I will say that the revelation enraged fandom on an Identity Crisis scale. I won’t reveal the culprit, or even the suspects. This story, sad to say, is one of the bad ones. In the bad ones, the heroes flail around for a while chasing clues, and then the culprit presents himself for a spontaneous confession. In the good ones, a series of clues leads the heroes to both deduce and prove the identity of the killer. ![]() There are good mystery stories and bad ones. The main plot of Heroes in Crisis is a mass murder mystery with a gaggle of C-list heroes as the victims.I guess Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy are lovers or something? Not all close relationships have to be sexual… ěooster Gold’s bromance with Blue Beetle is even kinda nice, evoking the military esprit de corps with which King is well acquainted.I think of him as vaingloriously insufferable like Crackerjack in Astro City, but King writes him just more as a brash source of endlessly convenient tech. My understanding is that he’s a time traveler who uses future tech to play hero in the present. Her constant homicidality only elicits clucking disapproval from the heroes playing straight man to her. Harley is this generation’s Deadpool, a zany cartoon of loony dialogue and absurdly unstoppable omni-competency. This time around, the main characters are Booster Gold and Harley Quinn, about whom I have no fond feelings and moderate negative feelings, respectively. King has previously taken second string characters like Omega Men and Mister Miracle and Vision and built really interesting stories around them.Really, if the whole series were limited to just these scenes, maybe doled out monthly in a “Direct Currents” column running in all DC comics, it might have been declared an unmitigated success. Tom King previously wrote a Vision series in which the Vision’s attempt to create a family went catastrophically wrong, making this panel drenched in irony. The Red Tornado panel below is a joke keying off the similarities between Red Tornado and The Vision. ![]() King wrings plenty of pathos and laughs out of those scenes, zipping through many characters with just a single panel each.Artist Clay Mann shines on the expression and body language in these scenes, as when Arsenal (the former Speedy, Green Arrow’s sidekick) recounts the origins of his narcotics addiction, a familiar tale among soldiers. The best part of the series is the testimonials, which give King a chance to show each hero as a different person.They work out their hangups through video testimonials and virtual reality re-enactments of encounters with those who have helped and hurt them before, their families, or even themselves. ![]() ![]() The central premise is that various PTSD-inflicted heroes and semi-heroes and semi-villains come to a rural retreat set up by Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.
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