Heroes In Crisis was an incredible book. It told an extremely important story, delivering a critical message to an audience probably not used to hearing it. It also kind of breaks the superhero formula.

The biggest split between DC and Marvel characters has always been what the characters are best at doing. Marvel has the street level folks, the people with regular problems who also have to deal with being superheroes. DC heroes have always been the icons, the Olympian gods shining a light and showing us what we can be if we strive hard enough.

The point where they converge, though, is on legacy characters. Laura Kinney, Miles Morales, or Bucky all face their regular person problems in the Marvel Universe, but they also face problems fitting into or adjusting the iconography and archetype they’re filling as Wolverine or Spider-Man or Captain America. The inverse is true for DC’s legacy heroes: Wally West can have regular person problems – self-doubt, family drama, being broke – while also fulfilling the epic archetype that the Flash is supposed to.

In fact, Wally West is probably the exemplar of the legacy character archetype. While nearly everyone in the Justice Society of America had some kind of descendant (in name, power set, family tie, or motif) in the Silver Age, almost all of those second generation characters were the definitive ones for the superhero universes built around them – as great as he is, nobody’s first thought when you say “The Atom” is Al Pratt. Wally West was introduced in 1960 by Carmine Infantino and John Broome to be a sidekick to DC’s ultimate legacy character, Barry Allen’s Flash. His primary role was to run around the DCU as part of team Flash, either with Barry or with his sidekick cohorts as a founding member of the Teen Titans. In 1986, after spending the previous couple of years with the speed force threatening to blow his heart out from exertion, he returned to full hero status for Crisis on Infinite Earths, and following Barry’s death, he took on the mantle of the Flash full time. He stayed the primary Flash until Barry was brought back to life in 2009.