As a comic reader who prefers his stories in collected, trade format the Flash Rebirth HC is a fun read. The same creative team that brought you Green Lantern Rebirth, once again are attempting to bring back one of DC’s cornerstone characters; Barry Allen as the Flash. Admittedly i’m not a big Flash fan and I bought this book because of the creative team and how they handled GL rebirth.

Ethan Van Sciver’s art is very good and handles one of the toughest characters in comics with skill. At times his pages are very dense and you can tell what pages and panels he spends real time with. The art quality is in the upper level of contemporary, mainstream super hero artists.

Geoff Johns puts in a great story, that has enough weight to satisfy the purists while delivering humor and even gets the characters to echo some of what the reader might be thinking.

If you’re new to the Flash, you might need to take a trip to Wikipedia to figure out some of the backstory, but for the most part its a self contained story.

at $19.99, DC gives you a good value for your money. It collects issues 1-6 of the mini series, giving you cover art, as well as the variants for each issue. As far as the backmatter, there is Johns’ original pitch for the project which is fascinating in its own right, as well as a gallery of pencils and sketches. At only 9 pages, the bonus section was a bit thinner than i’m used to and would have loved a bit more content.

My biggest nitpick is with the production of this book. DC was trying a new, more aggressive (and hopefully better quality) binding and as a result the gutter got a little tighter. This means that some of the art and even word balloons and text starts to get lost into the gutter. At times you really have to force the book open to read that word or see the rest of the art. Its unfortunate that such a nice book is marred by a production issue like that. While its annoying at best, its not enough of a detraction to make you want to skip this book.

This collection didn’t make me a Flash fanatic, but it made me more open to the character and interested in trying out his new series. It’ll be a handsome addition to your shelf.