Do you want to just hang out with superheroes, or be one yourself? That question, and Stan Lee’s incredible response, changed comics forever. In the early 1960s, when the man synonymous with Marvel co-created The Amazing Spider-Man, The Avengers, and The Uncanny X-Men, he also introduced us to nerdy teen Peter Parker, frail doctor Don Blake, and societal outcasts Scott Summers and Jean Grey.
At the time, Lee challenged the formula of gigantic rival publisher DC, which presented heroes like the Flash and Green Lantern as upstanding (and incredibly dull) role models, who had great day jobs and no personal problems. And for grade-school kids, this was plenty. They were a readership in need of science facts and guidance, not psychological complexity.
But Lee craved a deeper connection with teen and adult readers, and won it by presenting flawed heroes whom we could relate to. This is a round-about way of saying that Marvel is (and always has been) the younger, more daring company. DC is usually playing catch-up.
In 1995, the year I transitioned to high school, I read two large families of comics: Spider-Man and the X-Men (oh, and lots of gory, brainless Image titles). I’d flip through DC comics, but never land on ideas or art that thrilled me. Even when someone bought me Superman 75 (in which he dies), I quoted Bart Simpson with a grand, “Meh.”
Then, somewhere, somehow, Impulse fell into my greasy, grasping little hands. Written by Mark Waid, drawn by Humberto Ramos, this was a comic about a kid in junior high named Bart Allen. His older cousin happened to be Wally West, the Flash–a fact that merely doffs its winged-cap to the DC formula. Bart himself, from a thousand years in the future and likewise blessed with super speed, ran a joyful Marvel groove around grim siblings Action Comics and Legends of the Dark Knight.
That’s because Mark Waid is one of the smartest people to ever write comics. No matter how many storm clouds he rolls into a story (Kingdom Come, Fantastic Four), he believes superheroes to be creatures of light (his current run on Daredevil is pure bliss). There’s no trend he won’t buck in favor of classically fun tales, and clearly knew the savvy of this going into Impulse.
Ramos, whose crisp, kinetic pencils have helped make The Amazing Spider-Man brilliant these last few years, caught my attention for one reason: big eyes. In 1995 two-hundred people, in all of the United States, were familiar with manga. Despite having seen Akira, I wasn’t one of them. All I knew was that exaggerated facial expressions and bug-eyes were strange and therefore fun.
But Impulse wouldn’t still be taking up precious long-box space if it wasn’t a great read. We follow Bart into suburban Alabama as he learns the rules of not only the 20th Century, but the real world. In the future, he was raised in a “virtual” reality (and if you remember that one Aerosmith video, VR was gonna be BITCHIN’). His genetically endowed super speed, however, had caused him to super age. He came to the past to learn to master his gift and ground himself in reality.
Bart’s guardian is the zen speedster Max Mercury; he helps the impetuous boy who can’t tell driving a car from a video game to stay on the right side of the road. The first three issues see him introduced to junior high, and uniquely positioned to foil a not-quite-kosher missile test. The best moments come from the former situation, because Bart doesn’t know what to do with a book or a pencil (and once he does learn, using super speed to write proves problematic).
Ramos and inker Wayne Faucher deliver remarkably clean lines, no matter what zigs or zags. They excel during the crowded scenes at school, drawing kids with individual faces and clothes way more often than not; stand outs include the cinephile Preston and admirer Carol. The two issues featuring White Lightning, a reckless girl obsessed with attention, are wonderful and prescient. She uses the then-fledgling internet to gather her groupies in one place, collecting the hunkiest among them for her gang. Some of the in-crowd begs Bart to join them, complimenting his hipster aura. One boy even calls him “really good-looking.” To shocked homies, he replies, “That’s what my girlfriend says!”
Yet the best issue in this first batch number six. It begins in the Principle’s office, where Preston blames his bruised face (which we’ve seen in earlier crowd shots) on falling. Bart later joins Preston (and his camera) in the swamp where bizarre lights have been spotted. Regarding his prospects as a director, he says, “I’m gonna be Spielberg and Cameron in one… Gotta have a dream, man. Something you want so bad you can taste it.” Bart’s big dream, as we’re shown in one of his many pictorial thought balloons, is to slam pie into Max Mercury’s face.
Their hunt for a swamp monster, at any rate, ends up revealing a grotesque youth with gland problems. We also learn that Preston’s dad is a drunk–and that domestic abuse can sometimes be more complex than it appears. Dad and Impulse walk in on Preston’s mom hitting him, a scene made more harrowing when our hero–faced with something a bit too real–loses his nerve and bolts.
In the end, Bart retrieves his friend’s camera from the swamp. He’s also started growing into the enormous feet and soulful eyes Ramos gave him. By the time he joins Geoff Johns’ Teen Titans years later, he’s a hero–formulas be damned–that we’re proud of.
