Jay Garrick
1913 - Jay Garrick is born on his family's farm.
1919 - 6-year-old Jay's father returns from WWI with a greek helmet.
1933 - 20-year-old Jay goes to Midwestern University to study chemistry. He has Edward Clariss as a professor.
1936 - 23-year-old Jay conducts a lab experiment to use a cyclotron to purify hard water with no residual radiation, but is knocked unconscious by the hard water fumes and subjected to mysterious radiation, the combination of which leaves him hospitalized, where he slowly realizes he has developed his speed powers. He becomes the Flash.
1937 - 24-year-old Jay graduates from Midwestern University.with his degree in chemistry, and begins his graduate work. He stops Richard Swift from assassinating a bank owner.
1938 - 25-year-old Jay's speed is absorbed by Robert Turowski's kinetic absorber, and has to stop the Turtle without his speed.
1939 - WW2 begins.
1941 - 28-year-old Jay completes his post-graduate thesis, and becomes a chemistry professor at Midwestern University. He joins the newly-formed Justice Society after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
1944 - 31-year-old Jay is first confronted by another Speedster; the illusive Rival, who is eventually revealed to be a fellow professor from Midwestern University Edward Clariss, using his own formula to temporarily replicate Jay's speed.
1945 - WW2 ends.
1947 - 34-year-old Jay fights an escaped Robert Turowski, whose new kinetic absorber feeds the energy directly into his own body. He isolates Robert from external kinetic energy, causing him to absorb his own null-field, leaving him unable to move.
1953 - 40-year-old Jay and the Justice Society are called before the Un American Activities Commission. The Society chooses to disband and retire, but Jay reveals his identity and attends the hearing, his testimony crucial in the decline of Senator McCarthy's influence.
1954 - 41-year-old Jay discovers that Edward Clariss is manufacturing low doses of his formula as the drug Velocity 9, in an effort to perfect the formula and truly replicate the Flash's powers. The rampant use of the drug creates a Speed Force singularity, threatening the lives of the people using it, forcing Jay to enter the Speed Force to save them. He survives by racing the corona of the singularity, bypassing time itself.
21 years ago - 41-year-old Jay is pulled out of the Speed Force Vortex when Johnny Chambers taps it to contain Edward Clariss, his connection to the Speed Force finally exhausted. He returns to academia where he meets his fellow teacher, Joan Williams, who helps him acclimatize to the modern world.
18 years ago - 44-year-old Jay is found by Barry Allen, who reveals his new powers to him. Jay gives him his blessing to become the new Flash.
14 years ago - 48-year-old Jay meets Barry Allen's nephew and new sidekick, Wally West, and helps Barry train him to use his new speed powers.
12 years ago - 50-year-old Jay & Joan Williams are married.
7 years ago - 55-year-old Jay & Joan Garrick both retire from teaching.
Jay Garrick is probably the most easily recognized of the Golden Age heroes. Not only because he's literally everywhere in absolutely every depiction of that era, but because he is also a major supporting character in the later adventures of his modern incarnations. He even LOOKS like the perfect example of a Golden Age hero that later spawned modern spin-offs... His Mercury helmet is such a dated design choice, but on him not only does it look awesome, but it conveys his entire character in a moment.
Like a lot of our Golden Age characters, we're going to have the bulk of his adventures play out during our historic WWII timeline. He does have a role to play in the modern timeline, so he's one of the few we're going to transition over to the modern timeline, although in his case it's going to be some time ago, so that he has time to actually age into the elder mentor figure he's meant to be.
Like a lot of our Golden Age characters, we're going to have the bulk of his adventures play out during our historic WWII timeline. He does have a role to play in the modern timeline, so he's one of the few we're going to transition over to the modern timeline, although in his case it's going to be some time ago, so that he has time to actually age into the elder mentor figure he's meant to be.
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Jay Garrick's Comic HistoryJay's first appearances were in 1940, making him a contemporary of the DC pantheon figureheads like Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. He was an invention of Gardner Fox, whose influence on the shape of DC as we know it is impossible to overstate.
Jay Garrick's story is actually WAY more familiar to modern audiences than most of the other Golden Age characters who were later reinterpretted in the Silver Age. The lab accident origin, the deep devotion to his romantic interest... other than the name and costume, he was pretty much carbon copied onto Barry Allen. The Flash was the very first character reinterpretted in the Silver Age, and there was no precedent to really rethink the character at all. More than anything, this is what really defines Jay's relationship with the rest of the Flash characters; his story was basically the archetype for all the characters to follow. |
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Jay was one of the founding members of the Justice Society from their very beginning (which is probably to be expected, since it's another creation of Gardner Fox), making him one of the most recognizable characters of the era. Later, in 1961, Jay was the first Golden Age character to cross over into the new Silver Age comics when he showed up in the seminal Flash issue #123, "Flash of Two Worlds", introducing the whole concept of the Multiverse to DC. Over the next few decades, whenever the JSA appeared in comics, Jay was right at the front of every group crossover.
Of course, the relationships between these characters got really complicated in the eighties as the Crisis of Infinite Earths moved them into the same universe. Jay and the rest of the JSA all had to all undergo a series of de-aging storylines to slowly explain why they were still around, but slowly they all settled into roles that took advantage of their new median age. For his part, Jay was able to serve as a mentor to all of the Flash characters that came after him, and in the pages of Impulse he and his wife Joan became surrogate parents to the young hero. When the 2000's JSA series started putting in the work to make all those characters relevant again, they really didn't have to do much with Jay, because he was already the elder statesman hero we recognized. |
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Our Jay Garrick StoryThe fact that Jay's story was xeroxed so thoroughly onto Barry means that for us to include him, we really need to work out what makes him his own character rather than just Barry Allen, Golden Age edition. This is actually best accomplished by focusing on the one part of his story that WASN'T applied to Barry; the fact that he was a chemist, college student, and later, a college chemistry professor. This was actually a big focus in a lot of his stories, and we can use that to give him his own distinct role to play the world as he becomes the world's first Flash and helps found the Justice Society.
One story element of Jay Garrick that was thoroughly replicated onto later Flash's was the focus in his stories on his romantic relationship. Other heroes have had love interests, but Jay's relationship with Joan was a HUGE source of motivation for him and that carried over into Barry and Iris, and then into Wally & Linda. Interestingly, because we need to put a time jump into Jay's story, we need to make his wife Joan a modern character, which means that during his Golden Age adventures he actually needs to be a bachelor, so that winds up being another element of his story that stands out as unique. |
Jay's FutureJay is one of the only Golden Age heroes that we're putting in the work to make sure he transitions into the modern timeline, specifically because of his role as mentor to the other Flashes, and more specifically as a surrogate father to Bart Allen. We didn't have to work that hard to give him his own time-jump; Flash characters practically have time travel built into their entire premise, so we actually have to work harder to take it OUT. In his case, we just gave him a single event pitting him against his personal nemesis, the Rival, that caused him to skip forward in time.
For his modern incarnation, we actually don't need Jay to have access to his powers, and he's actually more useful to us if he doesn't. The goal here isn't to have another superhero; it's to have this classic father figure that all the Flash's get to share. |
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