Right before Zero Hour, while the Legion is still in the 5YL era, a new hero is introduced in the 20th century comics that won’t interact with them until the Reboot.
Flash vol2 #92 (1994)
by Mark Waid & Mike Wieringo
It’s incredibly weird that Impulse technically predates the Reboot, isn’t it?
While Wally West is dealing with a subplot about his journalist girlfriend (and future wife) Linda Park…
…he gets distracted by an unknown speedster running by.
Unable to identify it, he gets back home to find someone who hasn’t been in the Flash series for quite some time: Iris, the wife of the late Barry Allen.
The general public thought she died before Crisis, while instead she has been living in the future the whole time.
Iris “died” all the way back in the historic Cary Bates run. While it’s a truly exceptional run (easily the best thing Bates has ever written in my opinion), it did include some truly bonkers stuff.
After Barry died in Crisis, Iris gave birth to their children… who we have seen before in the Legion retrospective: the Tornado Twins.
Iris has been working as a journalist in the 30th century too: we saw her byline in the 5YL era.
We will meet Barry Allen’s granddaughter in the Reboot, because she’s a big part of that.
But for now we focus on his grandson, Bart.
Given the Zero Hour shenanigans, the relationship between these scenes and the Legion is tricky.
This is before the Reboot, so technically speaking Bart was experimented on by the Dominators during their time as Earth’s secret masters… which means Bart should have been born around 2990.
But his cousin, who unlike him aged normally and is supposed to have been born roughly at the same time, will be a teenager in the 2990s during the Reboot.
It also means that the two cousins are technically born in different Legion continuities!
To complicate things, it’s evn weirder than that: the text page of LSH v4 #17 does mention that one of the two Tornado Twins is survived by a son… but also names him Barry II instead of Bart, and his cousin is never born.
Which means that Bart could only be born SPECIFICALLY in the 5YL continuity only AFTER time began to unravel, OR he could have been born in the Reboot continuity BEFORE that existed.
Ultimately it doesn’t matter, since Zero Hour will make this retroactively take place in the Reboot, but still. Food for thought.
You just know that if this was written today, Geoff Johns would introduce some insanely convoluted explanation of how they’re from separate universes.
With the twins dead, Iris decided to take Bart into the past to help him deal with his powers. Which are actively killing him.
Bart is technically two or three years old at this point, but he’s been living his whole life inside virtual reality. So this is the premise of Impulse: he’s a hyperactive kid raised by a virtual world.
This felt like a sci-fi exxageration in 1994, but by 2025 standard this is normal.
Since Linda doesn’t really play a big part in the story, I should take this moment to say that she’s one of the best written civilian love interests in the entirety of superhero comics.
After scouting the planet in a few seconds, Flash eventually does find Bart…
…who is now trying to kill him. And who is surprisingly buff.
Flash vol2 #93 (1994)
by Mark Waid & Mike Wieringo
See, even the cover is already calling him Impulse.
Flash snaps him out of this by doing what basically every other DC superhero wanted to do with Impulse from 1994 until roughly 2003.
I’m surprised to see he speaks English instead of Interlac, but I suppose Iris wanted him to learn the language.
I was already surprised to see Impulse so buff, but it’s especially weird considering he was physically TWELVE in the previous panels.
Wally knows a thing or two about going too fast for too long.
I’m not entirely sure what Wally does to fix Impulse’s power incontinence.
I can’t even blame the Speed Force because Wally won’t discover that until 6 issues later.
Linda has her own subplot in the middle of all this.
Don’t be worried. I told you she’s awesome.
Flash and Impulse drop by to help, and I still don’t get what Wally did.
Historical significance: 8/10
Legion significance: 3/10
Impulse will prove to be a very important part of the Flash family, at least until DC starts its never-ending battle to screw every single speedster who isn’t Barry.
He’s not really THAT important for the Legion, unlike his cousin, but they will interact.
Silver Age-ness: 2/10
We would’ve been given a much more convoluted explanation for what Wally did.
