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!
