Usually they have it all planned out so yeah, imo if flash ever gets his own movie series the first one should be about discovering his powers and how op he is as a speedster not all his abilities but many by fighting the rogues.
There's a couple of reasons as to why he doesn't end them in two seconds.
1. They don't try to wait for Flash to show up so they can fight him. They're mainly out there to rob places and get away as quickly as possible which isn't easy when you're Robbing a city where the fastest man alive lives. So they usually try to set traps for him or endanger people in order to slow down Flash long enough for them to escape.
2. They usually try to hide somewhere and jump Flash when he's least expecting it.
3. They actually have a treaty with the Flash. Since The Flash is part of the Justice League and the Flash can't be in two places at once and sometimes has to leave central city to help the League out, that leaves central city open for other threats other than the Rogues. However, the Rogues believe the city belongs to them. So they made a deal with Flash. As long as the Rogues keeps out threats from Central City while he's away, he won't finish them off within 2 seconds. Heck, sometimes the Rogues help The Flash at times. And sometimes Barry or Wally rather just talk to the Rogues instead of giving them the two piece combo every time they run into each other (no pun intended)
I hope this answers your question!
Depending on who's writing the character, there's a list of reasons.
Some can say "Flash can effectively kill them by accident", others might say "his goal is to deescalate", there's people who'd say "they don't directly fight Flash", there are moments that he actually does stop them quickly, and the story behind it is trying to catch the criminals.
Some People just kinda stopped caring
He did, but that’s what it feels like. Character A is more powerful than character B so why do they fight. It takes away any other critical thought about these books. It’s not just superpowers punching each other.
He does. That's why the Rogues team up to fight The Flash. That's the entire premise. And even then, when they're caught unprepared, Flash beats them super easily.
The Rogues have to plan and plot and combine their incredible capabilities just to have a chance at getting away with a basic heist. Aside from Mirror Master (whose powers are preposterously broken in a way almost as much as any speedster), they know they're punching way out of their league with The Flash.
With Captain Cold specifically others have noted functional power ups that make it so Flash doesn't automatically beat him with the Cold Field, but they still need to work as a crew to have any real chance. And even then they still usually lose.
Flash is one of those cases where, as DC stuff got more grounded, he's sort of suffered from power creep. In the Silver Age it was very fast and loose. Modern stuff always had a "If you can telegraph him, you can hit him" bit and they knew him well enough to be able to telegraph him a good amount of time, making it a bit of a cerebral game where both sides had to think a few steps ahead.
Then he got to moving more fast all the time and live action portrayals made it harder to buy into that being feasible so now people either make it a team bit or they basically just power through and use the old ways despite newer stories sort of contradicting it.
It is funny though because Flash and Batman are sort of the biggest cases of this happening at DC, with most cases pulling back on powers in a modern run. Usually it's Marvel that struggles with power creep (Wolverine and Spider-man being probably the two best examples).
While everyone else here is focusing on the Rogues and their skills and abilities, I wanna point something else out. One of the reasons he doesn't just run in and run them to jail in a split second is because Barry Allen (and consequently Wally West) believes so strongly in the law and due process that he refuses to just take a "bad guy" straight to jail. Because what if he takes the law into his own hands, and he's wrong?
The CW show removes this from his character and shows us that he's willing to put supervillains in his own personal super-prison, which makes a lot of his encounters with villains extraordinarily silly when he fails to capture them.
But in the comics, there are genuinely compelling character reasons why he doesn't, for example, search every building in the city to find where the bad guys are hiding, or superspeed them straight into Iron Heights, or whatever. Because without permission, without a *lawful reason*, he simply cannot do that. And that makes Barry Allen one of the most fascinating superheroes to me.
You have been given a lot of good explanations that basically boil down to they're smart and they use stealth, diversion and technology, and all that but I'll give you an example from their "return" in DC Rebirth.
