Thanks to everyone who participated in our Favorite Flash Memory contest celebrating four years of Speed Force! 45 of you shared your stories of the Flash and Flash fandom, and 142 of you voted for the top four.

And now, the results are in!*

#1 with 36 votes: Wally East

My favorite memory of The Flash is him helping me through the end of a particularly bad training run. The run was just one of those sucky runs happens now and then. Toward the end, I started remembering how in a story I had just read (I can’t remember what story at the moment) had pushed harder and harder even though he wanted to stop. He didn’t let the pain stop him. He hit the wall and kept running hard. I thought about how Wally is just a regular guy with superspeed. If he could hang in, so could I since I’m a regular guy, too, just with regular-guy speed :-)

Wally East wins our grand prize: a 1st Appearance Jay Garrick action figure, a Flash: Rebirth #4 variant cover signed by Geoff Johns, and a Flash: Rebirth poster! Congratulations, Wally!

Read on for the rest of the winners!

Read More

Thanks for sharing your favorite Flash memories over the last few days! You’ve posted some really inspiring stories. Now it’s time to vote for the top four stories shared by your fellow fans.

» Vote for the best Flash memories. Please choose up to 4. [Edit: fixed link]

Voting is open until Friday at noon Pacific Time.

Once the results are in, the fans with the top four stories will get prizes from our personal collections including Flash variant covers (one of them signed by none other than Geoff Johns) and Flash collectibles!

Original Article

Our celebration of Speed Force’s fourth anniversary (last Friday) continues with a look back the Top 4s of the last four years.

Don’t forget to share your favorite Flash memory for our contest! Only a few hours left!

Top 4 Most-Commented Articles

4. Young Justice: Bloodlines (June 2012, 61 responses). The recent episode featuring four generations of Flashes. People started out commenting on the big reveal of Impulse, then moved into discussing the episode when it aired. The response to this post, and the images posted on Facebook, Tumblr, and yes, even Google+, convinced me of two things: 1. People like photos more than text. 2. Young Justice has more fans than the Flash comic book. Which isn’t surprising, since Young Justice probably has more viewers than the most popular comic book has readers.

(I wasn’t sure how to count posts with the new comment system, since it includes Likes and Retweets along with local comments, Facebook comments and Twitter replies. Filtering out the Likes and retweets knocks it down to 50, just behind Wally West’s New Costume at 51.)

3. Jay Garrick Redesign Revealed (April 2012, 64 comments). The Earth 2 redesign has been…polarizing? This was a simple repost of the cover from Earth 2 #2 when DC released it alongside a James Robinson interview.

2. Why I Don’t Like Barry Allen Generating the Speed Force (April 2011, 73 comments). An opinion piece about a retcon to the way the speed force works. Judging by the heated responses from some people, I’m not sure everyone read past the first six words in the title.

1. Geoff Johns Leaving the Flash (May 2011, 74 comments). This was a simple newspost following DC’s announcement that their superstar writer would be leaving the series after Flashpoint. Not surprisingly, Flash readers had strong opinions about this.

Top 4 Most-Viewed Posts

Just measuring by page views, the top four are all image-based.

4. Netflix Becomes…The Quickster! (September 2011). An example of the importance of timing. Remember last fall when Netflix, battered by the PR disaster of their rate change, announced that they were going to split the DVD and streaming parts of their business, and rename the DVD business “Qwikster?” That morning I remembered a Spongebob Squarepants character, grabbed a picture off a wiki, threw it online, and went off to work, figuring a few people would have a laugh at it and that would be that. Well, it turned out that no one could spell Qwikster (I even got it wrong while writing this up), and since I’d used the more logical spelling, it turned up in a lot of search results for the netflix/quickster combination until Netflix scrapped the plan, after which it dropped off the radar.

3. Wally West Costume Comparison (November 2009). A few days after Wally West’s Flash: Rebirth costume debuted (see below), I put together a set of side-by-side comparisons showing where the various elements for the new costume came from. The images have continued to be popular with search visits.

2. Wally West’s New Costume (November 2009). The day Flash: Rebirth #5 came out, I snapped a photo of the double-page spread with my phone, making this site one of the first to reveal Wally West’s new Ethan Van Sciver-designed costume online. Within a few hours, a reader had sent me a better image, and that evening, I scanned the page for an even better image. The day it was posted remains the single busiest day ever at Speed Force when measured by sheer traffic, though the post has slowly faded in visibility over time.

1. Flash: Reverse (January 2009). A deceptively simple idea: Papa Zero took the cover to Flash: Rebirth #1, flipped it horizontally, and swapped the red and yellow, then placed the two images together to show he Flash and Professor Zoom facing off against each other. It didn’t attract a whole lot of attention at first, but it’s become an ongoing favorite among image searches. Lately it’s been averaging about 30 hits/day!

