Profile: Linda Park West

Linda Park West
First appearance: 1989 in The Flash

Current status: mother to a pair of twins

Was subjected to the following acts of discrimination: in 2004, in the “Blitz” storyline, the “new” Reverse-Flash (who's still around and even turned up in the pages of Justice Society of America #8), struck her to the ground with a vibratory ripple effect, terminating her pregnancy and leading to her wailing in loss and agony in her hospital bed. All this in order to strike at her husband, Wally West, and to try and make him “a better hero.” A year later, in a time-travel effect, this was changed, saving her pregnancy, and making her a mother instead, but even so…

What’s wrong with how this was done? I think this can best be answered with the following: did we have to go through all that excess violence just to get to the good news? I don’t think so. There were plenty of other story and adventure plots and concepts that could’ve been tried out, but IMO, Geoff Johns missed out on just about all of them (and what he didn’t, Identity Crisis’ “repercussions” got in the way of).

There may be a need for hurdles to get around and over before superheroes and their families can have children, but what Linda – and Wally – went through in order to get to that point was decidedly unneccesary, as was even the part a few issues earlier where Grodd tries to torture Wally’s mind with images of Linda and the family being crushed to death.

And when Linda finally did win her gift of being a mommy, I decided to trade/sell off the issues of “Run Riot” and “Blitz” that I had, getting in their place some old Avengers and Superman issues in their stead. Because really, who needs it? I decided that I was better off with just the good stuff.