Heroes in Crisis #9

The best part is that it’s finally over!

And that wraps up the final issue. <br /><br />The big reveal happened last issue but this ties it all up. The consequences of actions, even if they didn't mean to do it, now have to have a payoff. The idea of loss, and hope, and trying to fill it all in isn't easy. I think the major turnout worked for most part, and the cases of watching each person go through their fears in the interviews, is still the highlight. <br /><br />A bit over complicated at times and a tad confusing, as all time traveling stories are, but it worked out. Without spoilers there's a scene I truly love in this issue too. <br /><br />I'll go into one big review once I get my hands on the hardcover complete series and go over everything but for the most part this issue wrapped it up nicely despite some bumps in the middle. A 4 out of 5.

That was quite anticlimatic... But so is life, most of the time, and a series about the real life struggles of superheroes can't be blamed for following that pattern, right? It's not King's best plot, but it's a really good story about mental health and self-perception. I quite liked the Robins' interviews, they're the ones which showcased the difference between who we are, who we think we are, and who others think we are, and how those three aspects impact our self-worth. <br /><br />I think a story focusing solely on the characters' therapy sessions might have been better. I get why King felt like he had to include a murder mystery, but it would have been wonderful if this series could have been promoted and told as a character study. <br /><br />Anyway. Extra points for Harley's "you framed me and killed my girl" and the way she runs towards the reborn Ivy without a moment of hesitation.

Pretty strong conclusion and a good message to cap off an otherwise disappointing, convoluted, hard-to-follow "event" comic. I've never read a comic that tried so hard to be brilliant while also coming across as lazy and mailed-in. Exploring the psyche of superheroes is a good idea, I just don't think this ever approached it the right way or gave enough substance. If you enjoy it or it means something profound to you, that's great! It just didn't land for me personally (and judging by reviews, I don't seem to be in the minority).

