The comic book world just got hit with a truth bomb hotter than a kryptonite-laced jalapeño 🔥! When legendary Marvel editor Tom Brevoort declared that Barry Allen's greatest contribution to DC lore was dying, it sent shockwaves through fandom faster than the Speed Force itself. In his brutally honest April 2025 Substack newsletter (now wildfire-spreading on Reddit), Brevoort didn't just compare DC's Flashes – he dissected superhero legacies with surgical precision while casually dropping this thermonuclear take: "The best thing Barry did for his own legacy was to become the patron saint of DC superheroes." Oof, right in the Silver Age nostalgia!

Brevoort's argument hits like a vibranium hammer ⚒️: Barry Allen, though beloved, was essentially a perfectly preserved museum piece – scientifically noble yet psychologically flat as a pancake stuck to the cosmic treadmill. His sacrificial demise during Crisis on Infinite Earths transformed him into something transcendent. That death crystallized his legacy like amber preserving prehistoric DNA, allowing Barry to evolve from just another superhero into DC's holy martyr. It’s a cruel irony that feels like watching a caterpillar achieve immortality only by being freeze-dried mid-metamorphosis 🐛❄️.

The editor then pivots to Wally West with the enthusiasm of a kid unwrapping vintage action figures. Wally wasn't just inheriting a costume; he was shouldering the weight of a sanctified legacy while wrestling with impostor syndrome on turbo-mode. Brevoort gushes about Wally's messy humanity – his anxieties, relationships, and growth made him feel like drinking hot cocoa after decades of Barry's clinical mineral water. That psychological complexity turned the Flash mantle into something electrically alive, like comparing a neon-lit cyberpunk alleyway to a politely lit dentist's waiting room 💡💥.

But here’s where the plot twist stings like lemon juice in a paper cut 🍋✂️: Brevoort contends modern Wally has devolved into "an almost carbon copy of Barry" – just with extra speedster kids in tow. That once-vibrant character now feels like a photocopy of a photocopy, his revolutionary edges sanded down into corporate-safe smoothness. It’s enough to make you wonder if superhero legacies inevitably calcify, like coral reefs beautiful but frozen in time 🪸⏳.

Personal take? Wrestling with this feels like trying to solve a Mobius strip puzzle while riding a rollercoaster 🎢. Brevoort’s brutal honesty exposes comics’ cyclical tragedy: death creates legends, successors innovate, then stagnation sets in like rust on vibranium. Yet his critique leaves haunting questions dangling like Spider-Man over a skyscraper:

• Can legacy characters ever escape the gravitational pull of their predecessors?

• Does superhero "growth" inevitably mean becoming paler versions of their iconic origins?

• And most painfully... is permanent death the only way to achieve true immortality in comics?

Wally’s current state especially hurts. Seeing the revolutionary reduced to replica makes one mourn what’s lost – like discovering your favorite punk band now makes elevator music 🎸😢. Yet Brevoort’s analysis remains weirdly hopeful: it proves characters can evolve beyond their creators’ limitations... until corporate inertia drags them back. Maybe superhero legacies are less like relay races and more like Ouroboros snakes, forever consuming their own tails in an infinite loop of reinvention 🐍🌀.

So where does this leave our Scarlet Speedsters? Barry rests in his martyr’s glory – untouchable, perfect, and ironically more powerful in death than life. Wally? He’s racing against his own legacy’s shadow, trying not to trip over the very monument he helped build. In the eternal marathon of comic book relevance, Brevoort reminds us that sometimes stopping the clock... is what makes time stand still ⏱️💫.