Already there.
They were ahead of ya, last year they killed 'im again.
But this time I hold no expectation at all they’ll get it rigtht 
Characters are brought back because if the comic companies don’t make use of their intellectual property, they can lose the rights to it. That is the consequence of our country’s odd laws on such matters.
So, every few years Marvel trots out Captain Marvel so they retain the rights to the character (even though he died of cancer) (particularly given their weird arrangement with Marvel’s Captain Marvel and DC’s Captain Marvel). Captain America is dead and replaced now, but he’ll be back eventually. Phoenix will be coming back in some miniseries or other, for sure. Martian Manhunter and now Batman are dead and “dead”; the latter will be replaced for a while, but both of 'em will be back eventually. And Barry Allen will be the Flash for a while, then maybe they’ll move on to some other Flash.
Now, the odd duck is the whole GL thing, where Hal was brought back as GL despite already being in publication as the Specter. But that was the writer’s doing (and, presumably, some fans’) more than anything else.
The Flash is probably the wrong superhero to be asking this question about, since the name and powers have been successfully passed on to several characters during the title’s history. DC let go of the Golden Age when Barry Allen replaced Jay Garrick, and they let go of the Silver Age when Wally West replaced Barry Allen. Sure the old characters are still remembered, and they can even step into the role again. That’s because they’re superheroes, which (lest we forget) are not really real. If anyone imagines that Wally West will never take up the mantle of Flash again, then I have a bridge in Metropolis to sell them cheap.
To the OP: why is it a problem to begin with? You claim to like Wally West: but he was the official “Flash” from 1986 to now, which is about as long as Barry Allen held the title (23 years). So shouldn’t he be stepping down anyway? What difference does it make to you whether it’s Grampa Barry or some new meat who takes over?
Isn’t it time you let go of the Dark Age?
Why won’t the editors let go?
Because the readers won’t.
You think the loudest voices after the first Crisis were those who liked the changes?
That’s the problem, right enough. There’s a stong feeling that the only right and proper GL is Hal Jordan, and that Barry Allen should be the Flash. But they’re writing in a style that makes huge irreversable change part of the format. So no matter how many times they reset the characters to what they want, they inevitably drift away, and every few years, someone else has to come along and do it all again.
I don’t know about you, but I’m getting dizzy.
Well, in terms of copyright, they retain the rights no matter what (for as long as copyright runs, in any case). As I understand it, the issue with Captain Marvel (or this particular issue, for there are many) is the rights to the trademark “Captain Marvel” as the title of a comic book.
So long as Marvel periodically publish a comic with that title, they retain the exclusive rights to it – the actual characters in it are irrelevant. Which is why Marvel have had, what? Four different Captain Marvels, is it?
Plus, in the real world, Captain American never actually died–he was published until 1955-ish. The whole “He died and was frozen in 1944” thing was invented in 1964 in the same issue of Avengers where he was thawed out.
And it wasn’t until Steve Englehart’s magnificent period at Marvel* that anyone got around to explaining who was running around in Cap’s costume claiming to be Steve Rodgers from 1945-1955.
I’m not happy that they’re bringing Barry back since they’ve actually fixed Wally–I like who the character has become. (Ditto with Kyle–Once Morrison** got ahold of Kyle in JLA, he became a great character (it was in that Starro story that Dream appeared in) as opposed to the whiney, insecure wimp that he was written as). I’m glad Hal’s back because I never bought his whole death–they were so anxious to make him evil, they didn’t actually read the stories that allegedly caused him to become evil. But Barry? There’s no NEED to bring him back. He had a good death, he’s remembered and his successor is doing a fine job, thanks very much.
That said, the idea that the turnaround time for bringing Barry back is too soon is kinda silly. Barry has been dead almost as long as he was “alive” (from Showcase 4->Flash 350)= ~25 years. He’s been dead since 1985.
*Anyone who likes Geoff Johns and Mark Waid should pick up some 1970s era Steve Englehart books (Avengers and Cap in particular). And, as far as I’m concerned, Englehart’s 10 issue run of JLA is still the best run of any incarnation of any Justice League ever.
**For all that I’m bitching about Morrison’s Final Crisis, he’s brilliant at turning (IMO) lame-ass Bronze Age replacements into great (new) characters. To me, he fixed Kyle from the wimp who had a guest star every three issues so he could get a hug and be told that he’s doing a good job and he turned Byrne’s Luthor (who was a thinner Kingpin, IMO) into a fantastic character with a motivation beyond “Wahhh. Superman is more popular than me.”
