Brian Truitt

USA TODAY

Before The CW's The Flash races on to TV screens, a new digital comic-book series will get everybody up to speed quick.

DC Comics' biweekly The Flash: Season Zero debuts Monday and introduces the Barry Allen that Grant Gustin plays on the show (which premieres Oct. 7). The story of the first Zero arc is by executive producer Andrew Kreisberg and scripted by Brooke Eikmeier and Katherine Walczak — the first print collection arrives in comic shops Oct. 1.

Kreisberg, who's also an executive producer on The Flash's sister show Arrow, is an old-school fan of DC's Scarlet Speedster from way back, he says. "And to take our interpretation of the Flash back to the comics, we're so proud and excited."

The first digital chapter of Season Zero previews some of what viewers will see next month, from characters such as Iris West (Candice Patton) and Eddie Thawne (Rick Cosnett) to the origins of Barry's new powers following a STAR Labs particle-accelerator explosion.

Like Arrow: Season 2.5 (which alternates Mondays with Season Zero), the Flash digital comic is meant to be a reward for those who watch the show, so Kreisberg will be sprinkling hints here and there about things that will be coming — a crossover that is similar to the one that the Arrow and Flash shows will have since they are set in the same universe.

While Stephen Amell's masked archer Oliver Queen is a stoic, tough guy who's seen it all on Arrow, Barry is just in his earliest days as Central City's guardian angel and is amazed, excited, scared and thrilled by everything around him, even when he moves from saving kittens in a tree to dealing with a super-duper circus villain robbing a bank.

"When he sees this strongman standing 8 foot tall in front of him like the Hulk, he gets to have that 'Holy cow, that's the craziest thing I've ever seen' moment," Kreisberg says.

"Grant Gustin is really light and nimble and adorable. All of that comes through on screen, and he does have a much more comic-book aspect to him."

Walczak, who co-wrote an upcoming TV episode of The Flash with Kreisberg, connects with Barry's sense of awe.

"He is surprised by things," she says. "He feels very human to me and accessible and relatable in a way that, working on Arrow, Oliver isn't."

Working on Arrow has helped Kreisberg and Co. with the overall storytelling of a superhero show — he admits that there's a lot of Eli Stone, the quirky law drama that Kreisberg worked on with executive producer Greg Berlanti, in The Flash.

However, while Arrow features mostly practical effects in its stunt work, The Flash boasts a character who can run so fast he becomes a red blur and other superhuman aspects, which calls for much more storyboarding, animation and previsualization.

"We always say one-fifth of the show is a cartoon, requiring a whole different level of production that we weren't totally familiar with," Kreisberg explains. "There has been a lot of trial and error in just figuring out how we're going to pull this off every week."

The digital comic allows them to go even farther with its visuals, especially in terms of exploring outlandish villains they could never pull off on TV — for example, having an entire zoo of animals running down the streets of Central City.

The aforementioned strongman and a crew of circus folk have been turned into "metahumans" by the same dark matter wave that also gave Barry his new abilities. That's just one similarity that he has with this bunch of baddies, though, according to Walczak.

"We liked the idea of paralleling Barry also feeling like an outsider from his normal life," she says. "Circus freaks feel that way all the time so it was an emotional story as well."

For Kreisberg, the Flash's Rogues Gallery is just about as great a group of foes as the antagonists of Batman or Spider-Man, so a lot of the ne'er-do-wells in the Flash show and digital series are coming directly from comic-book lore.

The circus group comes from Starman comics, and the TV show has already announced upcoming Rogues such as Girder (played by Greg Finley), Captain Cold (Wentworth Miller) and Heat Wave (Dominic Purcell).

"The few times especially on Arrow where we've tried to create our own villains, it hasn't always worked out the best for us," Kreisberg says with a laugh.

"Even if they're the worst, silliest, most mundane villain, if they have some tie to the comic book in some way (and) all we took was the name and we completely reimagined them for our purposes, it gives us ground beneath our feet to build up."