The Flash #784 Review

Dream Until Your Dreams Come True

Written By: Jeremy Adams

Art By: Amancay Nahuelpan, Jeremy Cox, Rob Leigh

Cover Price: $3.99

Release Date: July 19, 2022

.The search for Barry Allen continues with our Dark Crisis tie-in. In the previous issue, we saw the West kids go and muck things up when Wally got Wallace West, Jesse Quick, Max Mercury, and Jay Garrick together to search the Multiverse for Barry Allen's signature and Irey and Jai decided to take the hero-ing into their own hands. This separated our heroes into three worlds, Jesse and Max into the Mad Max world, Jai and Irey into the Batman/Flash amalgam, and Wally and Wallace into Barry's dream world, where Pariah imprisoned him. The big question is..... What the hell happened to Jay Garrick? Let's jump into this issue and see if we get that answer and also find out what everyone else is up to in their search. Let's check it out.

For this issue of The Flash, we're given three small segments of each world that our speedsters are in, but ultimately, the only one we really get any substance in is the dream world of Barry Allen, which is obviously the one we want to have featured here, especially for how mysterious these dream worlds still are, but because of this, the other sections of this book with Max Mercury and Jesse Quick in the Mad Max Universe just comes off as goofy because it's just making references to Road Warrior and Fury Road... and that's essentially it. Hell, I'm not entirely sure what that world's Barry Allen is actually fighting for. With Jai and Irey we just see a Flash/Batman who scares the kids and all I could think of is what kind of drag that cape would create for a speedster. So yeah, not a lot going on there either. The weirdest part of this is, there's not a single mention of Jay Garrick.  

Thankfully, we do get Wally and Wallace in Barry's dream world and this part comes off intriguing as hell because the dream world seems to manipulate you so that you remain in the dream state of mind and unable to be influenced by outside factors to waking the hell up from the spell that you're under. This leads to a scary confrontation between Barry and Wally, where instead of Wally simply explaining the situation, we have Barry seeing his former side-kick as Reverse Flash and our hero simply goes into attack mode because of it. If that wasn't enough, it seems that there are other forces within this dream world because while Wallace is trying to track the dream-world Wally, it looks like our current Kid-Flash gets mesmerized by this world as well.

All in all, the art continues to be great in this book and I love the silver age look to Barry's dream world.... and really, I love all of Barry's dream world and everything this book does with it because it's compelling as hell since we still don't know much about it or how it works........ especially with it making Barry see Wally as Reverse Flash to keep the mind con going. So while I love this section, the other two sections of the book come off lackluster in their presentation and do little here besides for being brief moments of silly fun, which might be fine for people, but I'm just looking for more than silliness to fill up the book and Flash/Batman and Mad Max Barry Allen just don't do it for me at this point. Hopefully, these sections get more compelling as the story goes on and hopefully someone realizes that Jay Garrick is missing as well.

Bits and Pieces:

While the Search For Barry Allen continues to be a fun tie-in to Dark Crisis, there's too much of this book that's currently not doing anything. Yeah, you can have fun with a Flash/Batman amalgam or a Mad Max Barry Allen, but these sections of the book only seem to take away what we could be getting out of the amazingly presented Barry Allen dream world that's keeping our hero prisoner. The art is great and the Dark Crisis aspects of this book are great but I still think we could be getting more.

7/10