Jay Garrick: The Flash #6 - "Life's Terms" (2024)

written by Jeremy Adams art by Diego Olortegui & Luis Guerrero

My favorite idiot brother/clone/twins. I don’t actually think bart is taller, i just think he’s either jumping or Thad is just real hunched over, but fuck it, right? Love these two!

grandpa grandson bonding maybe. here’s some speedy rabbits . I just kinda fucked around since I haven’t drawn much this week due to studying. Nursing schools a bitch.

I get an image in my head and draw it.

Then i get the same image but slightly diferent and draw it.

I love drawing speedsrers rynning

pov you're a flash rogue

bart allen week day 2!!! they will all wake up extremely sore tomorrow.

also sorry for deleting first days post i hated it so much i couldn't stand it 🙏🙏 its okay i like this one much better

PROMPT

What if clockwork had HUGE beef with the flash family? They slow down time or travel back and forward in time and it just ruins all his hard work. At the beginning, it was ok but after five years? No, just no. Now the justice league has to summon Danny to make political connections, but after the summoning Danny is just gon smacked and asked flash to sign something, when asked why Danny just says "you and your entire family pissed off the controller of time and timelines. He isn't allowed to because ghost writer won't allow him, so he has been planning your lives after you die, he has a HUGE grudge with you guys, you're like celebrities". And flash? He has a new love for being alive and absolute terror for when he dies

"Speedsters are boring, they're useless they just run fast."

Wrong! Jay Garrick can make sonic bombs by just hitting his helmet at the right frequency. Barry Allen can disassemble and reassemble himself molecule by molecule at will. Wally West can freeze a person in time by removing their potential kinetic energy. Bart Allen can trap entities between molecules. Eobard Thawne can age someone to dust with a touch. Literally any of them can throw a grain of sand with enough force to go through any armor you care to imagine. Speedster abilities are not only endlessly creative, they're horrifyingly OP.

I've always really liked DC's in-house choice of referring to their various superhero groupings as "families," but it has gotten a little frustrating recently with people both in canon and in fandom seeming to forget that families aren't just a parental-unit-and-kids formation. They're complicated, and a lot of the DC families are too messy to fit into that neat little nuclear family mode.

Which is to say... here's some scattered thoughts/summaries about how these families are actually structured in canon, because I think it's interesting:

Supers -- The smaller, more traditional Superfamily (Clark, Lois, Kara, Kon, etc.) is a pretty traditional Midwestern nuclear family, with Jimmy Olsen filling the role of close family friend/goofy neighbor sidekick (in the Silver Age, he was Kara's would-be suitor) and Steel feeling more like part of Clark's personal circle of friends. The recent line up, though, with Jon, the twins, Kong and Nat? Starts to feel more like some old dynasty or noble house, complete with fostered foundlings and the Steels acting almost like knights under a noble's banner, possibly reflective of what the House of El would have been on Krypton.

Arrows -- Might currently be the closet to a traditional nuclear family structure. You've got Ollie and Dinah, their younger sisters, Ollie's adopted and biological children, and Ollie's granddaughter through Roy, plus by some counts Roy's co-parent and her sister as "in-laws." Bonnie and Cissie King-Jones are adjacent to but not technically "part" of the family, though I believe it's implied at one point that Ollie might also be Cissie's bio-dad. Pretty straightforward, these guys are actually family and they act like it, for good and ill.

Shazam Family -- Also a literal, actual family. Not originally, the original golden age "Marvel Family" was considerably more complicated and only Billy and Mary were full siblings, but nowadays the whole point of the modern Shazam family is that they're foster siblings united by familial love and that's fantastic. Meanwhile your average Black Adam story is 75% angsty family drama, 25% Egyptian mythology references.

Flashes -- Technically closer to three nuclear families (the Allens, the Wests and the Garricks; four if you include the Quicks), two of whom are united by marriage and all of whom are bound by the Speedforce, which, given its semi-spiritual connections to things like Speedster afterlives, can act almost like a religious force that connects them to the additional members like Avery, Circuit Breaker and Max as Bart's foster-dad. They're a big, sprawling tree with more cousins than siblings, the kind of family that functionally has a reunion every Christmas and Thanksgiving.

