52 Shake-Up: Wally West

After DC's The New 52 happened, several mainstay characters were nowhere to be seen. These characters - Donna Troy, Spoiler, Cassandra Cain, and others - became the patron saints of all that fans considered wrong about the New 52. But none so more than Wally West.

Wally West had been around since the 50s, longer than most current comic book characters. Over that time, fans had seen him grow from Kid Flash to Flash, join the Justice League, get married, and have kids. In fact, by the time Flashpoint happened, Wally had been the Flash almost as long as his predecessor Barry Allen had been. And yet, for the first three years of the New 52, Wally was nowhere to be seen. Never even mentioned.

And then he was: in April 2014, in The Flash Annual #3, he finally showed up. Sorta:

Some fans argue that this isn't the real Wally West, just a new character that happens to have the same name. It's easy to see why: he has a different race, age personality, background, and costume than the Wally West people were asking for. No one can say for sure why DC decided to change the character so thoroughly, but one change CAN be explained.

See, around the time this issue was being made, they were also filming the pilot for the 2014 series The Flash. And in that pilot, Joe and Iris West look like this:

So DC wanted Wally West to look the same across media. And I know what you're thinking: maybe the Wests were cast as black because Wally is. And that would be a good point, except that, besides the producers saying it was the other way around, Iris HAD already appeared in the New 52, and she looked like this:

So they made Wally biracial to explain it.