After years of success in comics and on the small screen, the Flash is finally getting his first live action movie! (It’s not often that the Scarlet Speedster is late to something, but in this case, we’d say he’s well overdue.) At this point, we’re going to assume most of you know who Barry Allen is. You know, good sense of humor, wears red and yellow, runs really fast. But there’s far more to the Flash’s powers than just speed—or to get more technical about it, that speed of his can allow him to do some truly remarkable things.

What are we talking about exactly? Well, sit back and we’ll show you. Faster than the speed of sound, the speed of light and even death itself, here are five examples of Flash’s greatest feats of speed!
 

1) The Flash Safely Lands a Crashing Airplane

In 2011’s The Flash #3, an electromagnetic pulse sends shockwaves all over both Central City and Keystone City, knocking out all power. As a nearby airplane begins to drop out of the sky, the Flash races off the ground and vibrates his way into the plane. Has he run into his doom along with the rest of the passengers? Thinking quickly, Flash vibrates the entire plane from the speed of his body alone, making everyone and everything inside move at such a high-speed frequency that their molecules phase through the very bridge and water they were about to crash into below.

With the plane landing onshore, the Flash briefly collapses—exhausted from the newfound use of his abilities. Still, hundreds of people emerge from the crash safe and sound, as the Flash makes a speedy escape towards the next calamity, having achieved a new use of his super-fast abilities.
 

2) The Flash Evacuates an Entire City in a Millisecond

In the JLA storyline “Trial by Fire,” J’onn J’onzz a.k.a. the Martian Manhunter is possessed by an ancient being from his home planet of Mars known as the Burning Martian. An evil entity, the Burning Martian sets off a nuclear bomb in the North Korean city of Chongjin. Although Superman was unable to stop the missile from hitting its target, the Flash fortunately proves to be much faster.

Racing in at .00001 microseconds, the Flash saves everyone in the city, running them safely away from the warhead with far enough distance to not be affected by the radiation. Green Lantern would later contain the city with the power of his ring, and after the Burning Martian was defeated, the League worked to restore Chongjin to its former status before the explosion. Luckily for everyone involved, the Flash’s reaction time was a millionth of a second faster than the speed of man-made nuclear weapons.
 

3) The Flash Outraces His Own Death

In The Flash #130, Wally West is greeted by Jay Garrick and Max Mercury who inform him that he was found dead in the street, with a note pinned to his costume warning that he had sixty minutes to prevent his own murder. We soon learn that the death-trap was enacted by the Suit—a sentient super-villain costume that takes the host’s lifeforce and goes from person to person, killing the wearer.

Having absorbed the body of the Fashioneer—a criminal with the power to freeze people in time—the suit freezes Flash in place and taunts him with his death one hour in the future. However, we learn that in a bit of quick-thinking, the Flash faked his death by racing twelve hours back in time and counter-vibrating into his past self, sending him into molecular shock, which took on the form of a fake death. Right as the Flash had calculated, the past-Wally awakens in time to race into the exact moment which the Suit was set to freeze and kill him, outracing death and saving his own life.

It’s crazy, brilliant and will probably be no surprise at all for you to hear that this issue was written by Grant Morrison.
 

4) The Flash Races Across Dimensions for the Fate of the Universe

Speaking of Morrison, in The Flash #136’s “The Human Race,” another of their storylines, the Earth is approached by the Cosmic Gamblers, who wage the fate of two planets—Earth and Kwyzz—on a cross-dimensional footrace. The Flash agrees to represent Earth, and racing across space, time, galaxies, universes and even into the collapsing star of a black hole, he runs as fast as he ever has. But he’s still far behind Krakkl, his Kwyzz-representing.

Knowing that he’s not long for the race after running near-nonstop for several days, Flash learns that the way to win is to have the cumulative energy of the planets run alongside his own speed to match it. Signaling to the entire world to all run together, and with several more speedsters including Impulse, Jesse Quick and Superman racing in toe on Earth, Flash outraces the Gamblers’ own Instantaneous Travel and wins the race, with the guarantee that both Earth and the planet Kwyzz would be spared.
 

5) The Flash Runs So Fast, He Becomes Omnipresent

Living between the ticks of a second, the Flash has moved beyond the mere power of a speedster in the seminal miniseries Kingdom Come. In a world ten years moved on from the retirement of Superman, the destruction of Kansas and Metropolis and the dawn of the Dark Age of Heroes, the Flash is now a being of near-pure energy. Constantly moving and constantly running, this Flash is lost in his role as protector of Keystone City and has removed himself from humanity.

So fast he’s both invisible and consistently visible, a red blur stretches across the city and across the time and space in which Flash occupies himself in. So hyper-fast that his senses are attuned to different frequencies of existence, the Flash spots the presence of Norman McKay, a kindly old pastor who was being shown the sequence of events by the Spectre, outside the realm of reality. It’s through the Flash’s super abilities that McKay is able to talk to Superman and start the process that sees the redemption of the world’s greatest heroes.
 

The Flash, directed by Andy Muschietti and starring Ezra Miller as Barry Allen, is in theaters June 16th. Visit our official Flash hub for more news, interviews and videos about the Flash!

Donovan Morgan Grant writes about comics, graphic novels and superhero history for DC.com. Follow him on Twitter at @donoDMG1.

NOTE: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of Alex Jaffe and do not necessarily reflect those of DC Entertainment or Warner Bros., nor should they be read as confirmation or denial of future DC plans.