Does it stand the test of time? 8/10
I hold the Waid run in very, VERY high regard, although honestly this isn’t my favorite Wiering series. These two issues are not among the best, but they’re right before Waid’s historical juggernaut “Terminal Velocity” saga that will establish the Speed Force as a fundamental aspect of the Flash mythos. Without driving that concept into the ground like later writers.
How close is this to the modern character? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I stopped following Flash since DC doubled down on Barry Allen, so I’m not confident enough to make the call. All I know is that Bart will forever remain Impulse for me.
A name he comes up with Flash #95.
Impulse proved popular enough to star in his own series, which lasted 89 issues from 1995 to 2002.
That’s where he gets his trademark hair.
I only read the Waid run, which was rather unusual for a superhero series: at times it felt more of a slice-of-life comic than what you’d expect.
Waid really focused on how different Bart’s mind can be, as well as how of place he can feel in the 20th century.
I don’t know if he’s ever commented on it, but the fact that Mark Waid grew up in Alabama makes me wonder if this series is at least a bit autobiographical when he transfers Impulse in a small town in Alabama to complain that life is too slow.
If you’re wondering: he takes his hair from his mother.
(that’s not Barry’ s daughter: Bart’s father is Barry’s son)
The real foundation was his relationship with Max Mercury, who takes double duty as superhero mentor and father figure.
It wasn’t an easy relationship, thanks to Bart’s… uhm… everything?
True to his name, Bart tends to solve most of his problems through sheer instinct and talent without thinking much.
Which doesn’t mean he’s dumb, but… well okay he IS pretty dumb, but not AS dumb as he may come across.
His problem is that he acts waaaaay before he thinks.
Doesn’t make it easy for other heroes to work with him.
With the partial exception of the superhero team: Young Justice.
It’s not always easy for them either. Especially poor Robin.
He kind of comes up with the team’s name too.
In my opinion, the late Peter David is the only writer besides Mark Waid who ever GOT Impulse.
Not only he could be hilarious…
…but he had his serious moments.
Or sometimes both at once.
Impulse stayed in the Young Justice book even after his own series ended.
After the end of the Young Justice series, with the skyrocketing popularity of the Teen Titans cartoon DC decided to launch a new series by that title.
Which makes sense in many ways, since in terms of vibes the cartoon had more in common with Young Justice than with the Titans.
You would have expected Impulse to play the same role in the comic that Beast Boy played in the cartoon.
After all, Impulse had several things that made him unique from most other teen superheroes: for lack of a better term, he had developed his own identity.
Enter Geoff Johns, a writer who never misses an opportunity to ruin a character’s history and development in order to pander to nostalgia. Who turned Impulse into the next Kid Flash.
Stuff like this is what drove me away from most DC series after 2003.
Making characters grow is one thing. This is one of the worst examples of COMPLETELY missing the point of a character and turning him into somebody else, because this is not Impulse: this is just a slightly less mature Wally West.
And I love Wally, but… this was dumb.
As if that wasn’t enough, in 2006 he becomes the new Flash after every other speedster loses his powers or dies. Complete with aging him up.
I’m 100% behind sidekicks growing up to replace the hero… I’ve completely lost interest in the Flash franchise once they brought back Barry and started crapping on Wally… but it has to be earned, and Bart doesn’t fit this journey AT ALL.
Unless you completely re-write him as a different person AGAIN, which is exactly what happened.
His entire series was also completely meaningless because it ended with Bart being killed by editorial mandate.
He stays dead until 2009, when Geoff Johns doesn’t miss an opportunity to ruin a character’s history and development in order to pander to nostalgia, and brings him back as Kid Flash.
Just because I didn’t like his development into the New Flash doesn’t excuse this idiocy.
We will definitely see both Impulse and Kid Flash later in the Legion retrospective.
Apparently at some point he died AGAIN and was resurrected as both a Black Lantern (because death is an emotion now) and a White Lantern? This is combining my intense dislike of both modern Flash and Green Lantern, so I couldn’t bother with this.
