You've stated before that you don't like Waid's work on the Flash, so I'm not going to try to change your mind - but I feel that your comparison of Waid to Byrne is completely off the mark and I need to go on the record that I disagree. As a quick example, that a look at Birthright vs. Man of Steel!
You are correct when you say that the comparison to Byrne is inexact, because at least Mark Waid incorporates what has come before whereas Byrne doesn't bother to attempt. Mark Waid has written stories I personally, enjoy: for instance, his JLA: YEAR ONE had its moments, and he did several Superman backups in ACTION COMICS that were a great deal of fun. And while I'm not a fan of everything he did in BIRTHRIGHT, Mark Waid got a sense of who the character was and wrote him admirably, creating a worthy reboot story for the character incorporating many wonderful elements from past stories. Byrne, on the other hand, has never written anything that I have truly liked, and has never contributed an idea that wasn't destructive.
As an aside, let me point out that in the few interviews I've read of him, Mark Waid is a genuinely funny human being and if he's ever here in Miami, I'll take him out and buy him a peppermint schnapp, because somebody that knows who Ultra the Multi-Alien is, by definition is a cool guy I wanna hang out with. I would not say the same of Byrne; every story I've heard of him as a person shows a childish egomaniac. And doesn't he look like the creepiest serial killer ever?
However, I feel the comparison to Byrne DOES hold up in the sense that both impose their personal views on characters where it is unjustified for them to do so, where it conflicts with what has been established.
My dominant objection to Mark Waid's run on the Flash is that he had the Flash behave in a manner that was totally out of character, projecting Waid's own personal social and political views on a character for which such projection is innappropriate and unwarranted.
Imagine, for example, if a Parents' Group took over writing the next James Bond movie. Instead of messing around with bikini and catsuit clad spy babes like every teenage boy wishes they could, Bond was rewritten by the Far Side-glasses wearing Mother's Group to mess around with women in the only manner that it ought to be: in the bonds of holy matrimony, with a Mrs. Bond they take extra pain to be as boring and personality-free as possible. Wouldn't it be outrageous for said Parents Group to impose their perspective on movies, whose function is entertainment, not moral instruction?
I would say that in some ways Mark Waid is to the Flash what Edmond Hamilton is to Superman. It's almost like Waid was doing with the Flash what he wanted to do with Superman: He gave the Flash a "Flash Family", the Flash travelled all through time, went to the future and was a hero, there were super-powered descendants across the ages, and there was an almost universally known "Flash Legacy;" along with mind-blowing new plot developments every issue.
Otto Binder made a lot of contributions to the Superman Family as well, but I see what you're saying.
But this statement here hit the nail on the head of why it is I don't like the Waid FLASH run if for no other reason than omission. There was one DC speedster that Mark Waid has never used in his entire Flash run, which seemed to get mileage out of (no pun intended) every speedster that there ever was, even those Three Russians.
Who can it be?
It isn't Max Mercury, that's for sure; he was pulled from Dimension Nowhere to become the Zen Guru of speed, the Obi-Wan Kenobi of skidmarks.
It's Impala, the Zulu speedster from the Global Guardians. Yes, Impala had lost his powers in JLQuarterly #17 (1994) but last time I checked, Max Mercury hadn't been in a DC Comic since the 1940s. Apparently, reviving a forgotten Golden Ager and establishing why they didn't age in the interim, setting up a retroactive backstory involving Native Americans and the 1950s, a heretofore unrevealed connection to the Quick Clan, and making them into a major DC player - there was plenty of time for THAT, but a three panel sequence just to get Impala back into fighting trim is an unaccountable waste of precious, precious comic space.
And I'm sure it has absolutely
nothing to do with the fact that Impala is from a different race and from a foreign country. I'm not saying Mark Waid is prejudiced, I am however, bringing this up as being absolutely typical of Mark Waid's white bread, middle America perspective that he chose THE FLASH as the vehicle to cram down the throat of the comics world. This wouldn't be so intolerable (Cary Bates for instance, was a midwesterner who was always unceasingly polite and he wrote some of the greatest Superman stories ever), if it wasn't for the fact that Mark Waid, with all the crass unprofessionalism of a fanfic author, ignored the Flash's previous characterization in order to graft and transplant - Frankenstein-style - his own worldview onto a character that has a perfectly workable personality.
The defining character traits of Wally West - the personality that he was given that made him an interesting character in his own right fit to be compared with the characters before that had the name - was that while Wally was fundamentally a nice, decent, funny human being, he nonetheless was a young man in his twenties who was awash with hormones, his moods swinging, falling in love with woman after woman. We readers rooted for Wally because he made all the wrong choices with his love life.
Mark Waid however, couldn't take all that malt-sharing and hand holding hanky-panky going on in Speedsterville, and married him off to some bland, personality-free Lois Lane equivalent. It really says something about her lack of personality that I can't remember her name. Marky Mark had the Flash MARRY, despite the fact the decent but boyishly immature "Peter Pan" Flash would rather face Captain Cold, Rainbow Raider, the Trickster and Grodd all at the same time before even *considering* being tied down with a ball and chain. Characters grow and change with time, and it might have been interesting if someone with a grasp of the character, like Messner-Loebs or the Baron/Guice team, had remained on the title; watching the Flash acquire dignity and maturity and eventually, perhaps, marrying and settling down. But Mark Waid didn't tell that story; he did not have the Flash grow and develop in any realistic way; he throws us headlong into the Flash marriage and engagement and asks us to accept that the fact that he's getting married is a sign he's matured - despite the fact he's got it backwards: we have to see the Flash mature before we can accept the engagement. We can't just see the wedding and buy that he's a different person. Something that important has to happen "on camera."
Another character in the forefront with Messner-Loebs that faded to the background the INSTANT Mark Waid's name hit the writers' box was the Pied Piper, a major supporting figure in the years after Crisis, a redeemed, eccentric supervillain who became to the Flash what Snapper Carr was to Hourman, a loveable character that may possibly be one of comics few open homosexuals, a detail revealed and handled with dignity by his creative team. This character faded entirely into the background and has for the most part never been used again.
Oh, wait. Mark did get some use out of the Pied Piper, having him build some radio earpieces for the Flash and never mentioning his homosexuality ever again. Gee, I take it. All. Back.
Wow, this post is longer than I intended, and I haven't even GOTTEN to the "Speed Force" yet. A retcon of this magnitude - a powerful force that was around "all along" but that there has never, ever been a shred of evidence for its existence except those stories set in the past that Waid wrote himself to "prove" the speed force was "always there" ...all of it is really insulting to the intelligence of the comics reader, just like asking us to believe Superboy had never really been in the Legion of Super-Heroes was insulting and just like asking us to believe that Superman had never been in the Justice League until recently was insulting. Worst of all, this isn't some cute fact to throw back and forth, but something that fundamentally alters how the Flash's powers - previously easy to explain and based in real world physics intimately researched by the savvy Julie Schwartz - operate. Costumes of "solidified speed," "deriving sustenance from the speed force," and "I will remove the speed from those objects" implies an understanding of how the world works that borders on the demented. To say nothing about being unintentionally funny, and not in the charming way the Silver Age can be, either: unintentionally funny because of the total cluelessness of the concept.
The Speed Force's insane "Snake Oil" properties, the arrogance of the retcon that insinuated the Speed Force into every aspect of Flash history like a loud party guest that just won't leave, and the total denial of the scientific accuracy that previously had been the Flash's trademark, all these catapult the "Valhalla of Speedsters" amongst the nakedly egotistical, self-aggrandizing concepts John Byrne "created" to leave his mark on comics history at the expense of said history.