Warning: contains spoilers for Heroes Reborn #3!
Marvel’s new version of the Flash just stole one of Doctor Strange’s signature powers – and now the new speedster is almost unstoppable. In Heroes Reborn #3, written by Jason Aaron with art by Federico Vicentini and colors by Matt Milla, the Marvel Universe’s fastest man alive gains the power of astral sight and learns an important lesson about speed in the process. This knowledge comes at just the right time, as the issue begins during a battle against Blur’s arch-nemesis: Wanda Maximoff, better known as the Silver Witch.
In the world of Heroes Reborn, the Avengers never became superheroes and never joined together as a team. This has caused reality to change drastically, and now the Squadron Supreme – the Marvel Universe’s version of DC’s own Justice League – are known as Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. Only Blade remembers what the world was like before the mysterious change (though other heroes can’t shake a peculiar feeling that something is amiss) and he sets off to find Thor, Captain America, and the rest of the crew. But the lack of Avengers hasn’t stopped other heroes from fighting the good fight – such as Stanley Stewart, aka Blur, the fastest man alive in the Heroes Reborn universe. Blur begins the issue in a tense showdown with the Silver Witch, ultimately demonstrating a new powerful ability.
Blaming Blur for the death of her brother Pietro, the Silver Witch attacks the speedster as the two battle throughout a cityscape. Wanda uses a terrifying power to slow down Blur dead in his tracks: she rips his astral self from his physical form. Before Blur can reunite his soul with his body (the two cannot exist apart for long), Wanda uses a hex that House of M readers will find familiar: “No more speed.” Blur promptly loses his super-speed, and he thinks this might be the day when he’s finally beaten for good – until the issue flashes back to Kamar-Taj in Tibet and Blur’s old teacher: the Ancient One himself. A disheveled Blur can’t control his speed and is constantly running too fast, and like a certain Steven Strange before him, he’s desperate for help.
Through patience and sheer willpower, Blur stares at the flower for seventeen long days – long enough to center himself, focus on a single, solitary object, and eventually unlock the ability to see the astral plane. This is no doubt a dangerous trick that only Doctor Strange and few others could perform, but in the Heroes Reborn version of reality, Strange never became the Ancient One’s student. With his astral sight, not only can Blur finally slow down his perception of the world, he can also see an entire ecosystem’s worth of creatures living all around him – they just happen to exist in a different plane. Stanley uses one of these creatures – a monstrously large being called a wraith whale – to ultimately defeat the Silver Witch and reunite his soul with his body. All without using his super-speed, relying on the lessons from the Ancient One instead.
A speedster learning mental discipline from Doctor Strange‘s teacher is a fascinating development. Super-fast heroes in the Marvel and DC universe alike tend to be flighty, impulsive, and think quite highly of themselves. Forcing Blur to stop and smell the literal roses could also be seen as Marvel critiquing the DC universe’s characters for being larger-than-life, almost-Godly figures with too much power. Since the Squadron Supreme are essentially Marvel’s (lawyer-friendly) Justice League, complete with their own version of the Flash, Superman, etc., the comparison is apt. Marvel has always been known for its down-to-earth approach when writing its characters – and paradoxically enough, sometimes it can take a magical trip through another dimension to teach a lesson with real-world applications.
