The Flash has been one of the most consistently enjoyable and downright fun comic book adaptations since it debuted, and more than most of its peers it is blisteringly unafraid to embrace its comic book origins. In the space of two seasons we've got multiverses, time travel, and an honest-to-gosh Gorilla City, and it paved the way for shows like Arrow and Gotham to lighten up and have more fun.

With no new episodes of The Flash until later this year, you might be looking for something to fill that science-based superhero hole in your life, and we've got five great independent comics for you that, while they might not all feature a super-speedster punching a gorilla in the face, do live up to The Flash's absurdity and unrelenting inventiveness in one way or another!

  • The Five Fists of Science

    Matt Fraction & Steve Sanders

    The Five Fists of Science often goes overlooked in the Matt Fraction ouvre as one of his first pieces of work in the medium, but it stands up as one of his best. The comic stars Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein and Bertha von Suttner teaming up to unite the world into peace through scientific trickery.

    The comic is outlandishly brazen in its historical inaccuracy, and Steve Sanders' designs and expressions sell the comedy perfectly. Over the course of the volume the story gets wilder and introduces more and more historical figures to lampoon, including Tesla's archnemesis Thomas Edison.

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  • Nowhere Men

    Eric Stephenson & Nate Bellegarde

    Nowhere Men posits an alternate history where instead of pop music and The Beatles becoming the coolest thing in the world, four scientists analogous to The Fab Four made science the place to be.

    The series is packed full of interpersonal drama and bizarre science experiments and creatures, and takes the speculative fiction aspect beyond what could be seen as a very narrow concept into something much more engaging.

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  • The Manhattan Projects

    Jonathan Hickman, Nick Pitarra & Jordie Bellaire

    Another speculative fiction science team book, but with a much different edge. The Manhattan Projects is about the group of real-life scientists who worked on the atomic bomb, but establishes that was just a cover for the much weirder stuff they were all getting up to.

    If you're a science buff, a history buff or a superhero fan, there is something in this book for you. Also, Albert Einstein is the Wolverine of the group and he has an alternate Earth counterpart who kinda becomes Conan The Barbarian.

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  • Trillium

    Jeff Lemire & Jose Villarrubia

    Trillum is a book that's a little out there, even for this list. The best way to describe it is that it's a cross-time love story between an explorer in 1921 and a scientist in 3797.

    The two lead characters find a mysterious temple in their own times that lead them to meet, and soon their budding romance threatens the entire fabric of time and space.

    The first issue was even released as a flipbook with the events told from each characters perspectives depending on which end you started from.

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  • MPH

    Mark Millar & Duncan Fegredo

    MPH is a Mark Millar comic, and a lot of people reading this will know instantly if that's something they want to read or not, and understandably so. It follows a group of teens in Detroit who gain access to a new drug which gives them super-speed, and the highs and lows this new power affords them.

    Millar's attempts at social commentary can be — to be charitable — choppy at times, but he's always had an eye for talent and Duncan Fegredo is the absolute star of this book and makes it worth a look just for his art alone.

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