10 Superheroes Who Broke Their Own Rules

Jay Garrick, Barry Allen, Wally West, Bart Allen and every other speedster in the DC Universe has, to put it delicately, made the timeline scream in unbridled agony multiple times in their history.

Whether that was Barry Allen with a simple super-punch that rocketed the Reverse-Flash through time (The Flash v1 #153), Wally coming back from a future where Linda died to be the Dark Flash or however that arc went in the Teen Titans, or whatever the Chain Lightning storyline was, it always seems that the Flashes of any Earth break the first rule of time travel: DON’T.

The most obvious answer to this particular infraction is Flashpoint, the event that rewrote the entire DC Universe to bring about the New 52. That whole five years of comics happened because Barry went back in time and stopped the Reverse-Flash from killing his mother. The verdict is still out on how Ma Allen being alive caused a war between Atlantis and Themyscira but wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey and all that.

However, the most impactful time he broke the rules of the space-time continuum may in fact be in The Flash: Rebirth when Reverse-Flash uses the Negative Speed Force, poisons the regular Speed Force and forces Barry to become the lightning bolt that struck him to give him his powers.

If that sounds convoluted, it is. He basically made a grandfather loop the likes of which even the Doctor would have to squint at.