Analysis Notes
| General |
Only pages 1-3, 9, and 18-23 are dealt with here. |
| Walt Simonson pencilled three pages in this issue, but they do not involve Inertia, so he is not credited in this analysis. |
| Cover |
The kids in the background are (clockwise from upper-left) Rolly, Carol, Preston, Mike, Ayana, and Wade. |
| The image of Impulse trapped in the head of a baby Chemo-like creature is misleading. He does get trapped in the technoplasm in issue #53, though. |
| 1:1 |
The description of Iris’ return to the 20th century here is so wrong. To start with, it is off by over twenty years, as she returned after her children were killed, long after her husband (Barry Allen) had died. She didn’t return so much as fled; she had kidnapped her son from the government installation where he was being held and studied, with the primary goal of bringing him to where he could be helped, but also to escape from the oppressive government led by the killer of her children. |
| 1:2 |
The photos are of Barry Allen (Flash II), Dawn and Don Allen (Tornado Twins), and Bart Allen (Impulse). How she has a photograph of her kids — a technology probably long dead in the late 30th century when they lived — is unclear. |
| 1:3 |
The photo above the shelf is Barry and Iris on their wedding day; see also 2:8. The one to the far right is Jenni Ognats (XS, Iris’ other grandchild). The picture between Bart and Jenni must be Wally West (Flash III), then, as the other speedster in her family. (Well, sort of in her family, since he’s the nephew of the 20th century woman whose soul she replaced when she was first sent back in time.) |
| 2 |
Inertia is quoting from The Life Story of the Flash, page 95. The actual text is: “I will comfort Impulse when he learns a harsh lesson about life that will cost him a friend but gain him a lifelong companion. I will watch his greatest thrill come in the form of a very special gift from his timelost mother, and I will worry the day when his greatest challenge arrives in the form of his own dark twin.” |
| The green streaks here count as appearances for Inertia. |
| 2:8 |
Iris apparently has two wedding pictures up, framed identically, since this one is over the television set. |
| So, by showing up early, has Inertia affected the future or not? This may be a case of misinterpretation of vague writing: is Inertia the “dark twin” referred to? Does the “harsh lesson” coincide with the arrival of the “dark twin”? And if these things occur in the near future of Impulse’s life, either Iris only knows of them hazily or she knows extreme detail of her involvement in them and thus may have already affected them by observing them so closely. |
| While Inertia is Impulse’s “dark twin” in part because he is a twisted clone of Bart, his costume is also a negative image of Bart’s, replacing red with green and white with black (and brown hair with yellow). Note the negative image in his goggles in 3:1. |
| 3:1 |
It isn’t clear who the second image face is behind Inertia in this panel. Maybe it is supposed to be the wedding picture on the wall? (We will count it as such.) |
| Inertia’s word balloon probably should have been in the special form used on page 2. |
| 3:4 |
Y’know, maybe we shouldn’t have build the cabin quite so close to the edge of the cliff. Yeah, the views were great, but if you drop anything out the window, it’s gone. |
| 9:1 |
This might even be “Somewhen… else-”. |
| 2560 liters is 2.5 cubic meters, which doesn’t seem to be sufficient to create the creature seen on page 19 (although it gets close). Some further decanting may be occurring while Inertia finishes his preparations. |
| 9:2 |
Boom tube technology? Maybe that is simply more available in the 30th century, or perhaps Craydl is constructed from Mother Box? |
| 9:2-3 |
Maybe we will find out what the ring does in Impulse #53. You would hope. You would be wrong. |
| 9:4 |
How can you become Bart? Your hair isn’t nearly long enough! |
| 18:1 |
The smoke is from the M-80’s that the boys were setting off. |
| The boys here are Wade, Bart, Mike, Rolly, and Preston. |
| 18:6 |
This shadow counts as an appearance for Craydl as the Technoplasm Beast. |
| 18:7 |
On page 15, Bart was asked if Max is a “tool” (from context, a conservative authority figure who works only in certain ways; a tool of the patriarchy). Thus, if Max is a tool, does that make Bart something that a tool operates on? |
| Meet the Feebles is a 1989 New Zealand film from director Peter Jackson, featuring bizarre animal puppets; it got limited U.S. release in 1995. |
| 19:5 |
Preston had a watermelon in 15:2, obviously preparing to blow it up with one of Rolly’s firecrackers. While he appears to have dropped it here, he was not holding it on the previous page, so the damage seen to it here is from the last explosive they set off. |
| 20:3 |
Bart, like his grandfather, keeps his special polymer costume super-compressed in a ring, and it expands on contact with the air. (Don’t think too hard about how the boots get in there.) |
| 20:4 |
It appears that the technoplasm put its hand down very fast and either blocked Bart’s path or Bart ran into it. There is no indication of that on the next page, though; perhaps a page of fight scene got cut from this issue? (As it is, the issue runs 23 pages rather than the usual 22, kicking out the letters column.) |
| 21:1 |
This is a clue, Bart: it can change its shape in any way needed in order to defeat you. It isn’t a solid monster, but dissolving it doesn’t mean you win. |
| Impulse’s speed traces count as an appearance for him. |
| 21:3 |
A lime Jell-O robot. (“Lime” is perhaps the most popular flavor of Jell-O. There is at least one Jell-O cooking contest which has categories for salad, side dish, main dish, dessert, and “green.”) |
| 23:4 |
No, it isn’t obvious. Bart hasn’t read Iris’ book. |
| The technoplasm starting to reform counts as an appearance for Craydl as the Technoplasm Beast. |
