Something Happened

Flashpoint was DC's own Age of Apocalypse. It, too, was predicated on a character's alteration of history, although this time it is about saving a life long-ago ended (Barry Allen's mother) rather than murdering someone who was supposed to survive (Professor X). In both cases, the alterations to the timeline extended far beyond the obvious: in The Age of Apocalypse, reality is destroyed because Phoenix was not around to fix the M'Kraan Crystal in X-Men 108, while the repercussions of Nora Allen's survival somehow included evens that preceded it, such as the death of Bruce Wayne rather than his father, Thomas, the capture of baby Kal-El's rocket by the military,  and others that seemed to have no connection with it, such as an abortive alliance between Atlantis and Themyscira that results in global war. [1]

The fact that the Age of Apocalypse was a localized event can be seen as an artifact of the way that Marvel Universe functioned in the 1990s.  The X-Men franchise was far and away the biggest seller; it did not, technically, exist in its own universe (continuity aside, that would have prevented money-making mutant guest appearances in other titles), but it did live in its own corner of the Marvel Universe (with its own editorial office).  The very next big Marvel event, whose seeds were planted in the immediate aftermath of the Age of Apocalypse, was a story that temporarily resulted in the mutants having the earth almost entirely to themselves.  At the end of the Onslaught storyline, almost all the non-mutant superheroes were presumed dead, rebooted and  transported to an alternate earth where they remained for a year. But the Onslaught storyline, though it was rooted in X-Men continuity, involved the rest of Marvel's heroes: when each of them "died" to stop the villain, it was a conscious choice they made, a last act of heroism. Had this truly been a reboot of the Marvel Universe, it would have at least involved all the affected characters.

If Flashpoint had stuck with what appeared to be its initial ambitions (to be a DC variation on The Age of Apocalypse), it would simply be another alternate universe remembered fondly by many, and inevitably revisited over the years. But instead, Flashpoint brought the extant DC continuity to an abrupt end.  Everything about this suggested a last-minute frenzy rather than carefully-laid plans.  DC had just finished a year-long crossover storyline called "Brightest Day," which, among other things, planted the seeds for a number of new storylines by bringing multiple characters back from the dead and by announcing the formation of a new Justice League International. In Flashpoint itself, the entire plot was wrapped up as one would expect of a well-wrought story: the protagonist (the Flash) undoes his own mistake and faces the consequences.  But the last eight pages take a sharp turn. The Flash has been running on his cosmic treadmill, realigning the timelines, when suddenly, in a two-page spread, we see multiple versions of DC characters in separate sections of the page.  The Flash says, "I see three timelines. Why?" Out of nowhere, the hooded head of a mysterious female figure appears, explaining, "Because the history of the heroes was shattered into three long ago.  / Splintered to weaken your world for their impending arrival. / You must all stand together.   The timelines must become oneagain.  /You can help me fix that Barry Allen, but at a cost." Whereupon the Flash wakes up in the world of the New 52.

Oh, sure, when you put it that way…

This is undeniably sloppy storytelling. If Johns and the DC team had really wanted to sell both the role of the mystery woman (subsequently revealed to be Pandora of Greek myth) and the possibility of a real reboot, both should have been introduced earlier than the last eight pages.  But this sloppiness is a symptom of the real problem.

There had been rumors of a line-wide reboot by the time Flashpoint came out, but they were difficult to credit, and not just because of the new storylines that were aborted before they could really take off. Flashpoint broke the unspoken compact among creators, readers, and characters that undergirded every reboot since Crisis on Infinite Earths.  It is not enough that reality itself be threatened; that threat must be represented on a meta-level, forcing the main characters to be aware of just what is at stake.  This is one of the functions of omniscient beings such as the Monitor (DC) or The Watcher (Marvel): they alert both the characters and the readers that reality and continuity have suddenly become excessively malleable.   In DC terms, this is what distinguishes an Event from a Crisis.  An Event is crossover involving multiple characters in a high-stakes fight, but leaving continuity mostly intact.  A Crisis is a paradigm shift, and for it to work effectively, the characters have to understand what is happening.  A character might not be aware that they are participating in an Event--their genre (superheroes) and their medium (corporate comics) send them from Event to Event like a pingpong ball.  But characters' knowledge that they are in a Crisis is part of the story.

Instead, both the readers and the heroes are mere spectators.  The Flash may have started Flashpoint, but in the end, no matter how fast he runs, he has been reduced to a bystander observing a process that he cannot comprehend in the moment, and will quickly forget when it is over.  Even worse, in the absence of the usual signs of the looming continuity change that fans have come to expect,  this was a betrayal of the readers. The readers, too, are hapless bystanders. 

Note

[1] Some of these deviations go far beyond the standard Butterfly Effect; Kal-El's rocket, for example, landed on earth before Nora was ever meant to be murdered. In the animated adaptation of the storyline, Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox (2013), the main villain provide an explanation: “Break the sound barrier, and there’s a sonic boom. You broke the time barrier, Flash. Time boom. Ripples of distortion radiated out through that point of impact, shifting everything just a tiny bit—but enough. Enough for events to happen slightly differently“

Next:  Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?