#73 - Heroes in Crisis (Part 3)

Oh goody, Heroes in Crisis, time to put this garbage to bed. Here’s a recap of what I’ve covered so far: A bloody massacre as occurred at the strange and stupidly run facility known as the Sanctuary, tapes that shouldn’t exist were leaked to Lois Lane and rather than giving essential evidence to the Justice League, she wrote an article.

Superman makes a statement to the press rather than actually looking for the killer. That honour goes to Booster gold, who after claiming innocence under the Lasso of truth, something I will not drop btw, is pursued by Harley Quinn and Batgirl who still think he’s the murderer for some reason. On his side is Ted Kord, who has donned his pre-new 52 appearance because Tom King and Jamie S Rich don’t know jack about DC continuity. And most of you are probably still wondering why I spent half my first review giving you the backstory of Wally West when he’s been dead the whole time. But don’t worry, answers will follow. Also, this is all that’s happened in 5 issues.

#6 is, oh you’ve got to be kidding me, it’s another flashback issue? We’ve still got 3 issues to go, so we’re not gonna get much info out of it. I wonder if these issues were just an excuse to get in a fill-in artist. Clay Mann, the regular artist for this series did only 2 pages for #3 and #6 with Lee Weeks doing the bulk of #3 and Mitch Gerads doing #6. And their artwork is perfectly fine, for the most part. Here’s the thing though, War of the Realms was Marvel’s event this year. It shipped twice a moth and the Artist, Russel Dauterman did the entire story without needing a fill in artist. Yes, I find the constant delays with Doomsday Clock frustrating. But I’m not asking them to extend the story with pointless sh*t to tide you over between issues.

Huzzah, Harley’s upside down on the cover and the floor covered in blood. What a way to sell this book. So, guess what kind of pages Clay Man actually drew for this, 9 panels of talking heads. We’ve got 3 characters on this one, Gnarrk, Wally and Harley Quinn… They’re each answering the same questions, which tells me the sanctuary has questions pre-programmed. This seems counter-productive to helping them with trauma, which is different for everyone but by now you've probably realises that the Sanctuary in all its forms is a terrible idea.

Sum it up, Gnarrk is confused, Wally is defeatist and Harley is confrontational. Got that? Good, we’re moving on. Gnarrk remembers the world before he was frozen, he’s from caveman times. So with the sanctuary’s illusions, he’s on the back of a mammoth, watching the moon and reading poetry. OK, we’re gonna get a scene from DC Rebirth going to act like it’s supposed to be that scene and not a reflection of Wally’s mindset because I have a serious point to make. In DC Rebirth, Barry managed to pull Wally out of being trapped in the Speed Force.

The two hug and we get this line

“Do you know what this means? This is the return of… Hope!”

You might’ve guessed this line was not in the DC Rebirth special and for good reason. Wally is symbolic of hope TO THE READERS! A sign of the end of the dark era of storytelling the New52 glorified (it didn’t last, did it?). To the characters, he’s someone they know and love coming back from the dead, essentially at least. Barry should not symbolise Wally with hope, nor should anyone else, yet this is the crux of the narrative around Wally, and we will get to this.

Cut to Harley and Ivy and Harley is bored, she’s not even supposed to be there and Ivy (is she supposed to be there?) tells her the trinity is likely to come and kick her out, Harley says at least then she won’t be bored. Riveting. Gnarrk is fighting a sabre-tooth tiger with a rock, spouting out words… these words aren’t particularly interesting. We see Superman, Nightwing, Donna and Roy all hug Wally and tell him he’s hope. I refer you my previous rant on this point. Obviously, it’s had a detrimental effect on Wally and that’s why he’s here.

In the Sanctuary, Harley gets to chance to punch the Joker, Ivy stands in a very awkward pose and Harley doesn’t look that happy and is in fact crying after hitting the Joker. Honestly, this is understandable, but it’s also another insight into how the Sanctuary is the worst facility ever. Gnarrk’s journey on the mammoth to make peace with something. This is a conflict that was established in this issue and just as easily resolved. If this is an attempt to gather sympathy for him, you’re 5 issues too late.

