Identity Crisis #3

[history79]

8 pages of 30

Comments

[thezmage]

"The League teaches you how to fight" -like elementary school students on a playground.

Sure he can counter all of their powers, but can he counter all of them jumping on him?

[halloweenjack]

Zerg-rushing a guy who's pretty much unbeatable in melee combat is just as good an idea as infodumping about your secret that you were keeping from Superman when you're less than half a block away from him.

[theflames]

isn't the implication that Arrow knows Supes is happy to be willfully ignorant, only Wally is being surprisingly stupid in this situation (though he probably wants Clark to hear tbh)

[reveen]

Oh no! If only we didn't pile on Deathstroke in the exact same way with the exact same hero placement that we did on that guy years ago!

Also, Deathstroke's sword looks really stupid, just throwing that out there. I prefer the stick.

[icon_uk]

Deathstroke has always carried both staff and sword, along with numerous other weapons.

[sagrada]

It's their combat strategy! Hal gets left arm, Hawkman grabs the neck, Green Arrow grabs the left leg, Flash the right, and Black Canary and Zatanna tug ineffectually at the middle.

[icon_uk]

...and then they unite to form VOLTRON!


Sorry....

[steverodgers5]

Tug of War!

[lbd_nytetrayn]

Well, if you have a designated part and stick to it, you might be less likely to run into a teammate, I guess...

[icon_uk]

"We made a choice, and there wasn't a cape out there who wouldn't have done the same... well, apart from the really quite famous one... Bat something or other... who didn't think it was a good idea, but we soon mindwiped him so he doesn't count."

As I've moaned before, if the "cabal" really felt it was an objectively good thing, they wouldn't have hidden it from other heroes, they've have had the guts to stand up for their decision against any and all other heroes who didn't agree with it, and we might have had a very interesting story as a result, with the League maybe fracturing along those lines, since there's a difference between "removing specific memories" as a safety precaution and "fundamentally messing with a brains ability to choose".

The very fact they were prepared to mindwipe Batman because of his objections to their course of actions speaks of even themselves seeing it as a dirty little secret.

[drtechnobabel]

Yeah, it speaks volumes that they refused to even try and take responsibility for their actions, or defend themselves in any way, instead jumping straight to the mind-wiping so they could keep doing whatever the hell they wanted.

Holy crap, this really was the inspiration for Hickman's Avenger's run, wasn't it? People keep bringing up the comparison, but I didn't realize until now just how similar they really were.

[thatnickguy]

"Let's rush him!"
"Wait, no, that's stupid. Green Lantern, put this guy in a bubble please?"
*bubbled!*
"Okay, now what?"

[nyadnar17]

The treatment of Kyle as a rookie GL infuriated me while reading this. He paid his dues, more than paid them in every way a fictional character can pay. He deserved some respect.

[writeofway]

You have the greatest weapon in the universe just shy of the Infinity Gauntlet and instead of using a giant hand to smash Deathstroke into the pavement or chuck him to Timbuktu, you decide to fly in close and try to engage in a fist fight with someone who's equal to Batman in terms of fighting skill?

Did Brad Meltzer hate Kyle Rayner to make him this dumb?

[mrstatham]

The stupidest thing about this is that they actively state they made the decision to wipe the minds of supervillains on a repeated basis based on threats to themselves, and then Meltzer has the nerve to invoke The Killing Joke and THAT fucking scene like it's somehow pertinent to the argument of the heroes, when it's not. It's really not.

More to the point, why didn't they go one step further? It's disgustingly selfish, IMO, to merely pick and choose who you mindwipe based on a personal threat to yourself and your loved ones. If you're doing that to protect your own lives, why not go the whole hog and brainwash Joker after he battered Jason Todd to death? Why not mindwipe all of them who pose a threat to everyone? Not just your precious secret identities?

[sagrada]

I think an even more pressing question is this one: why LET them remain as bad guys? Why not just make them "good"? If they're on the League's side it's easier to watch over and keep track of them and even guide them to really being naturally productive members of society. Why not do that, instead of letting them go?

[coldfury]

I'm not defending Identity Crisis. It had a lot of flaws, but the idea that they had a backup to protect secret identities in case they were discovered isn't terrible. The idea that Clark or Bats didn't know is dumb, but the idea itself isn't a bad one.

I think they used the Killing Joke as a reference to "Because Joker knew who James Gordon was, Barbara Gordon got hurt." Killing Joke is problematic in its own right, but I think here it was a suitable example for what the author was trying to illustrate.

