The Flash's good vibrations

Right from the starting line, Flash comics have always been about some dude in a red and yellow outfit running really, really fast and fighting guys with boomerangs and trick mirrors. But then there was an interesting shift in them as the Silver Age really started to kick in, and it wasn't about the speed, it's was about the vibrations.

There had been comic book super speedsters for decades by this point, and a lot of the ideas for stories revolving around velocity and speed had been seemingly exhausted by creators who didn't really give a damn about how Jay Garrick actually fought crime. And in the bright and shiny Atomic age, the disconcerting comic book reader needed more than that, and the bright bulbs at DC starting adding in huge doses of pop science into the books.

So then you get a lot of Silver Age Flash comics where big Barry Allen is always just vibrating the shit out of the problem, spinning around, shimmering his ass off and doing extremely funky things with the molecules that make up his body.

It's all absolutely ludicrous and had absolutely no basis in scientific facts, but worked if you don't think about it and could sound suitably technical.

And once you've got the atoms humming, you can do anything on the right vibration - go through walls, travel through time, go to another earth, stop a tornado. If you have that much control over the atoms of the world, you have the powers of a god, and stopping the flipping Rogues from robbing a bank seems like overkill.

It doesn't matter if you can react in a nanosecond to a threat, it's the complete control of reality that spinning around really fast really matters. 

It turns out there were still plenty of things to do with speed, especially since the Speed Force became a thing, but there are still endless charms in that idealistic vibrations of a young Barry Allen, shaking his way into eternity