I’ve just finished reading The Flash: Emergency Stop trade paperback from a few years ago which details Grant Morrison’s (and Mark Millar’s) first stories as writers of The Flash. There’s a lot of nice moments in there (not least of which is Jay Garrick accidentally losing the pen which contains Johnny Thunder’s Thunderbolt who would later show up in Morrison’s JLA – a lovely bit of foreshadowing, subtly done) but one thing that caught my eye was the following scene. Wally and Jay are having lunch in a very Planet Krypton-style restaurant with a heavily disguised Nightwing and Jay waxes lyrical about how times change:

This conversation comes from The Flash #134 from 1997 which ties in with Wally’s assertion that “the Dark Age only just ended in ’95”

If Wally (via Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs in The Comic Book Heroes: The First History of Modern Comic Books) is correct in the 20 year cycle of heroic ages, then we’re just coming out of the age that Wally mentions as having just started from his point of view which means the recent DC Rebirth is pretty much on time . . . and I can’t help thinking how apposite Jay’s words are even now when he says “We’ve been through the darkness. Now let’s see a little light.”

Of course, with everything that’s happened in comics in the last 20 years, you also have to wonder whether the Dark Age really did end in 1995.