Flashback Friday: The Many Costumes of the Flash!

Each Friday, I take one of the entries from my old Super Posts and expand it into its own featured article.

This week: The Flash's costumes!

This is an interesting one because it seems like every time The Flash gets to be on tv, his suit changes. When Barry Allen debuted in 1956, he had the following appearance, and he kept it until his death in 1985.

When Wally West took over as The Flash following Crisis on Infinite Earths, he used the same costume.

When The Flash (1990) debuted on CBS, Barry Allen wore essentially the same costume, but as you might notice, it's a darker red and the belt is angled instead of straight across.

These changes were then given to Wally West's version of The Flash in The Flash #50 (March 1991).

Later, Wally West appeared as The Flash in Justice League (2000), but with two further alterations: one is the simplified lightning bolt logo, and the other is that the belt is now two distinct lightning bolts.

After Barry Allen came back in The Flash: Rebirth, DC needed a way to tell the two Flashes apart. In issue 5 (November 2009), Wally received a new costume that incorporated the animated changes.

These changes have continued to various degrees in DC's New 52 and Rebirth. Barry Allen received the angled belt but kept his classic logo, while Wally West kept everything but changed the gold to silver to further differentiate him from Barry Allen (and now has free-flowing hair to better match his Kid Flash suit):

And I know what you might be asking: what about his current show? Did it happen there? It did! But I've already covered it.

Costume Spotlight: The Flash's TV Look (With Bonus Reverse-Flash!)

Just in time for the season two finale, I present the time DC changed the Flash's costume to be more in line with the tv show...only to have the tv show make the change irrelevant only a few months later! Of course, this isn't the first time the Flash's outfit has reflected the small screen, as I've covered before.

When The New 52 happened, every character got a design overhaul. Some were major, some were minor, but all of them involved a bunch of extraneous lines. Fortunately, The Flash came off looking pretty good since extra lines means more places for lightning to flow from. Here's how he looked beginning in 2011:

Not bad!

Come 2014, The Flash gets his own series on The CW, with a pretty accurate costume...with some exceptions. The main one being that instead of a white circle behind the lightning bolt, it was red. I've never been able to figure out why this is, since the pilot shows a picture of a future Flash that has the white circle, but that's the choice they made. (The other one being that he doesn't have yellow boots, which has never occurred to me before but now that I've noticed it, it's going to bug me big time).

So in The Flash #41 (June 2015), the Flash in the comics gets a new costume that looks very similar. Even the extraneous lines have been moved to more accurately reflect the extraneous lines on his tv costume. And this was definitely to tie into the show, because this storyline also introduces the Reverse Flash to the New 52, and he was the primary antagonist of The Flash season 1.

So yay, he looks more like the tv show! ...except that season two of The Flash changed the circle to white only three months later. Of course, now that DC Rebirth is happening, I have no idea how the two costumes will compare.

But hey, speaking of Reverse Flash! Here's what he looked like prior to the New 52:

Simple, clean, efficient. I dig it. Here he is in The Flash season one (2014-2015):

Pretty good. A little too much black for my taste, but it gets the job done. So, of course, when he's introduced in the New 52 an issue before Barry's new costume (May 2015)...

...there's the black! Arguably not as much as the tv version, and they changed the shape of his symbol to a diamond for some reason, but it's still clearly based on the tv version.

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.

Super Post Potpourri!

We conclude out Super Post series with a couple of entries that are just too big (and a little complicated) to fit into a previous post.  If it weren't for the Flash, I could've just made this a second Batman Super Post, but oh well.  Such is life.

Mr. Freeze's Name, Real Name, Costume, and Backstory

The Riddler

Top Left: How The Riddler originally dressed
Top Middle: How The Riddler dressed on the Batman tv show (Frank Gorshin didn't like wearing the spandex costume) (1966)
Top Right: How The Riddler has dressed since DC's Secret Origin Special #1 (1989).
Bottom Left: How The Riddler appeared in The New Batman Adventures (1997)
Bottom Right: How The Riddler appeared in Tim Drake's mind in Red Robin #19 (March 2011)

The Flash's costumes

Batmobile