One last bit that I didn’t have time to edit in:
Finally, I think a small crop of writers (Morrison, Johns, Waid, Busiek) are fixing the mess Alan Moore and Frank Miller’s imitators made of DC and Marvel. The whole idiotic “I don’t like this character and he’s silly besides. Let’s kill him in the most gruesome way possible.” period is being fixed and there’s more of a “caretaker” attitude for the characters than there is a “I don’t like this toy–I’ll break it so no-one else can use it” attitude. Look at Marvel’s two “Scourge” story arcs–dozens of B-list (and many dozens of C-Z-list bad guys) killed because an editor thought they were “silly”. On the other hand, a British Captain Marvel knock-off (MarvelMan) was once considered to be one of the lamest characters around…until Moore decided to fix him.
Plus as hard as bad-guys are to come up with, it’s stupid to waste ANY of them needlessly. Excluding Venom and a few Bat-Villains, try to name ANY A-List bad-guy created after, say 1990.
Maybe they ought to follow the same pattern as Lord of the Rings did with Morgoth/ Sauron/ Saruman: the uber-villain eventually gets killed/ imprisoned forever/ reduced to a pathetic shell, and then his lieutenant or would-be rival steps up to the plate, using as much of the evil resources of his predecessor as he can lay hands on.
Doomsday! I win!
Venom dates from 1984.
The problem with villains is that any superhero needs dozens of villains to fill out the endless number of appearances he makes. You soon get to a point with hundreds if not thousands of super-powered bad guys.
Remember (not you personally, I’m sure you know) that in the beginning, super good guys fought mainly ordinary people. Even Superman didn’t have superpowered foes. (His big 40s antagonists other the Luthor were the Prankster and the Toyman.) Batman was the world’s greatest detective. His villains were Dick Tracy-style grotesques likes Two-Face and the Joker, but mostly he had to use his wits against thieves.
I think Stan Lee changed that with the coming of Marvel, although he was responding to a few years of aliens with odd powers at DC. Almost from the beginning each superhero had a corresponding set of supervillians. DC had to match this.
This came the oneupsmanship. Spider-man always had to battle someone bigger and more powerful than him. The Fantastic Four soon started having cosmic-powered villains.
And then DC made Batman psychotic and had every comic be about madness and had Robin tortured and killed. Chris Claremont loved to torture teenagers in the X-Men and it went to hell. Comic books cannot torture teenagers and be fun. So they lost that whole piece of their audience.
Once you one-up yourself until you reach utmost extremes you’re in a trap. Can you reboot to power levels of the 50s? Can you take away the “realism”? Can you eliminate the cosmic? (Can realism and the cosmic co-exist?) No, no, no, (and no). It’s all a set of traps. It’s all shock and special episodes. It’s disappearing up your own behind. So you have Jay Garrick *and *Barry Allen *and *Wally West *and *Flash Jr. III the Younger all at the same time because your whole edifice is still based on the equivalent of DOS.
As a writer I hate hate hate the stupidity of some of the lengths they go to trying to find a new plot of land to farm, but as a writer I understand why they need to do so. Mostly, though, I ignore the whole thing just as more and more others do.
I’d debate that–Doomsday was (to me) a one-time loser bad-guy who ONLY won the first time because the writer cheated.
GL could have flung him into space. Superman could have burrowed up under him and tossed him to the moon. He could have heat-visioned him. They never even TRIED to use kryptonite against him. Instead, the writer made everyone’s strategy “Run forward and hit him really hard”. Which, big surprise, didn’t work. Zatanna could have said “Tropelet siht gib retsnom otni a kcalb eloh!”. Superman could have used super-breath to blow Doomsday into orbit. There are hundreds of things that no-one bothered trying because the writer wanted the bad-guy to be kewl.
Plus, a measure of bad-guy greatness is how often he’s reused. And with Doomsday, he’s been around like…what? three more appearances in about 10 years, each one lamer than the last (he was just beaten up by a bunch of pissed-off New Kandorians).
Nitpick: as they had no reason to think Doomsday had any Kryptonian connection, and kryptonite was then very rare and known only to affect Superman quickly, there was no reason to try it.
The rest of the critique is on target, though.