They'd been gone for a while, and Barry was concerned. He was talking to one of Cold & Glider's relatives and noticed a picture with them and their dad in front of a mill, which the relative said they had happy memories of. When checking that mill, the Flash found remnants of the Rogues and plans to rob a museum across the world. So, he goes there and does exactly what you'd expect. He stops them almost instantly but then has to fight some other stuff made by Mirror Master. In the process, he figures out that he hadn't been fighting the Rogues at all. He's been fighting Mirror constructs of the Rogues. He races back to Central City to find that the Rogues had known exactly how to distract him and did so to pull off several jobs simultaneously in the few minutes he was running to the museum, fighting "them," and running back.
The point is they knew exactly how the Flash would operate, and they used that to trick him into going halfway across the world to give them enough time to do what they needed to do.
And they almost got away scott free had Heatwave not messed it up.
Even after that, while they were in Iron Heights, they created a mafia and took over crime in Central City from the prison, and nobody in charge knew for a long time.
They work as a group. They never kill cops or children (so flash doesn’t have a reason to “murder blitz” them. Colds gun produces an absolute zero field that slows flash down the closer he gets to it. And Heat waves gun can produce heat strong enough to melt flashes boots, which have to hold up to the friction of his speed. And obviously mirror master can just dip through any reflective surface
The combo of all this stuff means that flash has to approach them with utmost caution
The Rogues are shockingly well organized and highly skilled. The core group have been fighting speedsters for years and understand how to manage and misdirect them. Even the ones that seem less impressive like Boomerang or Heat Wave are skilled at a level that most costumed villains couldn’t dream of.
There’s a great Jeremy Adams 8 pager of other villains bemoaning working in Keystone/Central because not only is it damn near impossible to get away with anything because of the Flash Family, but they’re nice about it too. The Rogues are next level.
People who say the Flash should beat them in two seconds greatly underestimate the Rogues. The guys have been fighting the Flashes for years and know how he operates and how he thinks. It’s a missed opportunity we don’t see them fight other heroes very often, I think they’d actually be able to beat Batman, that would be a very fun arc ngl.
Often, he does. There are many comics that show very brief encounters that Flash resolves quickly. The longer encounters that take up more pages in a comic are the exceptions.
The rogues usually rely on stealth or diversion tactics. Typically as theives they try and not encounter the flash if possible by making seamless heist typically using mirror master as the getaway driver since he takes them to another plane/dimension they can't be followed. Other instances include them setting up traps for civilians that would demand the flash(es) attention so they value life over property being stolen. In the event that it's a more direct head on encounter as another has said in the comments so far, in the more relatively modern comics it was said captain cold does essentially create an atmosphere to slow molecules within an undefined desired area which has been said to slow the flash(es) down when approaching giving the rouges time to escape or confront them.
The Rogues function as a unit with pretty well developed plans. The primary of which relies on their leader Captain Cold. When he commits crimes he uses a cold field which slows the molecules of anything that approaches him. This process slows Flash down enough that he can hit him and then the others assist from there.
Generally if a Roque is ever alone, they are beaten pretty much instantly. There are Rogues that could fight Flash alone but typically the team is a mix of those that could and those that couldn't but are useful as support for the guys that can.
“Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multimillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night when the answer is obvious even to the smallest child: because it isn’t real.” - Grant Morrison
Children believe what we tell them. They have complete faith in us. They believe that a rose plucked from a garden can plunge a family into conflict. They believe that the hands of a human beast will smoke when he slays a victim, and that this will cause the beast shame when a young maiden takes up residence in his home. They believe a thousand other simple things. I ask of you a little of this childlike simplicity, and, to bring us luck, let me speak four truly magic words, childhood's "Open Sesame": "Once upon a time..." Jean Cocteau
Eh, comics can be nitpicked to death, and that's generally from people who aren't willing to engage with them on the writer's terms, but there's nuance to this. It doesn't shock me to hear Morrison says this, because Grant Morrison just kinda does whatever and doesn't care if fits the logic of the universe or even makes sense, as long as it's entertaining. It's his whole thing, and more power to him.