[drtechnobabel]

Well to be fair (not that this story deserves it), they probably didn't touch the Joker because they didn't want to risk getting Batman involved again. I mean, sure, if Batman was mind wiped to forget how it happened, he'd probably overlook Dr. Light's sudden personality shift. But if one of his own archenemies was suddenly lobotomized into being harmless, he'd probably realize something's up and keep looking into it no matter how many times he was made to forget, and I don't think they want to do anything more drastic than that to one of their own.

[starwolf_oakley]

"And hear what they want to hear."

I've posted it before: How would Superman know about the Dr. Light mindwipe but NOT know Batman was mindwiped at almost the same time?(Maybe Batman interrupting is why Zatanna screwed it up so bad.)

[night4345]

Worst fight ever.

Really it was bad.

[7dialsmystery]

For people who are supposed to be highly trained in martial arts, that looked like a playground scuffle.

[bradygirl_12]

DC: if I wanted to read about people that made me feel depressed/squicked/angry I'd just open a newspaper or click on a news site. I want heroes who inspire and are worthy of the name, please.

[md84]

The Flash and Green Lantern jobbing to Deathstroke was a joke. Either one should have been able to neutralize Deathstroke in a second. Even in other, better (and WORSE) stories, Deathstroke knows better than to take on super-powered beings alone.

I admit that Deathstroke beating the Atom with a laser pen was pretty amusing.

[wizardru]

This is such a load of crap, on so many levels.

1) the massive retcons to make things more 'realistic' and 'mature', but end up creating more questions than answers.

2) Jobbing a host of characters to make a pet character seem more bad-ass in the most ridiculous way possible. Could Deathstroke take this group of the JLA? Under the right circumstances and with preparation, Yeah, I think he could. But written like this? This is just terrible.

3) Throwing a bunch of characters under the bus in the service of making everyone more cynical and dark: Superman apparently willingly turning a blind eye to mind-rape repeatedly, everyone acting as if they have some moral high ground for atrocious acts and so on.

The series main justification is that: we need secret identities to protect our loved ones while we ACTIVELY BREAK THE LAW as vigilantes. Green Arrow gets to deliver the straw man arguments while Wally just sits back and listens...because you see he's naive, amirite? The only possible solution here was to mind-wipe everyone. There literally were no other solutions available. That's why we rewrote innocuous old silver age stories and retconned the parts of them to be shocking, but just to justify the Silver Age naivete.

Because the problem with doing something like making an old silver age story suddenly grim-and-gritty is that it becomes a pivot point: you now have to address tons of things that were lampshaded before. Why do the police indulge the vigilantes so much? How do these villains get prosecuted and tried (and how do they go to jail)? How do the DC heroes not get subpeonaed, get countersued by the villians and give credible legal testimony? If you turn that kind of spotlight on a comic, you raise a lot of other issues that now need to be explained in the 'realistic' world you've now created.

But since this was all about the shock value ("Gasp! Jean Loring...MURDERER?!?!") Also, I AM STABBY. Wow, that's hysterical.

[theflames]

the fundamental act of mind wiping someone who found out your secret identity is a cool idea, one of the comments here suggests, why, if they were so sure of themselves didn't they go a step further and turns the villains good. But that's more or less what they tried to do in this story? The messed with Light's mind to tone him down, and it backfired, they lobotmized him - thats the line.

(this leads me to believe that while many of the complaints against this story are fundamentally correct, they've caused people to wear a certain view of the story when critiquing it, 'everything is bad and wrong!')

I can see Superman turning a blind eye because of certain human traits, he doesn't have it in him to turn on people who have effectively been protecting his identity and therefore his loved ones, he *has* been benefiting greatly from their methods, and the mind wipes were apparently straightforward and not that dangerous. Batman does indeed have it in him to be all righteous anger if he found out, couldn't see him enjoying that news (but i could also see him fully supporting it, he can be awfully pragmatic sometimes).

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This type of dog piling the villains looks so stupid.

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Wally putting Barry and Hal on a higher pedestal than the other living perpetrators takes away from his own pedestal. Betrays a sense of compromise within him, doubt that was Meltzer intention.

(please don't assume i support this story's misogyny or or derailing of characters, echo chamber and all that)

But yeah obviously i don't mind the heroes having questionable morals, they're not gleeful about it, and are generally still good people, but are struggling with the balance of responsibility that comes with self appointed vigilantism and and super powers, they're the first few generations of their kind, it only makes sense for these situations to reveal themselves. Paragons are only fun to read on the odd story for me.