Heroes in Crisis #5 - "Blood in the Way"

[laughing_tree]

For the kind people who have been asking what my next new project will be, the sort of next Mister Miracle/Vision ambitions hopefully cool limited series thing, there’s a big hint/clue in Heroes in Crisis 5, which is out this Wednesday. -- Tom King

Comments

[shakalooloo]

So, with Commander Steel we have ANOTHER character lampshading the comicbook revolving-door-of-death in this series about a batch of Important and Serious murders. I really don't get it.

[lordultimus]

In this case, you could at least argue that it's TRYING to give death some relevance in a world where they just keep coming back.

[beyondthefringe]

What -still- annoys me is that he seems to have confused or combined Commander Steel (the original Golden Age version) with Steel (his grandson, the one who actually experienced the traumas mentioned in his confession.)

So he literally brings a character back from the dead without explanation, gets aspects of them wrong, and kills them off again in the same storyline.

Look, I know that the Justice League Detroit was a joke to many, and a less-than-illustrious era in general, but Hank Heywood's death was still a tragedy and a horrible end for a short-lived but decent hero. So to undo that, fuck it up, and kill him -again- is just trauma porn.

And trauma porn is basically Tom King's entire shtick, as far as I can tell from reading Batman and Vision and this series. And man, it's getting old in a hurry. Everything is bleak and miserable and characters don't act like they should and then they die.

This is really making me cranky.

[lordultimus]

Ystin is wearing some very form-fitting chain mail for someone who hides their assigned gender.

[scorntx]

"This is the last time I let Exoristos do my clothes shopping for me..."

(also, I thought Ystin was intersex, and not hiding it at all.)

[cygnia]

Odds on which character we should be fearing King will get his hands on next?

[beyondthefringe]

A Booster Gold 12-issue series where he tries and fails to stop all of history's greatest tragedies, just so he can wallow in misery and despair, until at the end he simply erases himself from existence in a temporal suicide (and is replaced by a younger, more innocent, carefree, and unsullied version) while Skeets winds up on a dusty shelf in the Hall of Justice, replaying holographic memories of better times together, the only one who remembers what truly happened?

Oh no, I got it.

Ambush Bug reboot.

[thanekos]

Heads for Blue, tails for Gold.

Speaking of Blue and Gold...

[deh_tommy]

I don't know, a Tom King X-Men book sounds cool.

[werehawk]

Metal Men so they can experience the trauma of dying over and over again.

[beyondthefringe]

Resurrection Man!

[werehawk]

Or I don't know why he doesn't do Suicide Squad. That would be up his alley. Even villains can be traumatized and all know they seem likely to die.

Or a reboot of Strikeforce Morituri. That would be really great.

[deathcrist2000]

I mean, given the end to Mister Miracle, it's flagrantly Adam Strange. Too good for him, I say.

[strejdaking]

Yeah, King doesn't deserve to touch cool guys like that.

[laughing_tree]

I'm not sure I see the connection. Just because Strange is also about family?

> Too good for him, I say.

Do you mean Tom King or Adam Strange?

[deathcrist2000]

Scott literally ends the comic wearing an Adam Strange T-Shirt.

[laughing_tree]

Oh, right. Forgot that bit.

And did you mean Adam Strange is too good for King or vise versa?

[starwolf_oakley]

So, what was the plan here? An "Identity Crisis" for 2019?

Of course, Identity Crisis made Wally and Kyle incompetent rookies, Ollie the biggest hypocrite in the DCU, and Batman into a paranoid lunatic.

[lucean]

I'm trying to be less harsh on King, but the plot twist of Booster being able to tell that Wally's body is five days too old is just such a baffling moment.

Also, while I'm now happy that Wally might make it alive after all, I'm also terrified that King will make him the killer.

[kjn]

I just read it as technobabbling forensics. But at least it was the first piece of proper detecting in this murder mystery. That otherwise involves the world's greatest detective, the world's greatest forensic investigator, the world's greatest interrogator, and the world's greatest computer expert.

[jetpack_monkey]

Wally's a speedster, though, so he should be the hardest to compare against, given relativism and the occasional sojourn into time travel. Five days should be nothing in terms of a difference.

[captainbellman]

Please leave Ystina alone, Tom. She deserves better.

[silverhammerman]

Superman's speech is interesting and something King's clearly put thought into, even if it's a bit long and not particularly exciting. Which brings me back to the refrain that people here keep making of why not just do this storyline without the idiotic murders and instead focus on the Sanctuary concept?