What is the Speed Force? What happened to it?
The “speed force” is an energy field from which speedsters draw their power. As speedsters approaches the speed of light, they begin to interact more directly with it. If they’re not careful, they can be absorbed by the field, or they can bounce off it, which usually leads to a trip forward in time. Max Mercury knew the most about the speed force, while Wally West and Savitar were the most adept at channeling it. The concept was introduced in 1994, during Wally West’s tenure as the Flash. During Infinite Crisis, the Flash (Wally) and Kid Flash (Bart) trapped the villainous Superboy-Prime in an alternate world beyond the speed force. With the aid of Barry, Max, and Johnny Quick, they held Superboy prisoner for several years. When he escaped, Bart absorbed the speed force in order to return to the main universe ahead of him. Only Bart could sense it or draw power from it, and doing so threatened to kill him. In the final storyline in Bart’s series, Inertia used a machine to extract the s
The “speed force” is an energy field from which speedsters draw their power. As speedsters approach the speed of light, they begin to interact more directly with it. If they’re not careful, they can be absorbed by the field, or they can bounce off it, which usually leads to a trip forward in time. Max Mercury knew the most about the speed force, while Wally West and Savitar were the most adept at channeling it. The concept was introduced in 1994, during Wally West’s tenure as the Flash. During Flash: Rebirth (2009), it was revealed that the speed force was created by the accident that gave Barry Allen his powers, and that his running actually powers the speed force. It exists outside of time (which is why speedsters could exist before Barry Allen), and acts as a portal to other times and dimensions.
