11 years after it originally launched, it's safe to say Flashpoint is one of the most important comics in Geoff Johns' vast DC resume. That series not only introduced one of the most twisted incarnations of the DC Universe, it also paved the way for DC's controversial New 52 relaunch. Flashpoint has gone on to inspired a number of DC's live-action and animated projects, from the animated movie Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox to The Flash: Season 3 to the upcoming Flash movie.
With that movie drawing renewed attention to Flashpoint, it's hardly surprising DC would greenlight the sequel, Flashpoint Beyond. But for Johns, there's no point in revisiting Flashpoint without a story worth telling. Now that Flashpoint Beyond #0 has arrived in stores, we finally have some idea of what that story involves.
IGN was able to sit down with Johns recently and dig into the events of issue #0. Read on to learn more about how this sequel builds on the original and why Thomas Wayne's strange journey has only just begun.
Warning: this article contains full spoilers for Flashpoint Beyond #0!
Why Flashpoint Needed a Sequel
The problem with publishing a sequel to Flashpoint is that the original series ended on a pretty definitive note. Flashpoint is created when Barry Allen travels back in time to prevent his mother's murder, an act that winds up causing cascading changes across the DCU (not the least of which being Dr. Thomas Wayne becoming Batman after a young Bruce is murdered by Joe Chill). The series ends with Barry undoing that well-intentioned mistake and (more or less) restoring the regular DC timeline. The only physical remnant of the Flashpoint timeline is a letter Thomas Wayne wrote to his son.
Flashpoint briefly returned in the 2017 Batman/Flash crossover "The Button," allowing Thomas to cross over into the regular DCU just before his world is annihilated for good. That set the stage for this older, more brutal version of Batman to become the main antagonist of Tom King's Batman run. Having seen the pain and misery being Batman causes, Thomas becomes obsessed with convincing his son to give up the cape and cowl. He ultimately fails, of course. Thomas has lately been seen in the pages of Justice League Incarnate, slowly finding redemption alongside other heroes from throughout the DC multiverse.
However, as Flashpoint Beyond kicks off, Thomas is suddenly right back where he started. He now finds himself back in the Flashpoint timeline, trapped in a world ravaged by war and where his son is still dead. Everything he fought for in the original series has been for nothing. That, Johns explains, is the crux of his vision for this sequel.
"Every one of these stories, I always try to get to the emotion at its core," Johns tells IGN. "With Barry Allen in the original Flashpoint, I think that emotional motivation and storyline was really clear. You could see him struggle with what he had done and trying to preserve it and trying to have everything, but he learned ultimately he couldn't."
Johns continues, "And in much the same way with this, with Flashpoint Beyond, it was looking at it from Thomas Wayne's point of view and his story, what he is struggling with and, again, getting him back to being a Thomas Wayne Batman. He's not a Bruce Wayne Batman. He's never going to be. Even if he wants to be or tries to be, he's just never going to be because that pain and that tragedy within him is too deep."
As established in Flashpoint Beyond #0, Thomas is hellbent on erasing his world all over again, even if he has to shed some blood along the way. To him, this world and its people don't matter, because he doesn't view them as real.
"He's not a Bruce Wayne Batman. He's never going to be. Even if he wants to be or tries to be, he's just never going to be because that pain and that tragedy within him is too deep."
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"There'd be no greater pain for him than him thinking he has done something to change the worst tragedy that he could ever imagine, and then ultimately it's thrown back in his face after everything," says Johns. "He knows that it's possible from his point of view to change it and that someone's done this deliberately and now he's going to do whatever he can end to go back. And I love that he says, 'None of this matters. Nothing here matters because it's going to all change anyway,' so it gives him a little bit of free reign."
Naturally, Flashpoint Beyond will also acknowledge the tragic ending of Flashpoint: Batman - Knight of Vengeance. That companion series reveals that Martha Wayne was driven mad and became the Joker after seeing her son murdered. In the final pages of Knight of Vengeance, Thomas manages to break through his wife's madness, revealing his plan to change reality so their son can live instead. Martha is momentarily hopeful, at least until she realizes resurrecting Bruce means dooming him to become Batman. That causes her to snap and commit suicide.
However, Martha's presence is still felt in Flashpoint Beyond. One scene in issue #0 shows Thomas haunted by the memory of his dead wife, who's now the devil on his shoulder as he fights to kill his reality a second time. Johns hints that Martha has a key part to play in this sequel even after her death.
"She's certainly haunting him. He can't ever forget his wife, so her voice is going always be in his head a little bit... She casts a shadow over him, what she's done, and what she did and what have happened to her. Ultimately, it will constantly affect Thomas."
The Mystery of the Clockwork Killer
Thomas Wayne's newfound nihilism has already caused the death of Barry Allen. Batman tracks down Flashpoint's version of Barry in issue #0, who never experienced the accident that transforms him into a speedster. In a scene mirroring a key moment from the original Flashpoint, Batman forces Barry to undergo the Speed Force ritual, only for an Atlantean assassin to sabotage the experiment and cause Barry's death. Clearly, rewriting reality won't be so easy this time around.
Johns confirms that assassin is connected to the Clockwork Killer, the mysterious serial murderer whose identity is one of the central mysteries of Flashpoint Beyond. Whomever they are, they seem to be targeting anyone with the ability to affect the flow of time.