It’s not so easy for Wally though, as the Titans are so happy to have him but he’s miserable without Linda and the kids. Harley and Ivy have a heart-to-heart which should be filled with longer bits of dialogue but it’s so short and snappy it doesn’t actually work. We’re back with Gnarrk for some reason, as he fights someone, Wally spends a page wallowing over his issues, he’s not even in front of a camera.

Ivy helps Harley by killing the Joker herself in multiple unpleasant ways (it’s Sanctuary illusions still) this seems to work, as it has Harley laughing like a child. Gnark takes a full page to say he’s done, just as the emergency starts. Wally emerges from bright light and says “wait, slow down.” Ivy tells Harley to stay in the chamber, expecting the whole thing to be a drill, this I will get back to. We then see Gnarrk dying with the Protector, this takes a whole page, we then get a whole page of Wally mourning Roy before being blasted to death by Booster. Harley happens to walk on this.

OK, so there’s clearly illusions at work here, except #3 made that kinda obvious anyway, final page of talking heads, here we go. I guess these people were all asked how many people they saved. Commander Steel is stoic, Blue Jay asks if being from another world counts, Solstice has an exact number, Kid Devil is excited, Hot Spot has no clue, Nemesis says no-one you’ve ever heard of, Arsenal is confrontational, Gunfire makes an anti-gun statement, and the Tattooed man just spouts nonsense. What was the point of this?  

You know what I said about fill-in artists? They were so desperate to get #7 out on time, we have 3 different artists here. Travis Moore has already been doing work on the series, he handled the 3 pages where Booster met Barry in #2, and the lab break-in in #5 (alongside the bit with Clark and Lois going over the speech together) #7 is the first time he’s credited on the cover, having done 8 of the 24 pages of the book, with Jorge Fornes stepping in for a further 3 pages.

The cover of #7 echoes with Superman flying at the audience saying “ENOUGH!” Superman is not in this issue, in fact he doesn’t really appear again in the entire book. Even ignoring that, all the lines on Superman’s face, he looks off, also does Booster usually carry a Legion flight ring? We see his hand on the left side of the page, along with a blood covered mallet, presumably Harley’s.

We open to a garden in the Sanctuary, Wally reads a poem Linda read at their wedding, as he uses the Speed Force to bring a rose back to life. Wait, what? Harley and Booster fight and apparently the force-fields, which are confirmed here to have been previously damaged, are working again and protecting him. Harley’s nursery rhyme thing is stupid, but we’ve got to wait for that. Batgirl and Ted stand on the sidelines talking.

We cut to everyone’s favourite part of Heroes in Crisis, talking heads. You are so desperate to emulate Watchmen but fail so miserably. Anyway, it’s Wally’s first day at the sanctuary and nothing of importance is said. Barry runs over to Bruce and oh my god, what is with this green tint on Batman. I think it’s supposed to be the computers but the computers are all blank. Is Batman just staring at empty screens?

Wally comes in and speaks words so fast even I can’t make any sense of them? Batman’s sure it has something to do with Booster. Ted Kord confirms that that he hooked up the shields to the bug, which is tied to his consciousness? NO! That’s stupid, Batgirl knocks him out with a single punch, from that angle I doubt that could’ve actually hurt a fly on his face but that’s the shield taken care of, and outside you’re probably hearing the bug crashing down on top of civilians, thanks Batgirl.

Without shields, Booster is on the ropes but Batgirl stops Harley from killing him. We get more talking heads from Wally, thinking about his lost wife and kids (again), he’s been at sanctuary and there’s another problem with Sanctuary I want to bring up. People are living there, they are spending their lives moving on, they’re spending them trapped trying to fix themselves with no contact with the outside world. This is really really dumb!