THE FOLLOWING IS PART TWO OF MY REVIEW POSTED FOR ‘HEROES IN CRISIS #1.<br /><br /> Chapter 8 contained the Big Reveal. Wally/Flash/One of the Fastest Men Alive is cracking up. He's sick. He knows it. His sense of aloneness and non-connecting stem from his family and himself being retconned from existence during one of the DC universes semi-regular reconstructions. He alone returned. No one save his mentor, Barry Allen/also a Flash, came to remember him. This lessened but did not assuage Wally's aloneness, nor did finding the woman who once was his wife having no memory either of him or the two children they had together. This breaks him, but he maintains himself, barely. Sanctuary is created. He goes there to put himself right. It doesn't work as it seems to work for others. He comes to believe the whole setup is a fake. He doesn't believe the other residents to be troubled at all. He knows that the recordings, once made, are immediately destroyed. (We readers are told that last, but it seems unreasonable that the instantaneous destruction is actually instantaneous.) Wally wants to know he's not alone in being heartsick and distressed. He knows he's the Fastest Man Alive. Because of that, he has options. Here now develops a huge crack with multitudes of little ones extending from it. The AI has told Wally 'all recordings are cracked into billions of bits and scattered into billions of places.' Then the AI throws in the following piece of nothing designed to create a whole bunch of something down the line. It says, 'It's a puzzle that'd take the average man a few billion years to put back together.' CRACK! The writer truly puts the goof into that one. What average man could hunt down billions of pieces of data, which are the scattered zeros and ones making up the recordings, by searching out the billions of possible places where those pieces came to rest or are still traveling through? How would an average man do this? What continent full of server farms currently in existence could contain and reconstruct the data into discernible visual and voice recordings? The writer then has Wally going full Tron, somehow putting himself into cyberspace and somehow (unshown and untold) gathering all the pieces together and reverse Humpty-Dumptying them back together. He then watches, listens, and learns. Just how could this reasonably happen using comic book science? Unknown. How could he hold and transport the data? Unknown. Where would it be collected, stored, and reintegrated? Unknown. How would he then watch, listen, and learn? Unknown. <br /><br /> Mr. King assumed we readers would skip over all this, willingly. But willing suspension of disbelief can be stretched only so far before it snaps. But I did my best to willingly suspend during my initial read through. But then part two of this problematic premise part smacked me upside the head. Wally has never been shown to have any knowledge of things Kryptonian. He doesn't speak it, read it, and certainly isn't familiar with its computer languages and tech. He has no idea if Kryptonian computer system languages have at its base zeros and ones. So momentarily setting aside the relatively small flaw regarding the data ingathering based on earth norms, how then are we to deal with the face punch of the very large flaw of Wally easily dealing with alien off world tech from long dead Krypton, Superman's home planet? Riddle me that!<br /><br /> Again Mr. King proceeds apace with that illogic thread. We are then treated to a scene where Wally watches and listens to all the recordings. Point of view for the reader is us looking at Wally viewing and hearing the recordings. He sees and hears all the self-doubts, angsts, and miseries related by his fellow heroes and friends. He then experiences an emotional overload which triggers within him an uncontrollable Speed Force cascade. Then -- whoopsie-daisies -- he's a mass murderer, killing everyone with the explosive energy of that Speed Force overload bursting from within him. Smaller flaw now. As Wally was losing control of the pent in Speed Force energies, instead of his desultory ambling from the Sanctuary building into an open field beyond, he could have just, being the Fastest Man Alive, run himself to the top of K-2 in less than an instant and unloaded there. Then no one dies when his self-created governors for the Speed Force come down. Someone might point out that he couldn't run because of the surprise of his losing control, both of himself emotionally and of the Speed Force. Valid. If he was shaking from his emotional quake, couldn't he continue to vibrate that shake to sink deep into the ground before the force explosion happened? Some might say he no longer possessed the wit to think this. But the Fastest Man Alive thinks so fast that mental years could elapse during which pico-time he was operating in he could calm down, see what was about to happen and remedy it. Instead, he walks seemingly unsteadily (it's drawn that way) from the building, stops in the field, then kneels, then waits the booming rain of death. Then immediately post-explosion he's all wits on fire again. He immediately formulates a plan of action to deflect detection of his responsibility for the murders and speeds to make it so. Nope. Not buying it. <br /><br /> Since part of Wally's quickly constructed post blow-up plan was to reprogram Sanctuary to take control of it, how could he do this without first knowing how Kryptonian tech works? (Not worked through for us by author.) We readers are sped past that. And how, with speed somehow meaning he had time, did he manage to disable Booster Gold's force field shield, which he couldn't do the first time he tried? We are sped through that too. The author also didn't inform us as to why Wally decided to frame Booster and Harley for the deaths he caused instead of just running, finding, and telling his Uncle Barry (criminal forensic scientist Flash) what had happened and ask for help? Nope. The author then has Wally cause more pain and misery, in addition to the deaths, by setting up an Atonement Scenario for himself. Thank you Tom King for this twisty bit of illogic. Interwoven with all of the above is beautiful writing and spot on characterization. Thank you , also. But those sink holes of plot holes? No. I believe King could, with more thought and effort, have done better. Certainly better than what follows.<br /><br /> At the end of Chapter 9, Wally is handcuffed and being led away to a place of incarceration by the Trinity. The last panel shows him reflecting on hope while still in his uniform, sitting on the floor of a jail cell, somewhere. I'd like to leave it there. Really. I knew I'd dislocate my little brain (and did!) trying to unconvolute the unconvolutable. (Not a real word, but then again comics aren't real either.) Maybe I'll just throw in what were for me real brain bangers. You want to, you dive into the deep crazy and see what you eventually surface as.<br /><br /> Perhaps you remember when time travel DC style was done in a time bubble operated by the Legion of Superheroes who knew enough to try not to alter the past. Remember when there was a rule for what happens if two beings, past and future selves of the same person, met and touched? They would both cease to exist. Or when time travel seemed to be used primarily to visit icons of the past. Plot points generally were something intercedes, alters an event, and visitor and icon work together to put things right, the event happening as it was supposed to happen. Or when a person from the past somehow sidesteps into the present, that person, post adventure with requisite hero, is sent back home with, somehow, all memories of that visit erased. Time travel from simpler times. Today, if it's not hyper complex, it's not done. As such, all of the above have been retconned from existence. Now we have Booster Gold, failure and thief from the 25th century, time bubbling back (stole a Legion time bubble, destroyed it) to our present along with his super capable AI drone Skeets and not seeming to blip a new universe into existence every time he does something. He's no butterfly; he's a buffalo in a glass figurine shop. But somehow no future time rejiggering. Here in Chapter 9 we have dumb as a thistle weed Booster educating Harley, pretty girl Poison Ivy newly resurrected as some form of plant/earth elemental, Batgirl, Blue Beetle the Bro, and not one but two Wally's, one from the present and one from five days hence, on the intricacies of time travel, closed loop mini-universes, and what to do to make what Wally did right again, except of course for all the deaths he caused and the trouble he caused for Harley and Booster by framing them as mass murderers. No problemo, right? In this bit of story ending nonsense from King, right. <br /><br /> Booster's big time solution reveal is -- completing the time loop so everything stays the same. Both within and outside the loop. Huh? Alright. In the pages of Chapter 9 (and 8) we've seen the two Wally's meet, greet, hug, talk, cry, commiserate, and work through the how to of a suicidal ideation -- and neither of them vanished from existence. (See above, old school.) That would have made for a better ending. So, recapping, there's Wally from Sanctuary Death Day. There's Wally from five days later, whom Wally One on Death Day time traveled to visit, kill (with permission, of course), and return to Death Day and place next to his dear dead friend Arsenal (formerly Speedy, sidekick to Green Arrow) and spend the next five days framing Booster and Ivy while setting the groundwork for his elaborately over-the-top suicide atonement. Couldn't be simpler. But then everything goes pear shaped because Bros Before Heroes muck it up by showing up before said dumb act could be thanatonically consummated. (A bit of sex/death linkage to break up the bleak.) Booster then waxes longwindedly for the wide eyed and confused assembled onlookers of two Wallys, the plant version of Poison Ivy, Harley Quinn (who may well have thought the babbling crazy made sense), Blue Beetle and Batgirl. Simple as sunlight through the pines, his solution. He and Blue Bro go to the 25th century, use the tech there to create from something not explained a never alive clone of Death Day Wally, travel back to Death Day and put that body where it needed to be found. This done, one of the two Wally's winks from existence, we are not told which one, and a closed time loop mini-bubble universe is formed wherein that five day scenario is repeated for the rest of eternity. No doubt fun for all contained within that bubble. But why consider that or them? Certainly not Mr. King. All's well for that which never ends.<br /><br /> So, a Wally goes to jail to sit and rot. A new Sanctuary is recreated to the same original specs in some mid-western farm belt state and continues its good work. I'm not even going to address the damage Wally caused by leaking the original Sanctuary recordings to reporter and wife of Superman Lois Lane who then released them on-line to the world. What's the unstated fallout from that action? We readers might presume Lane edited the recordings for Secret Identity content -- and no hue and cry from every media outlet in the world about the public's right to know. Maybe Wally edited them. We'll never know. What ever happened to the original Wally body at Sanctuary? How was it removed from existence? And all those bottom tier comic book heroes Mr. King decided to kill to create this novel? They're still dead for no reason other than to serve as motivating fodder for a poorly designed writing exercise. And Poison Ivy's now current iteration as a female form plant. How was that cleared by the editors and to what future purpose? And how does having sex with a plant sit with Harley Quinn? Perhaps she's crazy enough to enjoy a variation on a theme. <br /><br /> So, concluding, finally. Have I helped make 'Heroes In Crisis' totally clear for reader and non-reader alike? Like, totally? A crazy-making ride, this. I feel a split personality coming on. Wish me luck. If you choose, send your snail mail correspondence to me care of the ward nurse at Titicutt in Titicutt, Massachusetts. I'll read them all weekly when I'm freed of my height of fashion, form-fitting straitjacket. <br />In the meantime, there's much better Tom King comic book literature to be found. Go find it.<br /><br /> <br />