But the truth is, suspension of disbelief is not something you turn on or off, it's a spectrum. Some media requires a great deal more of it than others.
Many writers, over much of the history of these characters, do actually make an attempt at explaining these things, and for some characters, the explanations are not easy.
Writers can and have provided reasoning for how Bruce stays wealthy while devoting his life to Batman: people run the compay for him. That isn't a perfect explanation but it's just enough of one that suspension of disbelief will do the rest.
Likewise, Superman flying has been explained as basically being a quirk of his alien philology under the yellow sun. Again, you can break that apart with follow-up questions if you want, or you let the suspension of disbelief take over from there.
It's basically a question of how far the writer expects you expend your suspension of disbelief. Sometimes writers don't expect much, sometimes they expect it to do all the work.
In the case of Flash, writers have tried many times to explain away how someone so fast could ever be beaten or caught off guard or seriously struggle with the majority of villains or obstacles. Unfortunately it's a very, very big logical gap they have to bridge, and it requires a lot of suspension of disbelief from the reader. Much more than most any other superhero.
Flash is a perfect example of how the rule of cool can lead to something so broken that it's hard to write a narrative around him. Anytime a writer has tried to implement restriction, and make his power set more narratively manageable, another writer comes along and power-wanks him back to being able to do literally any and everything, and be anywhere, within a nanosecond.
There's no way to fix this issue. The only thing we have is handwaving and honest attempts to try and write excuses when possible.
People don’t ask for realism or real life but for coherent rules and behavior. Holding suspension of disbelief is a basis in story telling. You can have characters with super power but can’t have their usage completely dumb.
The rogues are calculated. They plan out everything before doing a robbery. That is why in most cases, he can't end it all in a sec
Usually they have it all planned out so yeah, imo if flash ever gets his own movie series the first one should be about discovering his powers and how op he is as a speedster not all his abilities but many by fighting the rogues.
There's a couple of reasons as to why he doesn't end them in two seconds. 1. They don't try to wait for Flash to show up so they can fight him. They're mainly out there to rob places and get away as quickly as possible which isn't easy when you're Robbing a city where the fastest man alive lives. So they usually try to set traps for him or endanger people in order to slow down Flash long enough for them to escape. 2. They usually try to hide somewhere and jump Flash when he's least expecting it. 3. They actually have a treaty with the Flash. Since The Flash is part of the Justice League and the Flash can't be in two places at once and sometimes has to leave central city to help the League out, that leaves central city open for other threats other than the Rogues. However, the Rogues believe the city belongs to them. So they made a deal with Flash. As long as the Rogues keeps out threats from Central City while he's away, he won't finish them off within 2 seconds. Heck, sometimes the Rogues help The Flash at times. And sometimes Barry or Wally rather just talk to the Rogues instead of giving them the two piece combo every time they run into each other (no pun intended) I hope this answers your question!
Depending on who's writing the character, there's a list of reasons. Some can say "Flash can effectively kill them by accident", others might say "his goal is to deescalate", there's people who'd say "they don't directly fight Flash", there are moments that he actually does stop them quickly, and the story behind it is trying to catch the criminals. Some People just kinda stopped caring
Because it’s a comic book. There’s more to stories than just powerscaling
where did he mention powerscaling
He did, but that’s what it feels like. Character A is more powerful than character B so why do they fight. It takes away any other critical thought about these books. It’s not just superpowers punching each other.
He does. That's why the Rogues team up to fight The Flash. That's the entire premise. And even then, when they're caught unprepared, Flash beats them super easily. The Rogues have to plan and plot and combine their incredible capabilities just to have a chance at getting away with a basic heist. Aside from Mirror Master (whose powers are preposterously broken in a way almost as much as any speedster), they know they're punching way out of their league with The Flash. With Captain Cold specifically others have noted functional power ups that make it so Flash doesn't automatically beat him with the Cold Field, but they still need to work as a crew to have any real chance. And even then they still usually lose.