Batman is monitoring safe-houses Booster and Ted are likely to use, and the Flash is searching continent by continent (yeah, they’re in the US, probably best to start there) there’s an ill-placed joke about whether the Flash is faster than radio. With Booster down, he tells Harley to kill him, he failed the future, he failed the past, this is all bullsh*t. Harley is about to kill him, and wait, didn’t Batgirl drag her away in the last scene? Anyway, of course she doesn’t kill Booster and lies down with him, saying that the nursery rhymes she’s been spouting is her attempt at being talkative whilst heroing. No, just no… I’ve not read her solo book but I can guarantee she’s never done this before.

We’re into the second week with Wally and we get a recap of his origin, again, we already knew all this information, what is the point of this. Wally zaps more speed force energy into the flower and out grows a now Green Poison Ivy. I don’t get it, I hear it’s related to the Green from Swamp Thing but I don’t know what that means, I’m not reading Swamp Thing.

So Booster and Ted tell Batgirl and Harley about Wally’s body, it’s been 5 days since the incident so the body could be from this time. Skeets might be able to find him if Ted can activate a grid to search for time disturbances which Batgirl can then connect Skeets to it. This feels ludicrously over-complicated when Time-Travel is one of Booster’s main gimmicks.

They decide to go just the 4 of them to hopefully save Wally from whatever he’s gotten himself into. Yes, Wally’s great friends… Booster Gold, Batgirl, Ted Kord and Harley Quinn. No Barry, none of the Titans (I’m excluding Nightwing since he was shot in the head and got his personality wired), none of his colleagues from the Justice League, no these 4 are the ones he really needs.

Batman tells the Flash that alarms have been triggered at the safe-houses, for some reason and it’s at this point where they stop having any role in the story. Yes, I’m serious, especially given what #8 is about to reveal to us. Wally tells Ivy he’s sorry for what she’s about to see as another version of Wally appears, she’ll see his death. We close with more talking heads, Wally’s been at Sanctuary for 3 weeks and still isn’t healed, can’t wait for week 4.

OK, there is a pretty major clash with the artistic style of Jorge Fornes and the others.

#6 and #7 make it obvious where this is leading, but before we get to that, #8. And Clay Mann must’ve been falling far behind at this point because he’s absent for yet another issue. Mitch Gerads does the art for 16 pages of the book, whilst Travis Moore does 4 pages. Gerads art is perfectly fine, #6 looked decent enough, and Travis Moore’s is, in my opinion, better than Mann’s whilst staying fairly consistent in terms of style and colour.

It’s another flashback issue, but this one is the final answer to the mystery so at least it’s actually progressing the plot this time. And now we’ve got a problem with the art. Most pages have 3 panels, those that don’t are either splash pages or 2-page spreads. This is kinda boring. And I gotta say, Moore’s artwork in this issue looks unfinished, all in this awful grey monotone background.

OK, so this issue is it. Wally’s confession (spoilers). This issue is loaded with exposition and narration, a lot of it repeated from previous issues. I’m going to summarise this issue, because outside of what the narration tells you, nothing of consequence actually happens. (I know this is shocking)

Wally had been at the Sanctuary for over 3 weeks, and he felt very alone, everything is anonymous at the Sanctuary so people feel comfortable sharing their secrets, but at the same time that means none of them have any support network, the Sanctuary is second only to Arkham Asylum as a mental hospital in how awful it is.

Wally somehow uses the Speed Force to reassemble the Sanctuary’s deleted data for reasons I don’t get. He saw that he wasn’t alone and it only succeeded in breaking him further. Overwhelmed by it all, he zooms outside, sparkling with lightning, in so doing he trips an alarm that has everyone leave. With everyone outside, Wally blasts everyone with Speed Force lightning, killing them instantly. Apart from Booster and Harley who weren’t outside. 

