First, I have to say that turning Flash Thompson into a high-school gym coach forced to face down the ghost of himself past is a brilliant move. I could almost just read a whole comic about that issue alone!
The new job is an important step for this reborn series, in part because Flash needs SOME people in his new life. As he mentions, Katy is his only friend (and I'm pretty sure that she doesn't live in Philly) and Peter has stopped returning his calls (for reasons that anyone reading "Amazing Spider-Man" understands). If Flash isn't going to be sitting around his apartment by himself (not exactly a great idea for an alcoholic), he needs to be in the world. The gym-teacher angle is just an inspired way to do it.
That said, the rest of this issue is a little weird. Flash patrols the street trying to find the experimental weapons that some group of criminals apparently released onto the streets in Philly, but I was distracted since I don't remember who did that. I thought the U-Foes only had one weird weapon, not a whole bunch of them. So, I'm not sure if I'm remembering it wrong or Bunn is alluding to an event that I forgot entirely. Either way, Flash locates a guy who's been turned into a monster by the experimental weapons, sparking a flashback sequence that also oddly seems that Flash and Toxin were subject to experiments by the same doctor as the one who experimented on the guy. I was definitely confused here and I'm not sure if it was Bunn not explaining or Shalvey making different flashbacks look the same. At any rate, Flash seemed pretty distracted here, since it seems weird that he could take on the entire U-Foes team but not be able to keep this guy from escaping. But, I guess that stopping him would've kept him from stumbling onto Toxin, who, for reasons also unclear to me, is just sitting in alleyways waiting for people to eat to stumble into his path.
As I said, it was a weird issue. I like the gym-teacher angle, but I feel like we could tighten up the action sequences a bit, particularly since it's getting a little hard to believe all these menaces are just wandering around Philly. I mean, I get that Bunn uses the release of the experimental weapons as the excuse for this sudden uptick in meta-human activity, but it doesn't help when the details of the release are unclear. Hopefully we'll get more information next issue.
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