Flash Of Two Worlds!

Ahead of the new season of CW's "The Flash" starting up, I decided to do a piece dedicated to an upcoming episode, whose influence owes a lot to this landmark story from 1961.

Gardner Fox, Carmine Infantino, and editor Julius Schwartz had all had a hand during the Golden Age of Comics doing many of the same characters they were later to shape in years to come in big ways. Fox, a co-creator of the Flash way back in 1940, was tasked with finding a way to explain the difference between current Flash Barry Allen and original Flash Jay Garrick, on top of explaining why Flash and Green Lantern were different characters but Batman and Superman were pretty much the same as they had been upon their debuts. The solution? The Golden Age, World War 2 heroes occupied the very similar parallel Earth-Two while the newer, current heroes such as Barry Allen, Hal Jordan, and Ray Palmer occupied Earth-One, thus, for the time being, solving the problem of explaining the different characters.

However, as would be proven some 25 years later, this solution ended up being highly unwieldy as DC continued to add to the Multiverse, with differing Earths having alternate timelines and heroes and characters that its practically a no-brainer why the company felt the need to rest its entire timeline with The Crisis On Infinite Earths. Although the loss of Barry Allen and Supergirl during the whole affair is still a wound that doesn't quite heal.

As usual I've rambled far too much. The photo isn't quite the 100% reproduction I wanted it to be, as the cover to Flash #121 had Barry and Jay saving a man from a falling piece of construction. I couldn't duplicate that the wanted to so I had to get imaginative. The word balloons are actually there, cut out from a print of the comic and cleaned up with minimal photoshop. Aside from that, everything else is as tangible as it can get.