Overhyped?

A wrap up of issue 8 but overall dissapointed

The amount of negativity this event has garnered has truly reminded me why I stay away from my fellow comic book fans. <br /><br />That being said, I truly adored this event - this series. It was a beautifully tragic story of how pain and loneliness can impact you, and how even perfect heroes struggle. To pretend these heroes are without blemishes - without flaws - is unrealistic and makes them unrelateable. This series has shown these cherished characters in such a way that I've wanted to see them for quite a long time: imperfect, messy and struggling with the horrendous things they've experienced. <br /><br />No hero can easily shake off the losses. To pretend they can is ignorant. This event reminds of this and gives a depth to these characters that wasn't there before. <br /><br />I cannot wait to get the bind up of this event and reread it all together with no breaks between.

This was heartbreaking, interesting and everything in between.<br />Last night, very late, I re-read the entire series just to be ready for the ending that was coming out today. It's been a while since a comic book story had me this hooked, and moved me this deeply. After last issue's reveal, I just needed to get a hold of this story before walking on Facebook or Twitter or any social media, today.<br />I know the series is getting a lot of hate, change for long standing characters does that with fans, but I do appreciate a bold story when it's told with heart. This is not Armageddon 2001, you know.<br />I'd like to see if this story resonates elsewhere. I mean, a Sanctuary series would be awesome. And what about a Blue and Gold and the Dynamicker Duo run? That would be beyond belief! <br />A lot was built here to just let it sit in a corner. We'll see.

Loved it. Loved how it wrapped up. Loved every panel Clay Mann touched. This story bogged some in the middle but I loved what King was going for, and I look forward to seeing the ripples it causes. I understand frustration from Wally fans, but man, when the writing and dialogue worked, it was powerful. Count me as a minority fan of this title.