Comparing The New 52 Jay Garrick with the Pre-Reboot Garrick

This is the new Jay Garrick The Flash for James Robinson's "Earth Two".

This on the other hand is what Jay Garrick looked like in the pre-reboot DC universe, even during the so-called GOLDEN AGE...

See the difference?

Here are some of the things that I want to blog about regarding the new costume:


I loved the old Jay Garrick/ Golden Age Flash because of his very old-school appeal. You've got a blue leggings and red boots with a red shirt with an inverted lightning logo. It's simplistic without trying to be one.

The new one just plain looks like its been dumped in a pool of fashion gurus and rinsed with some consumerism coupled with a little bit of elements from the pre-rebooted Jay.

One of the things about the redesign that made me heave was the design for the helmet. I firmly believe, as a comic fan, that if you are to do redesigns on a costume, you should still retain the "THING" that makes the costume iconic.


In Jay's case, it has to be the silver helmet which we see in Earth Two being worn by the dying Mercury...

I'm sure DC will be writing stuff as to why this is the new standard costume for the guy. They'll probably say something like this is going to do this, do that, blah blah. We might even see things later on when the JSA officially gets formed that will show how important the new costume is.

For now, the only MAJOR reason why we're even seeing this costume is because it can "hide" in plain sight. There's no Flash ring where Jay could keep his costume so he lets it just morph into something more casual when not saving people from "Apokorats".

Mind you I'm not bashing the costume. It's nice but for me, they kinda lost me with the whole those major revisions. I still prefer to see the old costume. Heck, Alan Scott's costume looks cool even if it ditched the old red shirt and green (or was it blue) spandex pants.


Back when I started getting into the Flash, the helmet made a big distinction between Earth 1 Flash and Earth 2 Flash.

I can prattle on for days about the importance of maintaining the helmet for the redesigned Earth 2 Flash but I'm going to cite this as a good example. In JLA/JSA: Vice and Virtue, Plastic Man becomes the avatar of greed after the seven evils gets freed from the Rock of Eternity. In one of the initial scuffles, Plas takes Jay's helmet and says that its going to be worth a fortune if he ever sells it.

Bottomline is the Earth 2 costume for The Flash/ Jay Garrick is nice. Nice in the sense that it has modern sensibilities but retains nothing of the classic stuff that old JSA fans like moi loved. But while the design looks horrible, I really have to hand it to Earth 2's creative team - James Robinson and Nicola Scott for producing such an intriguing book.