The Flash: Vibe is DC’s Most Powerful Metahuman in The Comics

From the moment The Flash returned to television, it wasn’t the Scarlet Speedster that caught audiences’ attention. The prize of fan-favorite was swiftly awarded to the Flash’s friend and superhero tech support Cisco Ramon (Carlos Valdes). While the show went almost out of its way in early seasons to portray the pop-culture enthusiast and everything engineer as the nebbish sidekick, the comic character is anything but.

Cisco Ramon, aka Vibe, first appeared in comics in 1984. Then Paco Ramone, he was portrayed as the breakdancing leader of a Detroit street gang who left his crew to join the Justice League of America. The questionable character origins – breakdancing included – were abandoned in Vibe’s solo The New 52 run where Cisco Ramon was given the more mundane career of an employee at a fictionalized version of Best Buy, and a childhood packed with the trauma of the loss of an older brother to Darkseid’s boom tubes. His powers, originally the ability to shoot blasts of shockwaves from his hands, grew into something more.

In the Justice League of America’s Vibe, Amanda Waller takes note of Cisco as he stops burglaries and petty crimes on the low. She recruits him for the Justice League of America, setting him up to fight interdimensional beings known as “breachers” slipping through into our universe. Employing him, as Cisco frankly puts it, as “a border cop”. The unscrupulous A.R.G.U.S leader throws tests his way, pushing his abilities in the name of ‘training’ while using the JLA job to keep him monitored and on a tight leash. As a human breacher detector with powers that pack a punch, it’s easy to see why Waller would be interested in keeping him close. “Cisco Ramon might be one of the most powerful super-humans on the planet,” she stated, noting that his powers could “in theory, shake the Earth apart.”

While no Earth-shaking occurs, Vibe’s powers certainly expanded through The New 52 run to include psychometry, dimension-hopping, and the ability to cut off Speedsters from the Speed Force itself. The cocktail of vibrational and frequency manipulating powers made the wide-eyed hero insanely powerful – something that the New 52 wasn’t able to explore in the ten issues Justice League of America’s Vibe ran.

Fans of the current The Flash television series have expressed frustration at the ongoing treatment of Cisco Ramon and, by extension, the uber-powerful Vibe. The series has been known to bench the meta by injury or illness – a conk on the noggin or a slice from Cicada’s dagger – or by simply stating the powers don’t work on the baddie-of-the-week…because reasons. Recently, The Flash had Cisco create and take a meta-human “cure”. The choice to have him take the cure, effectively neutering DC’s most powerful hero, smacks of tired writing by a team exhausted with trying to work around Vibe’s powers instead of leaning into the vast potential of the character.

Cisco Ramon, in both comics and TV, is a character who rose above odd character choices to become truly memorable. From the too-short comic run to the television character played with both broad comic strokes and surprising care and subtlety by Valdes on The Flash, Vibe has endured and moved beyond the limits set for him. Like Waller, audiences will be continuing to keep their eye on the vibe-blasting meta. Meanwhile, uninitiated readers should definitely take the dive in Justice League of America’s Vibe and discover the most powerful meta-human for themselves.

Next: The Flash Season 7 Will Reportedly Start Filming Next Week

Source: DC Comics.

About The Author

Bug Norman
(127 Articles Published)

Bug Norman is writer, reader, and lover of popcorn television. A current ESL educator, she’s answered phones, scrubbed toilets, worked as an intern on a film set, and now writes comic news for Screen Rant. She currently travels the world teaching English, and video chats with her elderly cat, McGonagall.

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