Zoom.

So with Zoom out of the way, and the world destroying itself, Barry has to time travel again to stop himself from altering the timeline and causing the Flashpoint universe to exist. While in the timestream, Barry sees three universes: The DCU, Vertigo, and Wildstorm. The merging of those three universes is what makes the new DCU.

The final pages of the issue have Barry visiting Batman (once again Bruce) and telling him about the changed timeline. He remembers his mother being alive, as well as the changes, although it’s not clear if those memories will remain or fade. In the end, he gives Bruce a message he brought from the other timeline and it is one of the best endings to any DC event in a long time.

Flashpoint had perhaps the biggest effect on the DC Universe since the original Crisis, and did it all in just five issues. But those five issues make up one of the best reads of 2011.