Top 4 Most Prolific Commenters

Excluding those of us who write for the site on a regular basis, the most frequent commenters are:

4. West
3. Ken O of That F’ing Monkey
2. papa zero
1. Kyer

Top 4 Social Network Favorites

4. Flash Costumes at Comic-Con International 2010 (August 2010). This photo gallery of people in Flash and Flash-related costumes turns out to be the site’s second-most-viewed page on StumbleUpon. It’s a mix of photos I found on Flickr and photos I took at the convention myself.

3. San Diego Steampunk Flash (August 2011). This post combining photos of a steampunk-inspired Flash costume with writeups by the team that designed and built it went on to become the second-most-popular Speed Force post on Reddit (measured by people who actually clicked through, anyway). Eventually I ran into the guy wearing the costume at the next year’s WonderCon.

2. Green Lantern vs. the Flash Tip Jars found at a local coffee shop. They’ve since done Supergirl vs. Batgirl and Hulk vs. Captain America. This one was a big hit with Reddit, though it’s actually the second-highest rated. The Young Justice pages where Bart’s (favorite) comic was canceled has more votes, but more people actually clicked through on this one.

And finally…

1. Street of the Green Lantern (December 2009) Speed Force’s most popular post on StumbleUpon features photos of real street signs in Dana Point, California, a city that really has a Green Lantern street…and a Blue Lantern street…and more!

And that’s it! I hope you enjoyed this look back at the more popular posts over the past year. Please remember to share your favorite Flash memory for our contest. Submissions close at 9PM ET today!

Original Article

In celebration of the site’s four-year anniversary, Speed Force is inviting you to share your favorite Flash memory. Submissions are open until Tuesday evening at 9pm EDT. After submissions close, you’ll get to vote on your favorite stories, and the four winners will get Flash prizes — including some cool variant editions! (Did I mention there’s a signed book in there?)

So head over to the Flash memory contest page and submit your favorite Flash memory!

Original Article

As Speed Force marks its fourth birthday, we decided to take a look back at where each of the Fastest Men Alive were in the fourth year of their titles.  Happy Speed Fourth!

Flash fans know a lot can change in four years, but Speed Force is still the place for Flash news, commentary and analysis.  But what of the heroes throughout the history of Flash comics?  Where were Jay Garrick, Barry Allen and Wally West exactly four years after their first solo titles launched?  After the jump, we’ll take a look at comics out on and around their fourth anniversaries, and the stories and creators involved.

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Hey there, Flash fans, and welcome to Speed Force’s fourth anniversary celebration! We four regular contributors will be writing about some of our favorite Flash memories, and thought it might be nice to get you folks involved as well. What better way to do that than with a contest?

Here’s how it’ll go: simply share your favorite Flash-related memory, or an early memory that you think is pretty special (for whatever reason — it could be entirely personal) in the comments section of this post. We’ll collect the stories and set them up as a poll to be voted on by readers, and the top-rated four will win!

There will be four winners, and the contest will run until 9 pm ET on Tuesday, June 19. Prizes will include Flash variant issues. There aren’t any rules or restrictions, although please share just one story to make things fair for everyone. So dig deep into your memories, and have fun!

Update: Vote for the top 4 here!

Original Article

Can you believe it’s been four years since the first post at Speed Force?

Amazing, isn’t it?

Back when it started, it was just me, running WordPress on a shared webserver at work. It’s since grown to four regular writers, the occasional guest writer, a bunch of regular commenters and lots of readers.

This was a time when the iPad didn’t exist, the iPhone had only been around two years, and Android had yet to release a single phone. Digital comics were something that the print publishers still looked at as maybe a threat, or maybe a fad, but certainly not something viable, even though webcomics had been around for over a decade. Wally West was still the main Flash and Barry Allen’s return had only been hinted at on panel. The previous Comic-Con International had still sold tickets at the door, and the next Comic-Con wouldn’t sell out until about a week before the event. No one had ever complained that Twilight “ruined” Comic-Con, because the movie hadn’t come out yet. No one had heard of a Black Lantern.

For comparison, here are the covers of the most recent Flash issues at the time the site launched vs. today.

Hmm, two relaunches (three if you count Flash vol.3 separate from Flash: Rebirth) later, and they’re still monkeying around…

I launched Speed Force on June 15, 2008, because I wanted to write about the Morrison/Millar Flash run being collected. A few days later I lucked into my first “scoop:” images of the Flash in Mortal Kombat vs. DCU. That and the reputation of Flash: Those Who Ride the Lightning helped the blog hit the ground running (so to speak), and it’s been a mad dash ever since.

Over the next four days, each of us at Speed Force — me, Devin, Greg and Lia — will be writing something special for the event. We’ll have a contest, too, so be sure to check in over the weekend!

Thanks to all of you for coming along on this ride!

Original Article