The Flash #28
The Flash #28 serves as the penultimate chapter of the 'History Lessons' arc and effectively the closing statement of Brian Buccellato's solo run on the New 52 title — a run widely praised as one of the strongest Flash stories in the character's modern history. By pivoting to a supernatural detective story featuring a body-hopping ghost called The Miner, the issue demonstrated that Barry Allen's world could sustain a genuinely different genre register, leaning into his forensic-scientist identity in a way the series had rarely done before. The team-up with Deadman, a pairing with almost no prior precedent, pushed the Scarlet Speedster into territory more reminiscent of a gritty police procedural than a traditional speedster book, broadening the storytelling range of the character within the New 52 framework. It also set the stage for the final exploration of the Nora Allen murder mystery — a plot thread that had been largely untouched since the New 52 relaunch — just as the CW television adaptation was ramping up interest in exactly that backstory.
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When Francis Manapul stepped away from the title after issue #25, co-writer Brian Buccellato continued solo, enlisting artist Patrick Zircher for a three-part horror-inflected arc. This was a deliberate creative pivot: Buccellato later moved directly from The Flash to Detective Comics alongside Manapul, making issues #26–29 effectively his farewell lap on the book. Contemporary bloggers noted that some of the Nora Allen story material — the emotional core of 'History Lessons' — had originally been planned for much earlier in the run but was set aside at editorial direction in favor of the Rogues and Gorilla Grodd arcs that better served the New 52 launch period. With the incoming creative team of Robert Venditti, Van Jensen, and Brett Booth announced for issue #30, Buccellato used these final issues to revisit backstory he and Manapul had deferred.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Published February 26, 2014, as part of DC's New 52 fourth volume of The Flash (volume 4, series launched 2011).
- Written by Brian Buccellato, with interior art by Patrick Zircher, colors by Matt Hollingsworth, and letters by Carlos M. Mangual; cover by Pasqual Ferry, with a variant cover by Howard Chaykin.
- Second chapter of the three-part 'History Lessons' arc (issues #27–29), in which Barry Allen and Deadman pursue a murderous supernatural entity called The Miner across Central City.
- The story introduces a genre-shift for the title: a supernatural, body-hopping ghost antagonist, contrasting sharply with the action-driven Rogues and Gorilla Grodd storylines that preceded it.
- The arc directly engages the unresolved mystery of Nora Allen's murder and raises the possibility that police captain Darryl Frye may be Barry's biological father — one of the most significant personal plot threads in the New 52 Flash continuity.
- Buccellato left the title with issue #29 (one issue after this), passing the book to writers Robert Venditti and Van Jensen beginning with issue #30 (June 2014).
- Collected in The Flash Vol. 5: History Lessons trade paperback (DC Comics, 2015), which reprints The Flash #26–29 and The Flash Annual #2.
- No new character first appearances are associated with this issue across major key-issue tracking sources; its significance is narrative and contextual rather than as a debut issue.
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Reprinted in Flash #8 (2014), The Flash #5 (2015), The Flash #5 (2015)
Key issues in The Flash
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