Irey West

now - Hunter Zolomon tries to kill Linda Park. Wally West runs directly into the Speed Force to outrun time itself to save her, using her as a lighting rod to ground himself and return. The trauma triggers her labor, and their twin children Irey & Jai West are born.

We gave very real thought to actually just having one page for Irey & Jai. At this point in the timeline they're newborns, basically two similarly shaped sacks of flower that just make double the diaper duty, so their timelines are as identical as two characters can be. Also, if we want to show them as infants, there's really not much art depicting them separately. This means we have two pages with the same image on top, which just makes me bristle.

So why did we wind up making two separate pages? The fact is, there really is quite a bit to say about both characters. They've been really well adapted into modern comics, with each of them reading as their own person with their own story. If we were going to do these two justice, they each needed their own space. (Yes this introduction appears on both pages. Just.. go with it.)

Irey's Comic History

Wally's daughter Iris, who is named after his aunt, actually has a longer history in comics than her brother because she's a reference to a Kingdom Come character. While most of you probably know this, Kingdom Come was a miniseries from 1996 by Mark Waid that imagined a vaguely dystopic future for the heroes of DC. There have been a lot of attempts to bring the designs and characters from Kingdom Come into the main continuity, but generally speaking it doesn't work; it all just works better within that world. The story featured the children of several classic Teen Titans, include Wally's daughter Iris.

Later, in 2003 during Geoff John's really great run on the Flash, Wally and Linda were expecting, but tragically Linda lost their twins in a fight with Zoom. This was actually undone in 2005 when, thanks to some time travel shenanigans, Linda suddenly found herself spontaneously pregnant again, and gave birth to the previously lost twins. This series ended only five issues later when Wally was absorbed through Speed Force to an alien planet during the Infinite Crisis crossover. Linda doesn't let him go alone him, and the whole family is lost together. It's actually a pretty great moment.

The new Flash series that followed after Infinite Crisis starring Bart Allen didn't do too well, so within a year it was cancelled, and the original Flash series returned going right back to it's original numbering. Wally and his family had all returned over in the pages of Brad Meltzer's Justice League of America, with the twins now aged up to somewhere between seven to ten years old. Mark Waid, the series architect who had build Wally into the character he became, was back on the book, and for the first time ever we actually had a series deliver on one of the most seemingly-impossible ideas; the hero finally managed to have a family, and that family got to be heroes together.

Eventually the series ended when Barry Allen came back during Final Crisis, and of course Wally completely vanished from continuity during the New 52. Thankfully, he returned to continuity in 2016, and eventually, impossibly, so did his family. Modern Flash comics actually continue to feature Wally and his kids, with Irey & Jai both starting to blossom into heroes in their own right.

Irey's Story & Possible Future

When we first meet Irey (as an actual person, not a newborn baby), both she and her brother had Speed Force-related powers, but neither of them were actual speedsters; Irey could vibrate through objects. Eventually, they realized their powers were unstable and hurting them because they were sharing a single connection to the Speed Force. Irey absorbed their connection fully into herself to save Jai, and was able to take control of it with the help of Jesse Quick, claiming the role of Impulse for herself as the newest speedster. Since her return in modern Flash comics she's evolved even further, taking on a very cool new costume for herself and a new name, Thunderheart.

In our project, both of the twins have only just been born, so anything that happens to them moving forward is just speculation, but there is a lot to build on. Our twins won't be rapidly aging, or having to deal with weird broken Speed Force connections, they're just going to grow up. While her brother Jai's relationship with their place in the legacy of the Flash family is far more complex, Irey's is very simple. She is born for this. She is every bit her dad's daughter, and she is going to dive into that legacy.

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