80-Page Thursdays: Flash Special #1!

We haven't had an 80-pager here since last August? That seems like a hundred years ago; but then, Flash's 50th anniversary here was 34 years ago...(crumples into dust, like the Flash in Crisis!) From 1990, Flash Special #1, featuring stories by Mark Waid, Len Strazewski, William Messner-Loebs, and one other I won't mention; art by Mike Parobeck, Irv Novick, Carmine Infantino, Grant Miehm, and more.

This one actually fills a bit of a hole for me, since I had been reading Flash on-and-off for some time, and when future Flash John Fox shows up, I didn't know where he had come from. If you go back and re-read those, I'm sure there's probably a caption box somewhere, saying go read this one. John was a historian from the 27th century, who gets sent back in time not for the usual research and whatnot, but an emergency: radioactive villain Manfred Mota was causing widespread devastation, and they needed to find out how the Flashes had beat him before. Never heard of him? Yeah, he's new here too!

In postwar Washington D.C. the Jay Garrick Flash is summoned to the office of J.Edgar Hoover, who doesn't care for mystery-men, but wants the Flash as a "spycatcher!" Jay isn't keen on spying on people who might be innocent, worse, his name is on a list of possible leaks in atomic weapons technology. Jay goes to visit a friend who might have been seen as less than "true-blue" American, but couldn't be a spy; and he's right: the janitor has been lifting stuff, and selling it to Mota, who's built himself a super-suit as "Atom-Smasher." With his friend's help, Jay manages to stop Mota, who wasn't a communist or anything as much as "a guy who liked to blow things up." (This would've been just before the JSA retired, rather than become government stooges.) John gets to see most of the fight, but is recalled before he can talk to Jay.

This keeps going on, as Mota keeps getting thrown in jail, then diving back into radiation and crime when he gets out; eventually melting down and sinking into the earth. John keeps just missing the Flashes, so doesn't learn much of anything; but in the 27th century a radiation surge overloads the time-machine, dosing John with way too many tachyons. John's friends are killed, but John manages to return to the timeline, now with super-speed powers! Raiding the damaged Flash Museum for costume pieces, he makes a quick suit, then manages to lure the now-radioactive monster Mota into position, to send him to the year 50 billion...John says that like Mota would age that whole time, his radioactivity decaying; rather than just dumping his ass in the distant future: damning someone to 50 billion years of solitude seems kinda harsh? Enh. 

John seemed like a slightly-older man here: I want to say he seemed way younger in his later appearances? And while he had a reporter girlfriend here, he would go after Linda Park in the late 20th century; because everyone did. And he'd later get in trouble for stealing time-travel tech, so he maybe moved to the 853rd century: he would be part of Justice Legion A in DC One Million. Either because they needed a speedster type and maybe somebody the present heroes would recognize as mostly-cool; or because he couldn't go back to the 27th century 'til the heat was off.