ROB'S NOTE: May has become the go-to month of the Comic’s Industry (even
though National Superhero Day is late April, but whatever… Congress…
pshaw). It is when Marvel drops their
big movie of the year. May also sees the
annual Free Comic Book Day celebration take place on the first Saturday of the
Month, so I hope you all got to check that out.
May also has 31 days of the month so what better way to celebrate the
wonderful world of sequential art with the 31 Days of Comics?
Seth Hahne, who runs the blog GoodOkBad,
has put together the 31 Days of Comics challenge. A daily challenge in which you are given a
category and you have to fill it with a comic that you think fits it the
best. You’re all on the internet, I
shouldn’t have to explain it to you. For
the rest of the month I will be taking this challenge. It is my hope it encourages others to make
and share their own lists either in the comments here or on their own
websites. The sharing not only might
turn comic fans on to works they have yet to sample but maybe catch the eye of
a few non-comic fans and highlight the diversity of the form.
Our prompt for Day 21 is “A Comic you used to love but now
you hate.”
“Identity Crisis”
“Written” by Brad Meltzer
Pencils by Rags Morales
Inks by Michael Blair
Colors by Alex Sinclair
Letters by Ken Lopez
I’ve done a
lot of things in my life, and I’m not proud of all of them. I once stole a friend’s toy car because I
really liked it. I drank before I was
21. I took the tags off a mattress even
through it says do not remove under penalty by the law. As I said, I’m not proud of those things but
I learned lessons through them that have helped me become a better person. Even though I wish I had made different
choices at those times, I wouldn’t take any of it back, except for buying,
reading, and enjoying Identity Crisis.
Whatever
lessons I learned from it does not outweigh the shame and horror I feel every
day of my life when I realized I bought this piece of shit. And while some days are better than others I
never have quite forgotten. The last
time I pruned my comic collection I gave away a long box full of books I’d
either read too much, probably won’t read again, and generally didn’t like I
ended up keeping Identity Crisis. I wouldn’t
push that on to my friends. I wouldn’t
take the risk of throwing it away and having it end up in some kid’s hands when
he was playing near the dumpster. Even
if I shredded it I fear it would reassemble itself like the T-1000 and continue
to destroy all it comes into contact with.
This is my burden and I will live with it.
For this I
have no excuses, but I do have an explanation.
Identity
Crisis came out right as I was getting back into regularly collecting. I got busy, didn’t have a lot of disposable
income, and had fallen out of the comic scene.
Finding myself back in a shop every week I didn’t exactly have much to
guide me. I picked up things that
interested me and when a story is pitched as a murder mystery with superheroes
in it would be very hard for me to say no. Especially when it was centered in
the DC Universe. I was never an
exclusively Marvel or DC guy. I always
felt good comics were good comics. But
DC has Batman and he is a detective. So
this should have been good.
It wasn’t.
I am not
alone in disliking Identity Crisis but I am taking the brave step in admitting
I liked it at first. I remember being
engaged at the start of the story, trying to piece clues together, enjoying the
art, and thinking there was real emotion involved in it. And while the enthusiasm tapered off towards
the last issue, I certainly didn’t dislike it when it was done. It was still, I thought, a very good comic.
Most people
point to the reveal of the killer (it was Jean Loring, ex-wife of the Atom. I’ve spoiled this for you so you don’t have to
read it. You’re welcome) and the mystery
as being implausible and stupid. To be
fair, while it wasn’t the cleverest way to pull off the murder of Sue Dibney, I
thought the motivation made sense and the method was clever enough. I cut Meltzer some slack on the mystery part.
Meltzer then
Carradines himself with the slack.
It is often
said that comics learned the wrong lesson from Watchmen, and nowhere is this
more on display in Identity Crisis (if you want a current version, please read
every comic in the New 52 that DC is putting out). The real lessons from Watchmen should have
been that you can have a story that is mature on many levels (themes,
motivations, and technique), that you can darken the mood in a comic book, and
that you don’t have to have established characters to bring about a story that
emotionally impacts comic book fans.
What was learned was that maturity means comics need sex and violence
(and sadly violent sexual acts), that darkness means that heroes need to be
just as bad as the villains, and that established characters need to start
taking on these characteristics. Alan
Moore wasn’t presenting Rorschach as the hero, and DC put him on t-shirts.
At its core
Identity Crisis not only sets the tone for an increasingly darker and
infinitely less fun and interesting DC universe that we still see today but it
retroactively goes back and tries to interject this darkness into the goofy
charming silver age stories. While the
murder mystery holds everything together (that is a relative term) the biggest
revelation is that the JLA in the past have used Zatana’s magical powers to
mind wipe and, in some cases, lobotomize villains. Why would they do that?
Well,
remember that fun story in the 1970s where the Injustice Gang swapped bodies
with the JLA? Well apparently the first thing they did was unmask and figure out
secret identities. So when they were
stopped? They needed their minds wiped.
Oh and you
know Dr. Light, the goofy and ineffective criminal who was also a main
character on the Teen Titans cartoon show for kids? Yeah, he actually is a violent rapist who
raped Sue Dibney back in the 80s. The
reason he was goofy and ineffective is because Zatana magically fucked with his
brain, not because some criminals were silly and not good at their jobs.
Oh and they
mind wiped Batman to make him forget about the lobotomy.
Identity
Crisis not only centers on the heroes doing horrible things to villains and
each other, but the worst part is that the story itself never deals with these
issues. The mind wipes are left to be
dealt with later, causing a split in the heroes and tension between them that
probably still lasts to this day. Batman
doesn’t realize he had memories and removed until later, which puts him at odds
with Superman because apparently what we want to see is not Batman and Superman
being heroes together, but them fighting each other. In essence Brad Meltzer is why we’re being
subjected to a Batman vs. Superman movie in which neither character is going to
actually be a hero (and it will suck).
Identity
Crisis is unique among bad comics. It
isn’t just a bad experience to read and ultimately set to the side and try to
forget. It isn’t just that Identity
Crisis sets a tone that is still be followed in the vast majority of DC comics
(and movies and TV shows other than Flash for now). It’s that, like a bad time travel movie,
Identity Crisis tries to reach back into the past and interject that darkness
and moral grey area into the Silver Age.
Without even
touching on the underlying misogyny, bad storytelling, and the fact that
Deathstroke can apparently take out the entire JLA in less than 10 seconds
Identity Crisis is not only insulting to readers, it directly insults the
readers themselves. Identity Crisis is
basically saying that those wonderfully colorful stories with fantastical plots
and characters that had basic senses of morality are things we should be
embarrassed about enjoying as adults.
But don’t worry, because underneath the cheer and positivity there was
this deep dark stuff going on so you can feel adult about pulling them out of
your long boxes.
TL DR
version: Identity Crisis sucked. It
confused rape and violently killing people with being a mature, serious story.
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