The Flash has defeated an enormous amount of villains in his time-fighting crime, but one absolutely nobody villain got the best of him.
The Flash is the fastest man alive in the DC Universe and, as one might expect, this means he needs strong and dangerous villains to fight. Whether it’s Barry Allen or Wally West, the Scarlet Speedster has faced the likes of a psychopathic speedster or a telepathic gorilla, but one villain beats Flash with almost nothing.
Flash has some of the strongest powers in the DC Universe, able to move faster than the speed of light, phase through solid objects, create torrents of wind from the motion of his hands and even run back in time or across dimensions. This absurd host of powers meant that Flash also needed an absurd host of villains, while characters like Batman or Superman usually fight their villains one on one, The Flash often had his villains team up just to fight him evenly. Flash’s villains The Rogues are some of the greatest villains DC has to offer, and it’s entirely because they’re a group that needs to team up to take down their individual hero. But despite all of this, the one villain that made Flash hang up his cowl wasn’t Gorilla Grodd, Eobard Thawne, or even The Rogues. It was a man named Diogenes.
Readers were able to see the villain that finally put Flash out of business way back in Mark Waid and Craig Brasfield’s Flash Annual #4. While trying to look for the hero that would grow up to end the world, the character Waverider peers into Flash’s possible future. Peering 14 years into the future, Waverider sees a Flash that has started a family, married a woman named Bonnie, and had a son named David. David even has Flash’s powers but can’t use them, since the family is in witness protection, hiding from the villain Diogenes. When a woman named Bonnie Blackmon reached out to Flash, it pulled Flash into the biggest crime syndicate in the world and ended with Flash being forced into retirement.
Diogenes Forced Flash To Give Up His Mantle
Diogenes wasn’t the typical villain that Flash fought, he wasn’t a man with super speed or a magician from the future. He was a simple man with a simple power, anyone he touched, he’d gain complete knowledge of. Including their wants and desires. Diogenes used this to move up in the criminal underworld, making friends with politicians or anyone else he needed. It was this simple power that forced Wally West to retire as Flash. While Bonnie and Wally were able to send Diogenes to prison, he gained managed to touch both Wally and Bonnie on his way there, which allowed him to have Wally’s mother murdered and threaten Bonnie’s life. With Diogenes having intimate knowledge of every single aspect of their lives, Wally had no choice but to give up being the Flash and go into witness protection. This shows that for as heroic and powerful as Wally is if his family is put into the firing line, he’ll give up anything to protect them, which is exactly how a man with only a useful power managed to do something that literal world destroyers haven’t been able to.
The Flash is one of the greatest heroes of all time, but even he can’t be everywhere at once. While Flash will try to save everyone he can, when his family comes under fire the only thing he could do to protect them was give up being a hero, which is exactly how a nobody like Diogenes beat him.