Gender: Male Location: Planning to take over the WORLD!
heroes in crisis--spoilers
with all the jla chatter, and doomsday clock chatter, i've heard next to nothing about what people thought of hic. i was pretty down with the whole thing up until the big reveal...
didn't love wally as the culprit. also, didn't fully understand just HOW he supposedly recovered all the scattered data (one of the truly great feats for any flash, tbh--and wally has some CRAZY feats in the series....)
the whole time travel thing has been sort of played out imo and it didn't seem to fully hold together logically. of course, we're not supposed to look TOO deeply into it i guess. i liked the idea of sanctuary, and thought booster and harley were handled really well throughout the story. batwoman and beetle were really solid too and it had some really good moments overall. just....the reveal didn't quite work for me.
I'm going to preface this by saying that Tom King, imo, is potentially one of the best writers working in comics today. His run on Batman is, for me, the best run in one of the character's books since Grant Morrison left it. His five-page story in Action Comics 1000 had more emotional weight than almost anything done with Superman since Morrison left Action Comics. At personal stories, he's great... When the premise behind the story works.
With Heroes in Crisis, it doesn't.
He fell in to the trap of wanting to make the characters fit the story, which is almost always a faux-pas when you're dealing with pre-existing characters. The characters shape the story, not the other way around. And yes, while I agree that there are some good parts (Harley going to Sanctuary being one of them), the idea that someone like Superman or Batman would go there is, imo, frankly ludicrous.
It also feeds in to what I perceive, at least as an outsider, this American ideal that therapy can solve all your problems. But that's just a loose theory on my part.
His characterization of Wally West when it comes to his actions is also abysmal, and I am not hyperbolic when I use that word. It's disturbingly bad. And yet, the panels where he's talking about Wally's grief are really well done. You genuinely feel for the guy and what he's lost.
In the end, I think the event is largely a failure, and it is down to King, as much as I like him. I don't think he deserves to be kicked off Batman, and I do think that he was unfairly treated over the whole Poison Ivy thing. I also, though, think that he needs to sit down and seriously learn that putting your own spin on something does not mean going so far as to completely ignore a character's pre-existing characterization.
I honestly can't recall an 'event' in recent memory than I disliked more than HIC. The story had absolutely no redeeming qualities for me, and seemed entirely pointless.
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"I am tired of Earth. These people.
I am tired of being caught in the tangle of their lives."
Gender: Male Location: Planning to take over the WORLD!
lol damn! guess that's why there was no chatter. i hadn't really been following wally much sense his return, so his grief over losing his fam was just something i'd assumed was being followed through in other books. like i said, i didn't mind it up til the end. i guess i liked the use of the main characters--booster/harley. i think he nailed them. even beetle was good.
the idea of sanctuary is definitely...interesting. i think they tried to make it special by incorporating all the kryptonian tech and the trinity's characteristics. i wasn't thrilled with the idea that EVERYONE seemed to go there. you're right--some wouldn't need it you'd think. as a teacher, i see the over-reliance on therapy all the time--and often it's seeming uselessness. "someone else always has the answer" is an alarming trend over here. you raised some interesting points though pr.
Wally's grief was referenced in other books, and particularly in the crossover "The Button", it was handled pretty well by Johns, I thought. I didn't even mind the whole "the speed force is a river and wally is the dam" aspect that was brought up, even if i feel like it sort of flies in the face of what Johns had established in regards to the speed force.
I honestly liked the Harley stuff too, and it's part of why I still defend King as a writer.
What I took from it was that the knife was added after to make it look like that was what killed him rather than the speed force explosion.
Gonna blame my meds for not remembering that, as I don't know what the hell I was thinking of. Anyway, according to the man himself, it was inside Lagoon Boy's mind that he was seeing this when the speed force hit him:
I think he messed up and now is doing damage control. As that makes even less sense that was in his head and why even show that to the reader?
He probably was going to make Wally go full villain but back tracked due to negative outcry
Granted lagoon boy contemplated his death by laser beams over 300 times, but this is pretty different and was actually him doing VR simulations and not just in his head
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Last edited by -K-M- on Jun 23rd, 2019 at 05:52 PM
If I had to guess, I would say he was told by the editors to change shit, and half-assed it. There's been a couple of reports of the editors not liking his run on Batman, so it makes sense to me that they wouldn't like an event if he wasn't doing it how they wanted either.
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Jun 22nd, 2019 07:04 PM
