Set, Go! Wait.... What Happened to 'Ready?'
I can't even talk about the boring cover this time, there's too much else going wrong here.
Surprisingly it's not Marcus To's fill in art. Sure it's not Francis Manapul but so what? There are other perfectly great artists out there, and To is certainly one of them. No, where this issue fall flat is in the plotting.
The pacing of the issue itself is fairly ok, but the beginning practically floods us with exposition, explaining every little detail about the past few issues (even an editor's not reminding us of someone's LAST FREAKING NAME) and then it explains a bunch of other plot that apparently happened between issues. Basically, an entire issue of setup was skipped. Barry's just suddenly now in Mexico or wherever I honestly don't care, to rescue Patty who was apparently kidnapped by Weather Wizard while investigating a murder. Everyone else in the issue seems to already know things, or assume everyone else does, so they all must have read this mysterious 'The Flash#9.5' because they're the only ones not confused.
And ooohh, a Rogue is rampaging after the death of a sibling, we totally didn't see that plot two issues ago. And what's the deal with Barry's priorities? Gorilla City? Turbine? And he gave up on Iris because she's trapped in the past so its apparently not possible? Even if you can allow yourself to brush those aside, and accept Flash's ability to do so, it's far too difficult to fully enjoy the story that follows. It's lazy as hell.
It all begins, right after the terrible waves of exposition explaining all the stuff that was never written, with the laziest issue title. Weather Wizard. Yeah, let's name the issue after the villain who's in it in this mostly one-off story. There's just... SO MUCH that we missed. Patty investigated the death of Weather Wizard's brother, ended up in 'Mexico,' got kidnapped, the murder sparked a whole gang war.... when was ANY of that? It all seems EXTREMELY important. Oh and Barry somehow found out she was kidnapped and went to find her. And was already pursuing Weather Wizard. I'm sorry, but that's just WAY too much for me to accept having happened between issues. It's ok to start us right in the middle of things, "Weather Wizard just robbed a bank, or killed a politician,' but to have to explain literally 90% of the setup.... that's like making a two-part episode, but never airing the first part and pretending it never existed. That's some straight up awful writing.
And in the end, there's two super dramatic arguments going on. The one between Patty and Barry almost works, but gets a bit awkward when you realize Patty going from hating the Flash, to accepting him but still hating him but at least being self aware of her hate, in that missing issue. The development never happened. But it's not nearly as bad as the huge dramatic moment between Weather Wizard and his sister-in-law. There's minimal context to it, and any context it has is stuff that was explained to us by the narration or other characters. The same kind of 'by the way' stuff. There wasn't any real building into this moment.
In Conclusion: 2/5
There's really very little wrong with this issue from a broad perspective. Had there been a setup issue, this one would've been excellent. The pacing is actually SMOOTH, and Marcus To's artwork is really nice, if less experimental than Manapul. But so much in this story relies heavily on the events that preceded it, events which were merely recounted to us instead of being used to build the drama and tension. And that made pretty much every single powerful dramatic moment completely fail.
The final page was really good though, I like how that's building things.
