Hello and welcome to Comic Drake where I talk about comic books and my name is Drake.
The Flash is the fastest man alive, there’s no doubt about that.
However, in my recent videos on if he’s faster than Superman and Shazam/Captain Marvel,
whatever you want to call him, a lot of you guys were very eager to point out that one
of the Flashes, namingly Wally West, can actually run faster than instant teleportation.
Yes, I am aware of this feat, but for the people who want to say that this is Wally
West’s ultimate demonstration of speed, they might want to actually read the book
or sit back and relax because we’re going to look over this storyline and put an end
to this debate once and for all
When people talk about The Flash running faster than instant teleportation, they’re typically
talking about a storyline from 1998 called The Human Race which has been featured in
several vs. debates across the internet and was given a lot of attention thanks to this
video done by my good friend, Tyler, over on the Imaginary Axis.
The Human Race was featured in The Flash Vol 2 #136 through #138 in 1998 and was co-written
by two industry legends, Grant Morrison and Mark Millar.
The fact that Morrison had his hand in this means that things are going to get pretty
weird so buckle in.
Okay, so the story begins with a couple of extra dimensional gamblers coming to Earth
forcing the planet to choose a champion to take place in a great race of sorts.
If the champion loses, forfeits, or decides not to participate, the planet would be instantly
be destroyed.
Naturally, the current Flash of the era, Wally West, was chosen as their candidate.
This actually appears to be a reference to the Golden Age characters Rokk and Sorban,
a pair of alien gamblers who have messed with Superman in the past and actually roped him
into racing Barry Allen with threats of destroying Earth and Krypton.
Just a neat little side bit of trivia, but back to the story.
The Flash is transported to the radio world of Kwyzz which exists separate from the various
universes in the local DC multiverse.
Its inhabitants are a race of beings made out of radio signals.
The most notable of which being Krakkl, a Sonic the Hedgehog looking dude that was Wally’s
imaginary friend back when he was a kid.
Turns out though that he’s actually real.
Because comics.
Krakkl is racing on behalf of Kwyzz which like Earth was also being threatened by the
cosmic gamblers.
In fact, Krakkl had beaten SIX champions before Wally!
With the fate of both worlds on the line, Wally and Krakkl race throughout all of space
and time, but during a short rest, Krakkl reveals that he has only survived this long
by cheating.
Krakkl had the inhabitants of Kwyzz running non-stop and he uses the kinetic energy built
up from that to allow him to keep running on and on.
He’s basically having them LITERALLY run for their lives.
This gives Wally an idea though.
He challenges the cosmic gamblers (who are unable to turn down) a bet that he could make
it to Earth before they could.
The deck was heavily stacked against Wally since the gamblers move instantaneously meaning
that he would literally need to be faster than that!
Regardless, the bet was struck and Wally manages to convince all of Earth to run in unison.
Every man, woman, and child from average citizens to imprisoned supervillains all joined together
for the sake of their word.
This INCLUDES the kinetic energy generated by speedsters and the near speedster levels
from beings like Superman.
If that wasn’t enough though, Krakkl gives Wally all of his speed IN ADDITION which INCLUDES
all of the kinetic energy of everyone on Kwyzz running in unison as well.
With all of this speed at his disposal, Wally managed to calculate the race down to the
septo-second and he made it back to Earth in time, but he still had a little bit more
to spare so in this spare time, he adjusts EVERY SINGLE RADIO ON EARTH to the frequency
of Kwyzz.
This basically brought all of Kwyzz to Earth temporarily which spared it from destruction
when Wally ended up winning the race and not Krakkl.
This ultimately ended up being a victory for The Flash and the cosmic gamblers moved on,
never to be seen again.
So there you have it, there is no way that Wally West could have done this without all
of the help that he received.
Wally can not run this fast naturally and when you’re analyzing character’s speed,
strength, whatever, you have to make sure that you’re not counting temporary power
boosts because that is the exception, not the norm.
You need to find characters at their base line.
Not so... fast, Drake.
Tyler, from The Imaginary Axis!?
That’s right.
I heard you were talkin’ smack about The Flash.
Dude, really?
Just give me a moment.
I feel like I’m partially responsible for the confusion going on here and I just wanted
to make a few things clear about the story.
First of all, I feel like a lot of people have misconstrued the meaning of ‘faster
than an instant’.
Try to understand that in our universe, we consider an ‘instant’ the amount of time
it takes a photon (the fastest thing in the universe) to cross a Planck Length (the shortest
distance in the universe).
This is the smallest amount of time that exists for us simply because there’s nothing AT
ALL fast enough to move during this time frame.
Secondly, when this Flash feat gets tossed around, it almost always has this number attached
to it.
Again, that’s my bad since that number usually comes from a video I made.
So, you interrupted my video to tell me that your calculations were wrong?
Oh no!
First of all, those weren’t even my calculations in the first place.
I mean I checked them to make sure they were accurate, sure, but I’m not here to admit
the calculations were wrong.
I came here to point out that they are extremely low estimations.
Wat?!
The calculations used in that video purposefully assume the lowest possible estimate for how
far the Flash moved during his run which is if he crossed a distance equal to the Earth-Moon
system during a conventional Planck Instant, when in actuality, we have no idea where he
was in the universe at that time in the story.
So the number is probably exponentially bigger.
Here’s how fast he would have been going if we keep the Planck Instant number, but
assume he was on the other side of the observable universe.
Holy crap...
Yeah and if you add up all the speed created by everybody on Earth and Kwyzz, you only
get this...
Well yeah, but that’s still a lot.
Yeah maybe, but it’s nothing compared to this or even this.
Besides Wally chose to speed steal from other beings in that story because at the time,
he was afraid of the Speed Force sucking him up like it did to Barry Allen in the past.
Once he got more used to tapping into his powers, Wally was DEFINITELY seen going faster.
Also, the Speed Force controls all of the universe’s kinetic energy.
Siphoning speed from the universe is just as natural to The Flash as going fast.
Okay fine, but you have to admit that people tend to take this story out of context.
I mean, whenever I see people on the internet talk about how The Flash can outrun instant
teleportation, they say it like it’s just a thing he can instantly do.
Yeah, I don’t appreciate people taking the story out of context any more than you do
and I feel kind of bad that I might have contributed to it, but what can I do?
I presented the information and it’s not up to me if people don’t listen to the whole
story.
Besides, that’s not even the fastest The Flash can go.
Wait wait wait wait!
What?!
Oh yeah!
Here he was able to outrace Zoom, who actually exists on a completely separate timeline.
Here, he outruns the Big Bang itself.
And of course, literally every time he dives completely into the Speed Force or runs through
time, he is entering a higher plane of existence in which he is essentially moving infinitely
fast to anybody in our third dimension.
I just didn’t mention any of these in my original video because…
Well it’s kind of impossible to calculate how fast any of those non-infinite speed feats
are.
And you know, this is important because people would know that if they just read the comics
for themselves instead of just repeating what they hear online.
Exactly!
Support your local comic shop and give the books a read for yourself, guys!
Exactly!
And by the way- Tyler.
Leave.
I’m just kidding!A big thank you to Tyler for coming on the show!
I had a lot of fun making this and if you liked what you saw today then why not go over
to his channel and see the video that sparked this entire debate in the first place?
Or if you want to see more of my stupid face then you could consider subscribing or watching
another one we have here on the channel!
Anyway, I hope you learned a little something new and maybe I’ll see you next time!