BUT... seeing the Society dump Chemo onto Bludhaven (killing millions, by Nightwing's count) was more powerful to me than Atlantis and Themyscira combined. And I don't read Nightwing's book.

The reason is simple: Atlantis and Themyscira are silly, fantasy-world locations. Bludhaven, although fictional and a bad clone of Gotham, is, at the least, a "real" city full of real people. Any writer in the world can bring back Atlantis and/or Themyscira with some mystical magical whatever... but Bludhaven? I'm thinking Bludhaven just got wiped from the DCU map for keepsies. I can identify with that much more readily. Plus, Chemo smells like laundry detergent!

Yes, I teared up when Batman - still vulnerable and reeling from last issue - asked Nightwing if "the early years" (his Robin years) were a good memory. And Nightwing says "[they were] the best."

Remember all the Infinite Crisis prequel miniseries? This issue explains a bunch of the leftover dangling threads, like the one from Rann-Thanagar War about how the center of the universe changed. Of course, everything involved with Rann-Thanagar War sucked... and this portion of Alex Luthor's plan is the fuzziest and and most comic booky part. I can easily see him wresting control of Brother Eye and the OMACs. Absolutely can he impersonate Lex Luthor and build a Secret Society. Kidnapping various representatives of the former alternate Earths would be simple. And yeah, with the help of the Psycho-Pirate and Eclipso, I can even see him sending the Spectre off on a madhouse killing spree. But having Superboy Prime move around planets so he can metaphysically split the universe in two with his own hands? I'm going to have to nod dumbly on that one. As ever, the leftover Rann-Thanagar elements are the weak link in the comprehension chain.

But back to good stuff, speaking of Superboy Prime. Holy shit, the boy is nuts. Naturally, the characters he kills - kills! - are a bunch of third-rate nobodies that we readers would kill ourselves given a locked door and a barbed wire baseball bat. But still. This is the event I predicted in issue 3: the visceral revelation of the corruption of Superboy Prime. Somehow, Golden Age Superman will get wind of this, and it's going to be time for the "How could I have been so BLIND" monologue.

The fracas with Superboy leads into the other big emotional moment: the disappearance of the Flash. This week, Flash #230 also dropped, which is the last issue in that numbering sequence. I've been getting that book for years, and I have just about all 230 issues. Unfortunately, #230 is pretty bad, the culmination of a truly lousy storyline. Not a great issue to go out on. It also has very little to do with Infinite Crisis... suspiciously similar to how Barry Allen's last Flash issue had very little to do with COIE.

Could this be another tidying up of the DCU? The way I see it... minimizing things like Atlantis and Themyscira takes away some of the larger "suspend your disbelief" stuff. They are both the kind of things that you come across, roll your eyes, remember you're reading a comic book, and move on. And as much as I love Wally West, his origin is exactly the same kind of thing.

Barry Allen had a reasonable origin story. He's standing by a rack of uncorked and unprotected dangerous chemicals when he is struck by lightning and turned into the Fastest Man Alive. Wally, on the other hand, got his Flash powers when, as a kid, he has Barry show him that origin. Barry, like an idiot, stacks up the very same chemicals by the very same window, and goddammit, lightning strikes twice. Young Wally West becomes Kid Flash, the Fastest Kid Alive, because DC marketing decided that Barry needed a kid sidekick. That's just stupid, even for the Silver Age.

Since then, we've had lots of retconning to add some layers of sense (the Speed Force) to the dual origins of Barry Flash and Wally Flash, but that's still pretty much the canon version. And looking back over my years of buying DC books, Wally's origin is typically shoved under the rug because of it being so silly. We get almost monthly retellings of infant Superman's historic escape from Krypton and young Batman's Crime Alley post-cinema murder scene. But Wally? Not so much.

It's apparant that DC wants a new Flash, and I'm not naive enough to suggest that Wally's Silver Age origin is the chief reason. But let's look at the origin of Bart Allen, Barry's grandson, initially known as Impulse but currently running around as a modern-day Kid Flash. Which I've hated because Impulse is by far the better name and his Impulse costume was undeniably a better design.

Recall that Barry ended his life living in the future, essentially hiding from a trumped-up murder charge in his present. (For some reason, I don't consider time travel as comic booky a plot device as Atlantis. Probably because time travel always gets explained away in delightful pseudo-science terms, while Atlantis and Themyscira are just old world legends continually resurrected because nobody owns the copyright.) So Barry's heirs were born and raised in the future. Bart, because he inherited Barry's powers, was raised in a VR tank... because that's just how you do things in the future, I guess. So when he comes to our century, he sees everything as one big video game. He's a Flash with ADD. He acts without fear because he's never interacted with the real world before. On impulse, get it?

Well, we lived off a scatterbrained, inattentive Impulse for quite a while. He's done mentoring turns with all the older speedsters. And sometime during his tenure with Young Justice, he grew up somewhat and ever since then he's not quite the naive youth he used to be. But, character development aside, that's a much cooler origin than Mr. Copy / Paste. It only marginally links him to previous Flashes, so when new readers ask the inevitable "How did he get his powers?" question, DC doesn't have to shuffle their collective feet and point to a shot of nerdy Barry Allen stacking poison on a bookshelf while Wally looks on in anticipatory amazement. Bart's origin can stand on its own. And when DC wants to re-connect him with his heritage, the Speed Force will be there, ready and waiting. The worst thing about Bart is his name, which always struck me as a dopey one-off Simpsons joke.

So will Bart become the new Flash? Will Barry come back? Will Wally just be reinvented somehow? I don't know. At this point, I'm just enjoying the ride. Because, regardless of what happened in the Silver Age, I've grown to think of Wally as my Flash. It will be sad to see him go.