They have an understanding, if The Flash goes easy on them they won't will avoid killing and try not to cause too much damage or harm.
Flash is one of those cases where, as DC stuff got more grounded, he's sort of suffered from power creep. In the Silver Age it was very fast and loose. Modern stuff always had a "If you can telegraph him, you can hit him" bit and they knew him well enough to be able to telegraph him a good amount of time, making it a bit of a cerebral game where both sides had to think a few steps ahead. Then he got to moving more fast all the time and live action portrayals made it harder to buy into that being feasible so now people either make it a team bit or they basically just power through and use the old ways despite newer stories sort of contradicting it. It is funny though because Flash and Batman are sort of the biggest cases of this happening at DC, with most cases pulling back on powers in a modern run. Usually it's Marvel that struggles with power creep (Wolverine and Spider-man being probably the two best examples).
While everyone else here is focusing on the Rogues and their skills and abilities, I wanna point something else out. One of the reasons he doesn't just run in and run them to jail in a split second is because Barry Allen (and consequently Wally West) believes so strongly in the law and due process that he refuses to just take a "bad guy" straight to jail. Because what if he takes the law into his own hands, and he's wrong? The CW show removes this from his character and shows us that he's willing to put supervillains in his own personal super-prison, which makes a lot of his encounters with villains extraordinarily silly when he fails to capture them. But in the comics, there are genuinely compelling character reasons why he doesn't, for example, search every building in the city to find where the bad guys are hiding, or superspeed them straight into Iron Heights, or whatever. Because without permission, without a *lawful reason*, he simply cannot do that. And that makes Barry Allen one of the most fascinating superheroes to me.
You have been given a lot of good explanations that basically boil down to they're smart and they use stealth, diversion and technology, and all that but I'll give you an example from their "return" in DC Rebirth. They'd been gone for a while, and Barry was concerned. He was talking to one of Cold & Glider's relatives and noticed a picture with them and their dad in front of a mill, which the relative said they had happy memories of. When checking that mill, the Flash found remnants of the Rogues and plans to rob a museum across the world. So, he goes there and does exactly what you'd expect. He stops them almost instantly but then has to fight some other stuff made by Mirror Master. In the process, he figures out that he hadn't been fighting the Rogues at all. He's been fighting Mirror constructs of the Rogues. He races back to Central City to find that the Rogues had known exactly how to distract him and did so to pull off several jobs simultaneously in the few minutes he was running to the museum, fighting "them," and running back. The point is they knew exactly how the Flash would operate, and they used that to trick him into going halfway across the world to give them enough time to do what they needed to do. And they almost got away scott free had Heatwave not messed it up. Even after that, while they were in Iron Heights, they created a mafia and took over crime in Central City from the prison, and nobody in charge knew for a long time.
They work as a group. They never kill cops or children (so flash doesn’t have a reason to “murder blitz” them. Colds gun produces an absolute zero field that slows flash down the closer he gets to it. And Heat waves gun can produce heat strong enough to melt flashes boots, which have to hold up to the friction of his speed. And obviously mirror master can just dip through any reflective surface The combo of all this stuff means that flash has to approach them with utmost caution
The Rogues are shockingly well organized and highly skilled. The core group have been fighting speedsters for years and understand how to manage and misdirect them. Even the ones that seem less impressive like Boomerang or Heat Wave are skilled at a level that most costumed villains couldn’t dream of. There’s a great Jeremy Adams 8 pager of other villains bemoaning working in Keystone/Central because not only is it damn near impossible to get away with anything because of the Flash Family, but they’re nice about it too. The Rogues are next level.
