Si Spurrier Announces Early Exit From ‘The Flash’, Mark Waid To Take Over With New ‘Impulsepoint’ Story: “If I Kept Going I’d End Up Either Resenting The Work, Or – Worse – Doing It On Autopilot”
After two years guiding Wally West in his return to the identity, a growing sense of apathy towards the hero and his Speed Force-powered adventures has prompted DC writer Si Spurrier to bring a voluntarily but premature end to his current run on The Flash Vol. 6.
Spurrier, whose run with the Scarlet Speedster kicked off as part of the Dawn of DC publishing initiative, broke the news to Flash fans on July 14th via a lengthy blog post made to his personal website.
“My final issue of The Flash will be #25, which drops in September,” announced the writer. “Rumor control, here are the facts. I made this decision alone, without pressure or incentive, for reasons I’ll come to in a moment. Despite the creative number-crunching of a few bad faith naysayers, I’m told sales have been remarkably healthy. Against a backdrop of industry-wide alarm we’ve enjoyed a far slower attrition than is standard, and on a few occasions have even bucked the trend by adding readers midway through our arcs. We’re not topping the charts, that’s true, but we’re a long way from the Rancor Pit trapdoor of financial cancellation.”
Turning to expound on the reason for his early exit, Spurrier explained, “Part of the difficulty, skill and joy of writing characters in a shared universe is finding that elemental thing – that core, elegant quiddity – that makes you feel the same thrill, the same devotion, that the most fervent fans have felt every New Comicbook Day for decades. And yet it can’t (or at least, shouldn’t) be to simply keep doing more of the same.”
“That way lies stagnation, diminishing returns; the faint whiff of fan fiction. Instead you have to capture the thing that most excites you and surrender to its ability to evolve. And then – after five or six or twelve issues – you have to do it again. And then again.
“Candidly, I never expected to stay past 12 issues. I had some ideas for a second year but never seriously expected them to get their chance. I’d taken a massive swing in my pitch – from conventional spandex to unnerving existential horror – and although I knew it would be awesome I didn’t imagine it would outrun the standard expectation for a Return To Basics for very long. That old, inescapable gravity of the status quo. I was delightfully wrong about that.
“As I said before, part of the challenge of working with shared characters – with all this rich history – lies in constantly finding something fresh to say with each new arc. Something valuable. I started to feel it getting a little harder identifying a kernel of truth that made me personally passionate each time a new story was on the horizon. And whereas I think I could keep telling stories about Wally West and his family for another year or two I began to wonder if I ought. It was taking too long to restring the bow after each shot. I started to suspect that if I kept going I’d end up either resenting the work, or – worse – doing it on autopilot. There are plenty of spectacularly successful (and often even quite good) writers who are exceptional at ‘playing the hits’. I am not one of them.
“I shall be very sad to leave the West Family behind – or, perhaps more fittingly, given their skills, to be left behind by them. But I part from their company with a smile, and a deep sense of pride, and I suspect that’s all any writer can truly hope for when borrowing such precious toys.”
Shortly after Spurrier published his post, DC revealed that the writer’s successor on the book would be none other than The Flash Vol. 2 writer Mark Waid, who would be returning to the title with an Impulse-centric tie-in story to the publisher’s upcoming DC K.O. event – a “knock-down, drag-out fight between all your favorite DC Super Heroes in a cosmic tournament to save the universe from Darkseid”.
“Wally and Impulse race!” reads the official solicit to the Waid-penned The Flash Vol. 6 #26. “As the chaos around the DC Universe erupts during DC K.O., Impulse proposes a catastrophic reality reset: Impulsepoint—a terrible move that could wipe out everything unless the Flash can catch up with him as they race through time!”
Barring any unforeseen delays, The Flash Vol. #26 is set to bolt onto shelves on October 22nd.
However, it’s presently unknown whether Waid will remain on the book past either Issue #26 or its DC K.O. era.
