Eclipso: The Darkness Within: Flash Annual #5 (June 1992)

This cover is almost a goatse!

Eclipso: The Darkness Within: Flash Annual #5 (June 1992)
By Mark Waid, Craig Boldman, Travis Charest, Dan Davis, Scott Hanna, John Lowe, Timothy Harkins, and Matt Hollingsworth
Cover by Travis Charest and Dan Davis
Edited by Brian Michael Augustyn

The Cover!
This is dangerous territory for a critic (and while I might not be a critic, I am intensely critical). I've heard that some idiot's mother once said something about not saying anything at all rather than dropping your drawers and shitting all over Travis Charest. But I don't get many opportunities to do it so why would I listen to that idiot's mother (who is also an idiot)? I had the opportunity to express my displeasure with his work on Darkstars and one of the covers of Robin III: Cry of the Huntress. I'll get another chance whenever I get to DC Showcase '93. But for now, here we have, basically, his first professional gig (being that this was released in 1992 and Showcase '93 in — you guessed it — 1993). And for his first cover, Travis decided to go with 60% solid black inks. Since this is an Eclipso story, I'll allow that it was a fine, if lazy, idea. About 30% of the rest of the cover, as we'll see in his general artwork (I'm assuming since I haven't actually opened this book for thirty-four years), lines. Lines, lines, and more lines is something I'm assuming Travis's art teacher once told him five thousand times. "If you think you have enough lines, you don't! Only when you're dizzy with vertigo from all the lines will your be able to declare your work finished!" Judging by that metric, Travis Charest has knocked this cover out of the ballpark. I just wish I hadn't been standing in the parking lot to catch it.

So many lines . . . going to . . . vomit . . .

The Story So Far
I don't know. Eclipso has eclipsed a number of heroes but not enough. I guess he's got Bruce Gordon's girlfriend's hot ass now as well as a handful of actual heroes, none of them that impressive: Starman, Hal Jordan, Star Sapphire, The Creeper, Valor. I'm not sure if he managed to capture Etrigan because my Eclipso Demon Annual isn't with this batch of Eclipso books being that I actually collected The Demon at the time. So it's with them.

The Story
The issue begins with me thinking, "I knew I came here to make fun of Travis Charest but I didn't think I'd get Mark Waid in my sights as well."

The only way this conversation makes sense is if it's one of The Kids in the Hall sketches where they make fun of stupid cops (i.e., all cops).

It's possible (probable, even, but I'm being purposefully dense right now) that the panel makes perfect sense but I've been programmed to understand fanny in the British sense and now I'm picturing somebody wiggling their fanny and most of the blood has left my brain for a secret location on my body. If you're over 18, you can drop me an email and I'll tell you what secret body part that is. If you're under 18, you probably already know I meant my penis.

The cops discuss how much they know about and love nuts while The Flash runs by on a nightly jog. Wally decides to investigate because an optometrist building nearby, the one the cop was talking about, wasn't there the day before. I would have stopped to investigate to make sure either the cop wasn't suffering from a nut allergy or an ape wasn't impersonating a cop. One of those reasons.

At this point in Travis Charest's career, he had never actually seen a human face.

The cop who wanted the other cop to do a sexy little dance earlier happens to be so hungry he's getting a headache. Luckily, they find a can of nuts on the ground so why not eat up? Free trash still in the can? Delicious! The big twist is that the can of nuts was rolled out into the street by The Trickster so you know it won't have nary a nut inside it. It's probably full of raisins. Ha ha! What a trick that would be!

I should offer up a correction and say that the cops were actually night deposit security men? You know, the kinds of guys who drive armored trucks full of money around. But they do it at night because it's more dangerous and easier to be robbed? And that's what The Trickster's doing. The Flash can't stop him because Weather Wizard appears at just the right time to freeze Wally in a block of ice. It doesn't kill him though because, um, comic books, I guess. He also doesn't vibrate out of it because Wally sucks (which the Rogues make sure to mention, of course. "Barry Barry Barry!" they say while then saying, "Barry! Barry Barry!"). They get away to go have a secret Rogues Gallery meeting while The Flash thaws out, goes home, and has a mini-adventure inside his friend Chunk's butthole. I mean black hole. I don't know. It was weird. If it has anything to do with the rest of the story, I'll mention it then. Otherwise, I'm moving on and ignoring it.

If only he had been in Chunk's butthole though! You would have had a play-by-play of that encounter!