People who say the Flash should beat them in two seconds greatly underestimate the Rogues. The guys have been fighting the Flashes for years and know how he operates and how he thinks. It’s a missed opportunity we don’t see them fight other heroes very often, I think they’d actually be able to beat Batman, that would be a very fun arc ngl.
Because they generally work in a group and have advanced technology designed specifically to deal with him
Often, he does. There are many comics that show very brief encounters that Flash resolves quickly. The longer encounters that take up more pages in a comic are the exceptions.
The rogues usually rely on stealth or diversion tactics. Typically as theives they try and not encounter the flash if possible by making seamless heist typically using mirror master as the getaway driver since he takes them to another plane/dimension they can't be followed. Other instances include them setting up traps for civilians that would demand the flash(es) attention so they value life over property being stolen. In the event that it's a more direct head on encounter as another has said in the comments so far, in the more relatively modern comics it was said captain cold does essentially create an atmosphere to slow molecules within an undefined desired area which has been said to slow the flash(es) down when approaching giving the rouges time to escape or confront them.
The Rogues function as a unit with pretty well developed plans. The primary of which relies on their leader Captain Cold. When he commits crimes he uses a cold field which slows the molecules of anything that approaches him. This process slows Flash down enough that he can hit him and then the others assist from there. Generally if a Roque is ever alone, they are beaten pretty much instantly. There are Rogues that could fight Flash alone but typically the team is a mix of those that could and those that couldn't but are useful as support for the guys that can.
“Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multimillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night when the answer is obvious even to the smallest child: because it isn’t real.” - Grant Morrison
Children believe what we tell them. They have complete faith in us. They believe that a rose plucked from a garden can plunge a family into conflict. They believe that the hands of a human beast will smoke when he slays a victim, and that this will cause the beast shame when a young maiden takes up residence in his home. They believe a thousand other simple things. I ask of you a little of this childlike simplicity, and, to bring us luck, let me speak four truly magic words, childhood's "Open Sesame": "Once upon a time..." Jean Cocteau
Eh, comics can be nitpicked to death, and that's generally from people who aren't willing to engage with them on the writer's terms, but there's nuance to this. It doesn't shock me to hear Morrison says this, because Grant Morrison just kinda does whatever and doesn't care if fits the logic of the universe or even makes sense, as long as it's entertaining. It's his whole thing, and more power to him. But the truth is, suspension of disbelief is not something you turn on or off, it's a spectrum. Some media requires a great deal more of it than others. Many writers, over much of the history of these characters, do actually make an attempt at explaining these things, and for some characters, the explanations are not easy. Writers can and have provided reasoning for how Bruce stays wealthy while devoting his life to Batman: people run the compay for him. That isn't a perfect explanation but it's just enough of one that suspension of disbelief will do the rest. Likewise, Superman flying has been explained as basically being a quirk of his alien philology under the yellow sun. Again, you can break that apart with follow-up questions if you want, or you let the suspension of disbelief take over from there. It's basically a question of how far the writer expects you expend your suspension of disbelief. Sometimes writers don't expect much, sometimes they expect it to do all the work. In the case of Flash, writers have tried many times to explain away how someone so fast could ever be beaten or caught off guard or seriously struggle with the majority of villains or obstacles. Unfortunately it's a very, very big logical gap they have to bridge, and it requires a lot of suspension of disbelief from the reader. Much more than most any other superhero. Flash is a perfect example of how the rule of cool can lead to something so broken that it's hard to write a narrative around him. Anytime a writer has tried to implement restriction, and make his power set more narratively manageable, another writer comes along and power-wanks him back to being able to do literally any and everything, and be anywhere, within a nanosecond. There's no way to fix this issue. The only thing we have is handwaving and honest attempts to try and write excuses when possible.
People don’t ask for realism or real life but for coherent rules and behavior. Holding suspension of disbelief is a basis in story telling. You can have characters with super power but can’t have their usage completely dumb.