He then stages an elaborate crime scene, and uses the tech from the Sanctuary to make Harley and Booster believe that the other did the deed. He tried to borrow Booster’s tech, which he does successfully, disabling his force-fields in the process, and travels 5 days into the future to meet his future self. His future self tells him about the Rose Harley threw into Gotham River and tells him to plant it so he can bring back Poison Ivy. Past wally prepares to kill future Wally.

He then brings the body back to the past and stages the crime scene to make it look like either Harley or Booster committed the murders. He then destroyed the robots and wrote the message on the wall about the Puddlers, he then sent all the tapes over the Lois Lane.

I have some opinions about this…

Let’s start with the tapes, because this in and of itself is pretty dumb. Wally somehow found data and is able to assemble it, that doesn’t sound in line with his powers to me, but I’m not a Flash expert so I could be wrong. But here’s the thing, the existence of the data fragments proves that Wally isn’t alone, he did not need to assemble them and in the process put targets on the backs of literally everyone who ever went to Sanctuary.

Then the who Speed Force creates lightning attack that kills everyone, what in the absolute hell? When this ever been established as something he can do? I know that Flashes can shoot lightning, but that actually requires more control. But at the end of the day, what happened was a tragic accident… But then comes what happens next

Wally stages an elaborate crime scene, changing the locations of bodies, planting evidence, and turning Booster and Harley against each other. This is the act of an outright villain. There’s no excuse for this, he can’t blame this on his lack of husband and children, he can’t believe this on being alone. He created a situation where Harley and Booster, who are already in pretty poor mental states, something Wally knows full well by the way, and turn them on each other, and get the entire superhero community after them.

With this action, Wally loses any right to the term ‘hero.’ He is now a villain, no better than anyone he’s fought. Hell, most of his villains would probably raise eyebrows at this too. And to make matters worse, he confesses to the crime and sends his confession to Lois? So what was the point? To buy himself time, well that can’t be right, he has access to time travel technology, he can make peace with Ivy and make it back before he even left.

This is character assassination, plain and simple. Whilst it’s not necessarily a bad thing to take Wally in a new direction, especially given that Barry is the flash, this flies against his character, and will be sure to p*ss off readers. They could be put off Wally for good because of this which is a shame. Wally was the Flash for decades; he was part of the Justice League cartoon (although they gave him Barry’s origin) that many grew up with. And to see his legacy handled so callously by not just Tom King, but the higher ups at DC is heart-breaking, flying in the face of all the good will Geoff Johns brought back to DC with DC Rebirth #1, hell Wally is still promised to be involved in Doomsday Clock (after 5 years, when the next issue actually comes out) this is why I spent a good half of my first review going over Wally’s history.

I never even mentioned the cover, which is fine, Wally and his Sanctuary-made family staring at a cornfield in the sunset. It’s calming, but the storm is in the issue. So, want to see how they resolve this mess? #9 Clay Mann actually draws this entire issue, so let’s see what they were saving him for. The cover looks fine, let’s move into the issue itself.

OK, we open with more talking heads and by this point I think they’ve just given up trying to deep and it’s all basically lines from a stand-up routine. We get a splash page featuring the title and the bug speeding along in the background, it’s very small.

So past Wally is about to kill future Wally when the bug crashes straight into them. We get another 9 pages of talking such riveting dialogue as “You ever see that old movie? The one where the guy has to do thing. I think that’s me. I’m the one who has to do the thing” Go home, Jaime, you’re drunk. Hal Jordan says “I don’t know what the hell “Will” is. Do you?” Earth’s greatest Green Lantern, god this comic is dreadful.

So, team who gives a sh*t come out and practice their posing. It looks dreadful. Harley sees Ivy still alive and we get that explanation that involves the Green that I’m not gonna waste time, Harley and Ivy embrace and cut to another bunch of quotes from a stand-up routine. Who could forget such classic dialogue as...?

“The Ocean is Large and contains multitudes. And so are we, I think. So do we. I hope.”

So Future Wally informs past Wally that he’s not alone, and I really can’t work out how he’s come to that realisation, I guess it’s because each of the 5 characters before him represent a different a different facet of his pain, I think that’s what they’re going for.

Booster has tried to do good and failed

Batgirl has been hurt and that become a part of her

Ted has had a person he trusts end his life

Harley has tried to turn away from the madness and ended up running back to it

Ivy has done terrible things and will forever be trying to make up for them

OK, this wasn’t Wally trying to do good, he hurt people by accident and then hurt people deliberately trying to cover it up. I’ll grant you Batgirl, but the comparison to Ted is forced, especially since we don’t know whether Maxwell Lord (and hence Ted's death) is even in this continuity. Don’t know what the point he’s making with Harley is and I suspect Ivy will be back to semi-villainy the next time a writer not named Tom King is writing her.

9 more panels of talking heads, including Sideways who just shouldn’t be there, Dr Light talking about her rapist counterpart, Damian Wayne who along with Cass should not be there, because they clearly don’t want to be. Kyle Rayner speaking in Spanish for no reason (he is Hispanic but he didn’t find out until fairly late in his life, the dialogue would’ve been better given to Jaime, anything would’ve been better than what he actually said). Wally says he can’t undo what he’s done because that would be essentially creating another Flashpoint, uh huh, but his purpose in showing the tapes to Lois is to potentially help people like him by showing that they’re not alone and…

THIS IS STUPID AND MAKES NO SENSE! They wanted to be anonymous, many of them have secret identities that you’ve just compromised! Incidentally, this is something Wally should know. His identity was public for a time and it had massive consequences on his life to the point where he made a deal with the Spectre to hide it again. And his frame-up was all to buy him time to… It was an accident, surprisingly, heroes can be understanding of accidents, maybe they’d be realise that Sanctuary is a terrible, terrible idea.

OK, I’m gonna wrap things up, there’s talking about Wally killing himself (what is it with Tom King and suicide?) but Booster interjects saying he can travel to the future and whip up a clone that can be used as a stand-in for Wally’s body, thereby fulfilling the timeline without Wally actually being dead, just his clone. We get a reprisal of the idiotic ‘bros before heroes’ line. Harley kicks Wally in the balls because he did kill her girlfriend and frame her for murder.

9 more talking heads including Catwoman saying ‘meeoww’ because that’s totally necessary, Raven talking about how her father loves her, you know her father, Trigon, the demon and Red Tornado being there despite being a robot. Wally gets arrested and we get closing narration about how being a symbol of hope is not just about being hopeful it’s about carrying the load and moving on anyway. Except Wally, you didn’t, you did the exact opposite of that.

OK, so that was Heroes in Crisis and I’m so tired… But I suppose by this point it goes without saying that THESE COMICS GIVE ME RAGE ISSUES!!!

Look, let’s put aside my issues with the reveal, I think I’ve gone over that in enough detail. Let’s look at the other problems with this book. People are murdered in the 1^st issue, in Identity Crisis, the murder of a civilian who was a loved one of a minor hero got the entire superhero community on alert. Everyone was searching for answers, from the highest ranks of the Justice League to New Gods from New Genesis.

In this story, literally dozens of heroes are murdered, and the only people to do anything about it are the trinity and the Flash (and Booster, Ted and Batgirl, I guess) why aren’t there others doing anything, why isn’t there a superhero manhunt for Booster if he was that high priority a suspect, and for that matter, why was the fact he said he was innocent under the lasso ignored? 2 conflicting testimonies both under the Lasso (assuming Harley’s was, it’s hard to tell) should’ve made the League consider possible external factors affecting their memories. And it's not like they're short of telepaths at the moment. Martian Manhunter's 'death' hadn't happened yet and Miss Martian was an active agent of the League, and Jarro, you could have used Jarro, I guess.

And for that matter, there’s no reason the suspect list had to be restricted to the two of them, there are a whole assortment of characters who were not among the dead who knew about Sanctuary. The fact that the data was being assembled could be a massive clue, and narrow down suspects to those with computer skills. What I’m saying is there were outs that didn’t involve Wally being the murderer.

But of course, Wally had to be, because without that, they couldn’t make their grand statement on Mental Health and Superheroes. A moral they butchered less than half-way through the first issue. Because then the mental health stopped being the focus, it was on the massacre, and it couldn’t be on anything else. And considering what that massacre was an analogy for, the moral seems to be if is if you take someone’s wife and kids away from them and don’t give them help, they will become mass shooter. This is a bad comparison to make, attributing anything like this to a single cause is a bad move because it places a stigma around it, and will make life worse for people who are experiencing it. 

And yes, I’m aware that Tom King suffers from PTSD which is part of what inspired this story. I don’t wish to condemn him for that, in fact I think the idea of a trauma centre for Superheroes is a good one. But… suffering from PTSD does not make you an expert in it, in fact it could have the opposite effect, stopping you from thinking objectively. Real mental health professionals should’ve been consulted for this story. 

This story was badly handled at an editorial level, from it’s exceptionally dour tone to its handling of the subject matter. This isn’t excusable when 13 Reasons Why came out before this story, a show which had mental health professionals on their writing team and still it lead to an increase in self-harm and suicide. This needed to be handled with the upmost care, but I don’t think DC Editorial cared, or the book in its current form would never have made print.

Beyond that, the dialogue and character work needed to be top notch for any mental health story to work, and the dialogue and character work here is dreadful. This isn’t all on King, DC higher ups forced characters onto him with a story he already had largely mapped out, this leads to generic as all hell sounding dialogue that ultimately doesn’t fit the characters they’re assigned to. This event was shot in the leg before it even started.

But what Tom King can be blamed for is the pacing. The pacing of the story is dreadful. At best this was 3 issues of content stretched into 9. The panels of talking heads don’t serve the narrative most of the time so they are just padding, even if they had interesting or memorable dialogue which the vast majority didn’t. Dialogue and motivations are repeated ad-nauseum and we have flashback issues that go nowhere padding out the length of the series.

And the continuity of this story is a mess, whilst it references plot points from series that are over a decade old, it can’t seem to find itself in the continuity of DC Rebirth, bringing back the older Ted Kord just for some Blue/Gold fan-service. I never mentioned Kid Devil in detail until this point, he’s one of the victims. Here’s the thing though, far as I’m aware his last appearance was in the Pre New52 Teen Titans Book. In said book, he renamed himself Red Devil, lost his powers and then was killed trying to stop a nuclear missile. They brought a character back from the dead, just to kill him off again, I hate this book.

The Sanctuary itself is shown to be absolutely terrible at dealing with the issues in the superhero community and I don’t think that was intentional either. One thing that could have helped this series is some actual build-up involving the Sanctuary itself, exploring its mission statement and how it’s affected people both positively and negatively. There is some of that in the series itself, but it leans so much towards the negative that you wonder how Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman can’t see how bad an idea this is, and even then the massacre takes central focus, which is another reason I think the massacre was ultimately a massive mistake. Incidentally this facility was created by and is run by exactly 0 trained doctors, which in the real world would be unthinkable.

Rating 100,000,000,000,000,000% x3 = 300,000,000,000,000,000%

It seems like DC is trying to move forward from Heroes in Crisis, a mini-series Flash Forward has been announced to deal with the fallout for Wally. The problem is the writer is Scott Lobdell, yup, the guy who made Bart Allen a criminal from the future, who butchered Tim Drake’s origin, did stupid things with Superboy and made Jason Todd’s backstory laughable… He’s the one who gets to fix the Flash. I’m scratching my head about this, and I’m not sure whether I’ll even pick it up, maybe if it gets good reviews but I won’t be rushing out for it. There's also a Harley and Ivy Comic which interests me about as much as grass growing but early reviews are at least positive.