Heroes in Crisis Review (Tom King, Clay Mann)

It’s not easy to superhero. All that stress - saving the world, occasionally losing lives, enduring injury after injury, day in, day out - it takes its toll. Hey guys - even heroes have the right to bleed. So there’s a secret location in the middle of rural America called Sanctuary, staffed by friendly robots, where heroes can work out PTSD and other issues troubling them. But oh no - someone’s killed a buncha D-listers right on its doorstep! Booster Gold saw Harley Quinn do the murdering, and Harley saw Booster do it! Whodunit? More importantly: who cares?!

Heroes in Crisis not good. I know, shocking - a crap DC comic? That’s unheard of! Unfortunately too, because I’ve quite enjoyed most of Tom King’s Batman run and was looking forward to this, hoping it’d be up there among his best work for DC. Instead we get an almost Bendisian effort at stretching a wafer-thin plot across nine, increasingly tedious, issues.

Issue one: establish premise.
Issues two to seven: nothing happens.
Issue eight: massive info dump on whodunit and why.
Issue nine: convoluted plan to sorta resolve things.

Boooo!

I hate that Harley has to be involved in bloody everything these days because she’s so popular. Even when it doesn’t make sense! She fights Booster Gold in the first issue and, even though I dislike that idiot, Booster could easily - easily! - defeat Harley if he wanted to. She’s just a skinny chick with a mallet! Then Harley gets the drop on Batman AND Superman AND Wonder Woman in the same scene! Not even on her best day could she take one of them by herself. It’s so stupid. But she’s popular so we’ve gotta pretend that she can do all that. And she’s even more annoying in this one than usual. Every single scene she’s in, she’s saying some dumb nursery rhyme - ugh!

Also taking centre stage with Harley is the most boring superhero character ever conceived, Booster Gold, and the next most boring superhero character ever conceived, the Flash (but not THE Flash, one of the loser ones). Tres horrible.

While we wait for the dull “mystery” to resolve itself there’s lots of heroes crying about whatever and Superman holds a press conference to tell everyone that heroes hurt too - as if anyone reasonable would suggest otherwise. I think a story involving superheroes and PTSD is an interesting one - conceptually at least - but Tom King clearly doesn’t have much to say about it beyond that it’s hard-going on superheroes’ psyches, if ya really think about it. Fascinating.

Thank heavens for Clay Mann’s sublime art. I was impressed with his work on King’s Batman series but he produces a career best here. The title splash pages are simply stunning and so imaginative. Gorgeously produced landscapes so full of space and dimension - they were the standout in a book that doesn’t really have any bad art at all. Every single Clay Mann page is incredible - he’s really produced something remarkable and impressive with his work on this book.

And I would recommend Heroes in Crisis purely for the art, which is among the best superhero art of the last ten years, if not more. It’s just a shame that it’s in service to such a dreary, plodding, pointless bore of a script. Heroically underwhelming, the “Crisis” books remain among the worst DC has to offer.