Back in the day, before the “Speed Force” was invented, I remember reading an essay that explained Flash’s speed as being a local temporal effect. Basically he is able to slow time down for himself, so that he can in effect move faster than anything. (I suppose he visualizes/ implements the effect by running as fast as he can.)
The other 98% of his time he spends a little slower than everyone else, so as not to get out of sync between personal duration l time and universal duration time, thus avoiding the old “The Girl, The Gold Watch and Everything” rapid aging issue.
And that explains why Barry Allen is Mr Mellow, and always late for everything.
I was fascinated by the Flash in “Kingdom Come”. He had retreated from humanity, focusing on Central City and never stopping. Nothing bad ever happens in Central City, no crime, no accidents. Just a red blur that is everywhere and nowhere. Seems like he found something to fill the time.
I remember a Wally West issue where he was sitting in a theater, and he was disoriented when he unexpectedly snapped into high-speed mode and the movie froze. He eventually noticed that something was pressing against the back of his neck, and reached behind his head to see what it was. Well, it was a bullet; turned out that some psycho in the back had started shooting up the theater. He then looked around and saw other bullets hanging in the air, and he collected them before they hit anyone.
I remember that comic, and most specifically the quicksilver portion. I always thought it would be a pretty cool power, but when he described his day to day life, it was horrid.
Peter David brought some great insight to Quicksilver in that run. I remember an issue where Quicksilver was banging on a piano and everyone in the room was covering their ears & complaining. After a few panels of cacophony, delicate and beautiful notes of music start coming from the piano. Commenting on the loveliness of the music, one of the members of the team asks “What was that noise before?” and QS simply responds, “Learning.”
Of course, Strong Guy was the best under Peter David…and #1 Fan was truly horrific.
Have any of you considered that the Flash considers the world so quickly that he got tired of being bored a long time ago, like just after he got his powers. He kind of adapted to knowing everything so quickly. It must have just gotten natural to wait for something to happen.
I always thought it would be interesting to have a guy who has the superpower of superspeed. But he does it by changing the flow of time. And he’s a 46 year old middle aged schlub. So sure, he could run across the continent in five minutes, but it would be just as hard and take him just as long from his point of view as it would be for any other middle aged guy to run 3000 miles. They always show super-speedsters running like crazy, it would be funny to have a super-speedster who can barely manage a fast jog without getting winded.
Sentry maybe? Speed isn’t his defining characteristic, but his “powers ostensibly derive from a Super Soldier- serum that “moves his molecules an instant ahead of the current timeline”.” Pretty divisive character, as I understand it, so YInterestMV.
In the series of novels Wearing the Cape, there’s a character who can enter “hypertime”- basically, he speeds up his own perception of time relative to the rest of the universe, so much so that the world is standing still, and he can take other people or objects into hypertime with him. He’s a normal human, otherwise, so he uses a motorcycle to get around while the world is stopped.
He’d be able to go around the world in an instant, but it would take him, subjectively, just as long as it would take a normal person.
There was a story that ran in one of the old comic book review magazines where this fat nerd gets the power to fly from aliens in exchange for his comic book collection. He starts out as a fat schlub but the side effect of his powers make him fairly fit by the end of the story.
PS Power’s Infected series has someone similar except time stops completely. To them, he crosses the country instantly to stop a bomb; to him, he spent months riding a bicycle across country, alone.
The general answer was that ‘it depends’ but it doesn’t seem to take long from The Flash’s own perspective.
But then the first panel in this page contradicts this: https://comicnewbies.files.wordpress.com/ 2014/02/flash-cant-be-bad-cop-0.jpg (broke the link because I don’t know if that site is safe or not) where he says that although to Green Lantern he could clean up the city in seconds from his own perspective it would take The Flash hours.
So I guess like most things comic-book its inconsistent and depends on who is writing the story that day.