Well, if winning is your mark of a good villain, I’ve got some disappointing news for you . . .
Whuuuuu?? I’m not much of a DCU guy, but it seems like he’s on the cover of at least one of their rags every other month. Plus he’s in some of the animated shows, they made that awful Superman/Doomsday straight-to-video movie awhile back, he’s in Smallville . . .
For Superman, he also had the Ultra-Humanite (4 or 5 appearances prior to Superman 61 which is where Superman learned about Kryponite which started the ball rolling for super-powered bad-guys) and Myztxtplk (which I can’t spell) along with some W.C. Fields-esque con-man who’s name I can’t remember. But point taken.
And your Batman point is dead on: Don’t forget, thoughout most of the '40s and '50s, Joker was NOT a homicidal psycho-killer, he was “The Clown Prince of Crime”–essentially a clown-gimmicked thief–no different from the Riddler except in his choice of gimmick. Ditto the Riddler and Catwoman. As far as I remember, the only real “super-powered” bad guy that Bats fought was Clayface.
I’m not sure I agree with the Stan Lee part here. Flash had his “Rogues Gallery” and Green Lantern his stable of super-powered bad-guys at least 2-3 years before Fantastic Four #1 was a gleam in Kirby and Lee’s eyes. And even then, the first dozen or so issues of FF didn’t really feature a lot of bad-guys (with one notable exception, of course)–if we don’t count the Mole Man (intended to be a one-shot character study rather than a recurring bad-guy–hell, he didn’t reappear for like 2-3 years) and The Puppet Master (a b-list bad guy at best who was only interesting for the Thing/Alicia/Puppet Master triangle) the only recurring villian until about #15 was Dr. Doom (and Sub-Mariner, depending on what you consider him).
By that point the Flash had at least 15 or 20 bad-guys in his stable and, GL had a comparable (but less interesting) amount.
I’d reverse the order: Claremont torturing teens LED to the psychotic Batman and the Superman who swears to protect little kids who then get murdered by implied child-molesters) and or end up in hell (no–really) but again, great point.
I disagree with your Flash example–Waid and Johns after him have specifically set it up to have a generational feel, but completely agree with the larger point. With the Flashes (until this Barry Allen ressurection) there was a growth and change feeling–Each generation, every 20 years or so passes the torch onto the next person. I loved that.
It’s what I love about the Lee/Ditko (and I give Ditko 100% of the credit for this feature) Spider-Man issues. In the course of those 38 issues, Peter grows and changes tremendously. Those issues are unique for their era. Peter comes out of his shell, learns to make friends, gets a job and a girl-friend (or three), graduates high-school, leaves some friends behind (so long Liz Allen!) and makes new friends. Hell, in the first few Romita issues, Peter even moves out of Aunt May’s house and gets a motorcycle and Flash is drafted to fight in Vietnam. no-one had ever done this in a comic book before. If Spider-Man had been published by DC at the time, Spider-Man would still be in high-school, wearing his nerdy V-Neck vest and tie, thick glasses and trying to avoid being beaten up by Flash Thompson.
Let the characters grow, change, age (with dignity–I’m thinking of DC’s treatment of Hal Jordan here) and pass on the torch–Flash (until now) was really the only book that was doing this right. If it were up to me, Impulse would NEVER have become Kid Flash and we’d have a 13 or so year old Impulse, Wally would remain Flash and have his hands full between Impulse and his twins and all the while we’d know that at some point, Wally would pass the mantle onto Impulse.
Yeah, but just wait until the day people my age right now end up running the books…
I hope you like bandoliers.
Or time-drifted future children of X-Men…
Maybe if you guys got out of the DC/Marvel ghettoes and checked out publishers like Dark Horse and Image, you’d see some fresh characters. In short, I’m saying the problem is with you, not the comics publishers. (::Goes back to reading Empowered Vol. 4::: 
It’s not winning, it’s putting up a good fight and having an interesting gimmick (a personality and motivation helps too, but you can’t have everything). Doomsday is a spikey Hulk but with less personality. And his gimmick seems to be “He can make the writer cheat on his behalf”. But winning because your opponents don’t fight back doesn’t make dramatic stories (to me)
Not that I remember–I checked Wiki and he only had something like 6 appearances/arcs and a couple of them were flashbacks/origins, one was a sort-of Bizzaro Doomsday. and at least one, maybe two of those were just Doomsday in a big crowd.
:rolleyes: