Heroes In Crisis

I read Heroes In  Crisis#1 this weekend. This is the series set around a place called "Sanctuary", a place for DC super heroes to go to cope with trauma. 

It is also apparently where DC super heroes go to die! 

The issue weaves between three narratives.  

One involves a bizarre match up between Booster Gold and Harley Quinn.

Booster is correct: there is a fight. It is weird and it is very, very violent. 

The second narrative involves a series of single page vignettes with 9 panel grids of various heroes talking through the traumas that plague them. 

The 3rd narrative thread is Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman responding to an alarm. Something bad has happened in Sanctuary. Deadly bad. 

Page by page, our heroes discover the bodies of the dead. 

OK, the good stuff.

The art with Clay Mann's pencils and inks paired up with colorist Tomeu Morey looks great. Special kudos to Mann on the 9 panel grid pages. It might seem like an easy out, drawing 9 panels of the same person just sitting there talking. But  there are variations of facial expressions and body language that tells the tales these heroes are telling as much as the dialogue.  


Outside the boundaries of the 9 panel grid, Mann and Morey produce pages with wide open vistas, fields of golden grain waving in the wind against an open blue sky, evoking the tranquility of what Sanctuary is meant to be, counterpointed by the horrific murders that stain this tableau with blood. 

Tom King establishes different tones in the different narratives. The building menace as Harley Quinn flits about Booster Gold in the diner then the bloody actualization of terrible violence when she launches her attack.  The sense of unease as various heroes give their testimonies about their pain and fear. The overwhelming feel of dread as Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman descend upon Sanctuary to find their worst fears realized.  


These three tones combine for a sense of discordant dread. Bad things have happened, are happening and are going to happen. The tension from page to page is palpable. 

But what does this package come together to do, actually? 

We can assume Harley and/or Booster are involved in the tragic deaths in Sanctuary. But there's very little to hang our hat on. We have a lot of mystery but very little in the way of clues. Or at least nothing obvious to me. 

There is an almost clinical detachment to the proceedings in Heroes In Crisis#1. Despite the tragic deaths, it's almost hard to care.  Tom King's concept of a place for super heroes to go to deal with trauma is a very good idea. But we barely know the place exists before it is violated.

I think I would've wanted to see more of that quest for redemption before we got to "just another hunt for vengeance".  


I remember when Crisis On Infinite Earths came out and how the deaths of even the most minor characters resonated with me. Backed up by 50 years of history, the import of what was happening as characters and worlds died could not be denied.


Today after numerous reboots (Nu 52 and Rebirth in the last 7 years are just 2 of them), we lack that continuous shared history. As a result, the lives of these fictitious characters lack weight; in turn, so too do their deaths. 


We needed to know Sanctuary longer to care more about its loss.

The body count is quite a bit higher than we were led to believe in the run up to this series.

One of those characters is dead inside the pages of Heroes In Crisis#1 and it's this guy:  

Roy Harper, AKA Speedy, AKA Red Arrow, AKA Arsenal, AKA the Super Hero Sidekick Who Did Heroin, erstwhile member of the Teen Titans, Justice League, Outlaws and other places where he could crash on your sofa.  

But Roy is just one person on the roll of the dead in this issue. Among what appears to be about 6 to 9 dead super heroes, there's also, most distressingly, Wally West. 

For 20 years, Wally West was the Flash. There was a time where Wally had been the Flash longer than even Barry Allen. But Dan Didio and Geoff Johns decided everything old was new again and Barry Allen came back from the dead to become the Flash once more, relegating Wally to irrelevance. 

Maybe there's a twist here somewhere. Maybe Wally isn't as dead as he appears. This is comics, after all. But given that Wally has been in Dan Didio's cross hairs for over a decade now, it doesn't bode well. 

Tom King and Clay Mann have produced a comic that is technically proficient but lacks power due to the lack of being able to fully embrace what was lost and why these heroes had to die.  I'm willing to give Heroes In Crisis another issue or two to fill in some blanks and maybe add some more emotional power than the clinically cold first issue.