I get that just running straight is usually faster and he can run on water, but if he wanted to, could he leap via momentum? Has he ever used a Flash Glider?
As a longtime Flash reader, let me answer this question for you: Speed Force.
Literally anything you want to ask, yes he can do it. And the answer will always boil down to: Speed Force. It’s as close to the Toon Force as it gets.
Can he open a checking account with an exclusive bank with bad credit history?
Does running through multiverses until he finds one with said checking account already opened in his name count?
You’ve done it again, ghen!
In Justice League Unlimited, he once hovered like a helicopter by spinning his arms fast enough
Theoretically he should be able to do this. The problem might be landing since he’s not invulnerable or super strong. But then again, we’re talking comic book logic. The speeds at which he travels should have already ripped him apart if he doesn’t have some sort of protection.
I’m not a Flash expert by any means. Does the Speed Force protect him? I know in the Young Justice cartoon Wally wore pads with his costume because he didn’t have as good control as Barry, so I’m guessing it doesn’t fully protect him.
I mean, in the show, he does punch people at full speed, and manage not to shatter every bone in his arm into a fine powder.
Yeah he has a protective aura as one of his powers to protect him from friction and he heals fast but not like wolverine just a broken bone would heal in minutes not weeks. After mark waid that got retconed to be the speedforce but it works the same. Also wally had a guilt induced mental block that reduced his connection to the speedforce due to Barry’s death. Once he worked through that he ended up faster and had better control than even Barry. As Barry controls the speedforce with his mind. Wally controls it with his heart.
I mean… flash runs so fast they had to invent a separate dimension he taps into just to explain how he avoids physics… he could theoretically run an at incline fast enough to launch himself into orbit, and fall down at whatever point he’s calculated. Is that flying? Not by the conventional definition of it in superpower media, but… rockets do that and we say they fly, so why not?
Superman can’t fly. He can only “leap tall buildings with a single bound.”
I heard Superman gained the ability to fly during the first TV series because doing the special effects for flying was easier than for jumping.
In the earlier comics yeah :3… later superman gets kind of out of hand with powers
That is what I mean by flight. It just kind of looks more like he’s fast-forwarding than physically moving in our spacetime. Like warp speed.
There is a villain that does just that the second Professor Zoom broke the flashes time traveling treadmill and it caused him to be able to move forward at any speed he wished on his time line. So it looked like he was running at super speed but he wasn’t.
Jumping consists of traveling off of something with enough momentum that it carries you through the air faster than the rate at which gravity pulls you down. I know nothing about the comics but it seems like the Flash is just running crazy fast rather than slowing down time or whatever. This means he would be affected by gravity at the normal rate, so at his speed he should be able to jump considerable distances. I dunno how fast he actually runs, but if it’s in the neighborhood of 25,000 mph the curvature of the earth would act like a ramp - it would curve away faster than he was pulled down to it by gravity - allowing him to run himself into space (not orbit, orbit requires circularizing once you’re in space near the apogee of your trajectory.)
Flash can easily run fast enough to observe the movement of lightning(he can technically go FTL and time travel)
He has some comic-type dimension he taps into, to avoid pesky things like physics. So he could probably launch himself out into space. Although most versions can’t run if he can’t step on something. So he’d be screwed.
That sounds like some time-dilation bullshit that would probably ruin the physics I was talking about.
It really, REALLY depends on which Flash we’re talking about. Even then it’s super inconsistent.
I’m Snyderverse, he’s faster than light and rewinds time. I think on the TV show he does this too. But then sometimes other people can react to him? Idk it’s pretty dumb. If we’re applying physics to Flash, if he’s even running at 25% the speed of light, and the air he’s hitting isn’t causing a wave of fusion reactions akin to a supersonic shock wave from a fighter jet, colliding with something solid isn’t going to be much different.
Somehow as he’s breaking through the light speed barrier gravity still affects him. But at those speeds he’s got enough momentum to leave the solar system if he runs off an incline and does a little hop I guess. He seems really stuck to the ground otherwise.
Meanwhile I’m still hung up on the idea that there’s more than one Flash. I am not a comics person at all, I am a physics person.
Lol there are 10 flash or flash adjacent characters that I can think of off the top of my head.
And every time one runs into a wall at fatal speeds, two slower ones appear.
Comics are weird. Asking questions like, could the Flash run so fast he exits the universe can almost always be answered with “if the plot calls for it.”
He has the power of fast. He goes exactly as fast as he needs to. It’s magic, not science. They make it sound like science but it’s magic.
Kinda like how Tony Stark invents time travel in an afternoon, or Peter Parker affords an apartment in NYC of even only barely.
Which is a big part of why I never got into comics. I didn’t read them as a kid, and as an adult it seems like I’d have to sift through too much reality- (or at least immersion-) breaking nonsense.