"Somebody else in the story wants to prevent Thomas from changing anything, and that would be the Clockwork Killer," Johns teases. "We find the bodies of [Time Hunters member] Dr. Jeffrey Smith and Matthew Ryder, who in its future would become Waverider. And David Clinton, who is Chronos in our timeline. Abra Kadabra's body is found. There's more to it that Thomas will start to uncover that clearly in issue #1. There's somebody out there killing anyone that's associated with time travel in the DC Universe."
As the title suggests, Flashpoint Beyond #0 is more a Batman-focused prologue story than the true first chapter of the series. A lot will change with Flashpoint Beyond #1, including the creative tam. Whereas issue #0 is a collaboration between Johns and Knight of Vengeance artist Eduardo Risso, the main series is co-written by Johns, Tim Sheridan and Jeremy Adams and drawn by Xermanico. Luckily, Johns made it clear he's still heavily involved in the scripting of each issue.
"Jeremy, Tim, and I get together, we plot every issue together and we break it out, and then we're all jamming on the script and the dialogue," Johns says. "So it's really a collaboration. And I find Tim brings such wonderful heart and emotion to his writing, his characters. His characters are very nuanced and he's always thinking with his heart, which I absolutely love. And Jeremy brings an incredible passion for the DC Universe, a real depth to the DC Universe that reminds me of my own. And his Flash with Wally West has been one of my favorite books to read at DC. So working with two really talented writers, and you put everything up on the board, and for us it was like a mini-writer's room for a TV show like Stargirl."
Rewriting DC's Timeline
As much as Flashpoint Beyond is centered around Thomas Wayne and the mystery of the Clockwork Killer, issue #0 also makes it clear this series will have an impact on the larger DC multiverse. In fact, the Bruce Wayne Batman also appears in this issue, joining forces with Doomsday Clock's Mime and Marionette to make sense of the predicament his father has stumbled into. Johns confirms we'll see Bruce play a recurring role in the series alongside other characters from the regular DC Universe.
"We focus mostly on Thomas, but also a lot of other characters, including Bruce. There's a scene with Bruce and Barry Allen in issue #1 that'll shed some light on exactly what Bruce is up to and maybe why it's so dangerous."
Getting back to the idea of why Flashpoint needed a sequel, Johns hints at the idea that this series is telling a much bigger story than just Thomas Wayne's return to his original timeline. The series is playing with the very idea of time in the DC multiverse.
"A storyline like Flashpoint, personally, I would be disinterested to just be like, 'Oh, I'm just going to go tell a Thomas Wayne story about him fighting some bad guys.' It needs to feel bigger," Johns says. "I think Thomas Wayne Batman is more important than that and his story featuring him needs to be more important than that. So the idea is, yeah, it ties right into the very center of the DC Universe and there's things that this point to that are happening now. There' things that it points to that are going to happen later and I think that's what I loved out of event books. And it doesn't overwhelm the book, but it's got to be a part of it, a deeper part of it."
Johns has done as much as any DC writer to redefine the multiverse concept in the 21st Century, including restoring the multiverse in 2005's Infinite Crisis and establishing Earth-0 as a constantly evolving "metaverse" in Doomsday Clock. With Flashpoint Beyond, Johns' goal is to do the same for the concept of time.
"There's a moment in [issue #0] where we introduce this concept called the Divine Continuum, which is something that I love - the Crisis events and the multiverse events - all that stuff is great, but it's been done a lot and it's taken up a lot of the epic nature of DC," Johns says. "But I think there's more than the multiverse, and if you look at the Divine Continuum, it's broken into two parts, space and time. And space is really the multiverse and the parallel Earths and the Dark Multiverse and the Omniverse and all that stuff, but there is more to it."
You have space and time and so as a lot of these events deal with space, Flashpoint and Flashpoint Beyond deal with time and time travel.
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Johns continues, "There's a concept that Mark Waid introduced and Grant Morrison played with that I always found fascinating called Hypertime. You have space and time and so as a lot of these events deal with space, Flashpoint and Flashpoint Beyond deal with time and time travel. There was an event after the original Crisis called Legends, and I loved Legends so much because it was a very grounded in character and it took obscure characters and it reintroduced the Suicide Squad way back when and Wally West is the Flash and Blue Beetle and all these great characters, and it really grounded everything in the DC Universe. It made it more emotion-based, and to me that's more interesting than doing just high concept."
Finally, Johns hints that the fallout of Flashpoint Beyond will lead to a new wave of DC titles, some of which will build on this revamped approach to time and time travel.
"There will be books and stories that spin out of this into the greater DC Universe, some of them featuring characters that haven't been at the forefront for quite a while that I'm excited to see," Johns teases. "But it'll do it in a very focused way on this side of history and time. And that's something I've always loved with DC Universe is the vast history of it going back to the '40s with the original to Justice Society and all the way to the future with the Legion of Super Heroes. But it is a storyline that is going to explore hopefully a different facet of the DCU that we haven't seen for a while."
Flashpoint Beyond #0 is available now in print and digital forms.
For more on what's brewing at DC, learn more about the upcoming Dark Crisis crossover and find out how Young Justice: Targets builds on the recent Season 4 finale of the animated series.
Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.
