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Monkeys Fighting Robots chatted with writer Joshua Williamson at MegaCon 2019, where he talked about his current Flash: Year One story, and what to expect from his upcoming Batman/Superman.

“Oh man, well, for me we’ve been building this big story with Barry since issue one, and we’re trying to tell this big narrative and sort of my view on who Barry is. Right now, in the story of The Flash, he is kind of at his worst. It’s like all the stuff that happened with Wally, all that stuff with Kid Flash, Iris is gone … he’s kind of alone.

During the Trickster storyline, he was confronted with the idea that he was questioning being happy. It made him reflect on himself, like, ‘what’s going on with me that i think being happy is weird?’ It made him confront how pessimistic he’d become, which is not who Barry Allen is, right? Barry Allen is an optimistic, hopeful person. He’d become so pessimistic.

At the end of the Trickster storyline, Trickster won. Like, The Rogues all escaped. Iron Heights was destroyed, The Rogues escaped, Trickster got away. And now you look at Barry and he’s like, ‘all The Rogues are free, Hunter is out there, I’ve got all these forces, all these things are happening,’ it’s just weighing down on him and he feels very pessimistic, he feels very overwhelmed by all this stuff. And then he meets Steadfast in issue 69 who’s like, ‘you need to remember something, you forgot something really important.’ And that’s what makes him relive that memory.

I wanted to put Barry at his most pessimistic before we do a story about… You know, he was an optimistic, hopeful kid. After his mom died he became this pessimistic person. What Geoff Johns said best was that after [Barry’s] mom died, he was always standing still, and then the lightning hits him and he becomes The Flash. But I wanted to show a story about how it wasn’t that easy. The powers don’t make him optimistic. The powers don’t make him hopeful. I wanted to show how he goes from this pessimistic person who then has the powers who then becomes the hopeful, optimistic person again. And so that’s what I was able to do with this story. I wanted to show that story again. And it’s perfect timing for this book because yeah, Barry’s pessimistic, but then for the next thing that’s coming – the thing after “Year One” – he needs to be optimistic and hopeful again. Even though there’s a lot of intense stuff coming at him, I want him to be that person again so he can tackle those problems.”