POP! Heroes – Black Flash

Company: Funko

Series: POP! Heroes

Year: 2012

Confession time: Black Flash isn’t a character I’m terribly familiar with. Though I love The Flash as a character, I’m really only familiar with him as a result of his adventures with the Justice League, rather than his own titles. As a result, a lot of his rogue's gallery remains borderline unknown to me.    

But from what I can see online, Black Flash is still pretty mysterious, even though he’s been around since 1998. Given his rictus grin and pallid skin, you could be forgiven for thinking for he was one of the Black Lanterns, but he’s actually some kind of harbinger of death, seemingly serving a similar function to the Grim Reaper for DC's speed-powered characters. Seeing that he’s partially a Grant Morrison creation, there’s probably some kind of obscure occult/magick/mysticism reference going on, but that’s outside of my expertise. I don't even know if it would be right to call him a villain, to be honest; the Reaper comes for us all eventually.    

Given his relatively recent creation, it’s a little bit surprising that Funko produced him so early on in their run of DC characters – this guy was released back in 2012! But The Flash’s star is rightfully ascendant thanks to his appearances on Arrow and the release of his own TV show last year. Perhaps even more importantly, this was an easy way to get reuse out of the unique pieces of Flash’s mould, back when POPs were all virtually identical.   

Paint on mine is pretty solid. The edges of the lightning bolt on his chest are a little faint, but that’s the consequence of printing red on black. I saw one particularly bad example of a mouth though – so pick carefully. His red wings feel a little soft and sticky; the original Flash POP’s wings weren’t super solid, but these feel a lot flimsier. Maybe it’ll “dry up” a little after a few days out of the box.

Black Flash is a great purchase for any Flash fan. He’s not the most essential member of the Flash family to track down, but given that like Reverse-Flash, he was incredibly rare for a long time and is now readily available again, it's a good time to pick him up. You'd think after buying the same mould three times now I'd be sick of it, wouldn't you? Well, there's still at least one more Flash to be reviewed here...keep your eye out!