In 2020 he’s returned to being a hyperactive teenager with his Impulse identity, in a new Young Justice series that sounds like it could be trying to recapture the spirit of the original…
…but it’s a Bendis series, so I couldn’t get past the first issue where he’s just annoying.
It’s a pity that DC doesn’t really seem to know what it wants to do with Impulse.
He’s simultaneously a character that could only have been created in the 90s AND he feels timeless… you don’t HAVE to turn him into a different character to keep him interesting!!!
I’ve always assumed that “Bart” was just a nickname for “Barry” (II).
Peter David, with his unique sense of humor was the perfect writer for Bart. I think my favorite uses of him was during the “Sins of Youth” crossover when Bart, at super-speed, learns to draw and starts illustrating Robin’s verbal recap of the storyline behind his back, and I think it was in the following issue when he, at super-speed, learns to lip-read and reports to the rest of YJ his interpretations of the conversation they’re not meant to hear with hilarious effect.
And, regarding the “Blackest Night” thing – death is not an emotion, it’s the ABSENCE of emotion, the way black is the absence of light. And life is all emotions, as white light is the presence of all colors in light. And he didn’t die again, Nekron had a hold over anyone who had died and had come back to life.
“Raised in VR and thinks the real world is another playground” reminds me of Charles Stross’s novel Singularity Sky. He observes that such beings (uploaded intelligences, in the novel) are incredibly dangerous. They’ve been raised in a world where it doesn’t matter if you break something, it can be restored from backup…
Is that aspect of Impulse explored at all? “He acts waaaaay before he thinks” could be a symptom of that – if you screw up, just go back to your last save point and try again.
They kind of address it; it’s more framed about the fact that Bart initially has a hard time understanding his actions will have consequences to others.
For example, there’s an issue where Max Mercury tells him to deal with some criminals after he’s secured something else (I think it was preventing an explosion? It’s been a while), but Bart specifically goes after the criminals first because “it’s worth more points if you beat up the bad guys”.
He gets over it, but it takes him a while.
Max Mercury calls it “The Single Synapse Theory”. With Bart, thought = action. There’s no pausing to consider the thought.
A Young Justice villain tried using the Ghostbusters move on them. “Whatever thought comes into your head will destroy you!” Robin Tim Drake can go all zen and blank his mind. Superboy Conner Kent isn’t nearly that well disciplined mentally, but of course it was monsters from Bart’s mind that attacked the team. Until it occurred to Bart to yell out, “Reset!” The monsters respawned, but they couldn’t attack as fast as Bart could shout “Reset!” With Bart continuously resetting the monsters, his teammates made short work of the villain.
One of my favourite Impulse lines was from a team-up issue between he and Batman vs. the Joker. Because of a hostage situation, Joker has Impulse fetch things for him – many being kind of ridiculous, but there’s a panel where Impulse has brought back food from Big Belly Burger. Joker says, “They call this a Happy Meal?” and Impulse mutters, “… I don’t even know why they call it fast food.”
Bart is one of the most delightful characters in the DC Universe, when he’s written properly. His solo book had a lot of charm. I loved how the Blue Valley High students thought Impulse was just another boring superhero, but cheered Bart as the coolest guy ever.
Bart is essentially a reboot-era character, but debuting an era earlier is very much on brand for him. Bart lives in defiance of continuity, often remembering timelines that others have forgotten. He doesn’t pay the best attention to the continuity that he’s in, but when he notices details, they tend to matter. He has continuity inertia. Sweeping changes to the timeline sweep around him.
Changing him from Impulse to Kid Flash was a mistake. Changing him from Kid Flash to Flash and then killing him appears to have been a long-term plan. The issue where Bart dies came out the same day as the issue of the Lightning Saga where the Legion makes off with a mysterious bottle of lightning. Maybe it was an overly convoluted plan, but it brought Bart back to being Impulse.
Then there’s New 52 Impulse. We don’t talk about New 52 Impulse.