Lanterns -- Now these guys are the exception that proves my point about the whole 'family' thing not being straightforward. The lanterns aren't a family, they're a corps. Soldiers. Space cops. Comrades-in-arms. They respect each other, have each other's backs, might even like or care about each other, but those last two are optional, and they don't have the same kind of assumed obligations towards each other that a family would have. They're friends and co-workers, not family, but that doesn't mean their relationships are less significant, they're just different.

Wonders -- Roughly half of them are either one of Hippolyta's daughters (Diana, Donna, Nubia pre-Crisis) or related to them through the gods (Cassie), and the other half (Artemis, Yara, modern-age Nubia) use sister as a term of endearment more in a utopian lesbian commune kind of way. I think they brought Steve Trevor back recently? He's basically the Ken in this equation and perfectly fine with that role. None of which should be surprising if you've seen Professor Marston and the Wonder Women.

Bats -- This is the one that people get really wrong when they try to force it into a traditional family structure. Don't let WFA fool you, the Bats are and have always been way more a snarled mess of tangled interpersonal relationships than they've ever been a cohesive family. Whether Dick is Bruce's son or his brother depends on what era you're talking about, and the former reading is much more recent than you think -- as in "started cropping up in the early 2000s" recent. Barbara is both Cassandra's sister and her mother. Duke and Steph both have living parents and neither of them want or would ever dream of treating Bruce like their dad; Tim was the same way until his dad died. None of the Robins ever lived in the mansion together, nor did Cass. Babs considered Jean-Paul Valley her brother and Huntress is so close to Tim she once hallucinated him calling her Big Sister. They're a beautiful mess of people finding places where their broken edges fit together into something that works for them and trying to reduce it down to a cozy nuclear family is just so goddamn reductive and lazy.

Blue Beetles -- Are only tangentially related to each other. Seriously, they never even get direct mentoring, each one just takes over when the previous one dies and works on completely different rules from the other two. They're complete strangers bound by a legacy and that's honestly pretty fun.

Zataras -- There's only three of them and they're literally a father, daughter and cousin.

Martians -- Not really a family because there's only the two of them, but an interesting case where the two survivors of what was functionally a war of mutually assured destruction came together in an attempt to find some peace in the aftermath of what they'd lost.

Titans -- The JLA and JSA aren't really in the "family" category, but the Titans lean into it hard, mostly because they're a textbook found family. They don't mirror a nuclear family structure, they're simply a group of people who came together to form a mutual support network. They're the idealized college friends you grew into your own with, some of them childhood companions and others you only met once you leave home for the first time, but all of them friends that you manage to maintain contact with for life, with everyone coming back together even as you scatter and do your own things.

Young Justice -- Meanwhile, this team is the chaotic group of misfits you hung out with when you were a teenager, especially when you were just starting to be allowed to act without adult supervision. You drive each other crazy, none of you know you're all queer as fuck, and you'd fight a bear for any of them even if they asked you not to. They'd probably be insulted if you tried to call them a family. They come out here to get away from their families, thank you very much.

One headcanon that I have is that Speedsters are really staticky, like they go to turn on the light and they get shocked by the switch or you bump into them and get shocked or maybe your hair stands on end around them

the chosen speedster

If you could live in one DC city, which one would you choose? Star City? Central City? Metropolis? Gotham? Or a different one?

All of them have their pros and cons

Star City

- Pros: the Arrowfam

- Cons: Ollie's chili

Central City/Keystone

- Pros: more mentally stable Rogues gallery

- Cons: the Midwest

Metropolis

- Pros: not Gotham

- Cons: gotta buy a new car every week the way they get thrown through your office

Smallville

- Pros: Kon

- Cons: corn

Gotham

- Pros: grunge vibes

- Cons: Gotham

Bonus

Impulse shaves his head. His friends don´t approve (except Arrowette becasue she is an enabler).

Thank you @fandomriderx-1 for the inspo. As soon as I saw this comment i had a vision and just had to make a rushed extended version.

(This is what I´m referencing btw)

https://www.tumblr.com/ddejay18/745207135889211392/i-get-an-image-in-my-head-and-draw-it-then-i-get?source=share

It gets ransacked every week

This was them b4 they got their wives