Captain Cold has sent out an invitation to the Rogues for an emergency meeting. I guess they meet in a movie theater because why not be complete and utter pieces of shit when you're already mostly a piece of shit? The people trying to watch the movie do this thing to show their disapproval of other people talking through the film. Here it is:

I can't believe they actually went there! Such harsh criticism!

I wonder if Mark Waid just wrote in his script, "Have the other movie-goers show their disapproval," and Travis was all, "Oh, a thumbs down! That's like an international sign that nobody would ever use but I'll have everybody in the theater use it as if it's a common thing to do!" I mean, maybe it was a common thing to do in a '90s movie theater and my choice of yelling, "SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU FUCKING STUPID MOTHERFUCKERS!" was a bit too Avant Garde for most people.

Later, Chillblaine doesn't know how to cross his arms and the Rogues share their love of Tuesday.

I think Travis asked a friend to pose with their arms crossed and then, having to think about how they cross their arms instead of just doing it, panicked and came up with that.

But before Tuesday comes around so that everybody can, I don't know, fuck it, I guess?, everybody has to get through Monday just chillin'.

I guess Mondays are for masturbation?

Mondays are also for kidnapping Wally West which is what Chillblaine, the least chill of the group, does with his day. Chillblaine just seems to be some raging Alpha bag full of testosterone that Golden Glider's currently fucking. I guess her brother, Captain Cold, was in jail at the time so Chillblaine's taken his place in with the Rogues. Nobody likes him because he can't cross his arms correctly and he's a dick.

Turns out Mondays are actually for each of the Rogues to stab each other in the back by doing the Tuesday job on their own one day early. It doesn't work out because they all do it which means it probably worked out perfectly for Chillblaine and Golden Glider who knew they would all attempt the job early. That's just stories work when you've got a writer who decides that plans always work out perfectly until they finally don't for some reason which is weird because all the things that happen in a plan are usually wildly implausible and then a normal thing in the plan's chain breaks and I'm always all, "Wait. What? THAT didn't work?! The easiest part of the plan?! But the part where the plan relied on the hero to take two minutes longer than usual on his morning shit because they fed him some extra fiber did work?!"

I'm guessing The Flash's secret identity isn't secret (I assume this because all of his villains are always all, "Barry was way better at this than you!") or else why would Chillblaine want to kidnap Wally West? Fuck, I just realized I don't even know what Wally West's regular job was. I'm going to guess "slacker" which is why he probably doesn't have a secret identity. He's all, "See?! I'm not lazy! You're lazy! Because you're all so fucking slow is what I'm saying! Idiots!"

Oh, um, well, there you go! Question answered!

I'm such a dumb jerk. I just realized Chillblaine is probably Starman. This whole plan to trick the Rogues into stealing the Black Diamond and kidnapping The Flash so he can send him on their tail is the entire Eclipso plan! I probably would have figured it out a long time ago if I didn't spend several days between each page I read.

I'm 27 pages in and I know I haven't been giving Travis Charest the hard time I promised. You can see in the panels I've scanned why I would want to give him a hard time but Mark Waid's script is also pretty fucking bad so I've been a bit distracted. But I thought I should maybe give Trav his big chance at being insulted by me, the greatest comic book critic on the Internet! But that's when Golden Glider showed up and my brain was all, "Hey, he does nice tits, doesn't he?" And I was all, "Hey, Brain? Could you stop trying to get a response out of Dick? You know he's 54, right? He doesn't just hop-to at a couple of nicely drawn titties. He needs story these days! He needs, say, a pirate whose cousin has just come aboard his ship after they hadn't seen each other for fifteen years and she's wearing tight leather pants and a billowy shirt that keeps billowing almost enough to see nipple (which you can see anyway through the shirt what with the cool breeze blowing and also she probably iced them up before the shot). And she's all, "Oh my god! I'm so horny after my encounter with those eight sex mermaids who did all kinds of disgusting things to me but couldn't finish me off because I need some serious man penetration!" And then her cousin is all, "Yeah, me too! Lucky I run a gay pirate ship!" And then he hands her an eight-dicked octopus dildo and says, "Maybe this will help!" And she's all, "Well, it's better than nothing. But can I at least watch all y'all gays fuck as fuck myself raw?" And he's all, "Actually, tonight is Scrabble night!" And she's all, "Fuck! I love Scrabble! I can pleasure myself later!" And then there's like two hours of exciting Scrabble play and what was I talking about?"

Luckily the tits were kind of hard to see in this panel so I noticed a few other things wrong with it. See if you can spot them too!

I guess the main thing wrong with that panel is that Chillblaine must be about ten feet tall. But maybe that's not wrong because is he ten feet tall? The other problem I have with that picture is this: Where did the '90s artists who were so bad at art and yet so beloved by idiot comic book lovers all learn to draw the same stupid faces? This is how Travis draws faces but it may as well be Rob Liefeld or Marat Mychaels. Probably others but, like, I never read Pre-Image Marvel and then Image. I definitely never looked at a cover of any of the '90s X-Men off-shoots or Image books and thought, "Holy shit that looks amazing! I have to buy it!" To me, it all read exactly like the cover of Doom Force. That was a parody that got it so exactly right.

It turns out Wally West has been attached to the sphere in which the Black Diamond is kept. Golden Glider poisons the Rogues by fucking them with her poison puss and then tells them that whichever gets the Black Diamond away from Flash gets the antidote. Okay, maybe Starman is actually Golden Glider since she's thought up this overly complicated plan to Eclipse The Flash. My plan, if I were Eclipso, would be to possess a worker at Wally's favorite pizza place, put a bunch of the wrong toppings on one of his pizzas along with the Black Diamond, and then when he finds the Diamond and takes it off the pizza, he'll be super pissed at them getting the order wrong. Then after he destroys the pizza chain and kills a bunch of teenage employees, he'll be free to do Eclipso's bidding!

Instead The Flash battles Captain Boomerang in a fight so confusing that I still don't know what happened. I'm not sure Travis Charest understood Waid's script and completely fucked up the fight scene.

Go ahead. Make sense of that yourself! I can't look at it anymore. I've thrown up on my laptop six times from line-induced vertigo!

What happened (which was not represented visually at all except vaguely one time) was that Captain Boomerang threw a boomerang that split every time it was hit but then it kept flying around and/or at Wally as if it had been thrown like a real boomerang. So when The Flash is spinning in that one panel, I guess he's causing all the little boomerangs (millions at this point? I don't know because Travis only ever drew three boomerangs (the first one and then a panel with two more that you really had to work hard to interpret that they were born of the first one) to orbit him so he can smash them all back at their source? And somehow when he smashes them back at the source, this time they didn't all split when struck because they were, um, confused from the spinning?

I think maybe Travis's art goes pretty well with Waid's script! Well paired! Like Dog Urine Rosé and Cat Shit Linguine!

Speaking of Doom Force, there's an advert for it in this issue! "Hey kids! Are you currently making fun of the art you're seeing right now? Well see how Grant Morrison, Keith Giffen, and Steve Pugh make fun of it!"

So a whole bunch of confusing battle happens. I can't follow hardly any of it once The Flash smashes through the ceiling riding a spout of Weather Wizard's water. Everybody gets lost. Nobody knows what's what. Glider and Chillblaine actually fuck downstairs during the battle. The Black Diamond they're fighting over turns out to be a bomb of some kind and The Flash rushes outside to throw it in the air where it can explode harmlessly. But does he run out and hammer throw it on the end of its tether? No. He puts it in a wheelchair and then push-throws the wheelchair into the sky? Like, um, that was actually more difficult? Barry would have done the hammer throw, dude.

Anyway, The Flash winds up Eclipsed because he gets mad when his friend Chunk shows up and doesn't save him. Um. What? I'm not even sure why Chunk was there. Some mystery person in a sleek car lured him over. Starman, maybe? I bet it was revealed in the script but Travis Charest didn't know how to convey the reveal in images and so he just left the unknown person as glowing eyes and a smile in the darkness.

The Ranking!
Absolute dogshit. Saying this is dogshit might be an insult to the colon of a dog because why would I accuse it of being able to push out something this fucking horrible. I'd rather step in dogshit than read this comic book again. I wonder if I drank three liters of vodka right now, the ensuing black-out would incorporate this moment into it and I could forget I ever read it. No, I'd better forget that rout. Every sci-fi story in existence where somebody chose to forget something always winds up with the person so curious about what they forgot and why that they seek out the memory. I'd like to assume that I trust myself enough to not seek out the reason I chose memory loss over the memory but I also think I should trust better writers before me and the lessons they've tried to teach. I didn't read nearly every book by Philip K. Dick and not learn a little something about, um, memory loss and delusional identity disorders?