The whole thing was...off kilter somehow. The characters were out of character, even with their current infinitely ret-conned personalities. I mean I would have thought the new Batman would have definitely found out they mindwiped him and then proceeded to capture all those involved and drop them in a deep cavern in the batcave with no food. Not that I like the new Batman mind, just saying...

DC had a good model for their comics. The characters were iconic, larger than life and so were their stories. That's what made them special. They weren't like Marvel's characters and they couldn't be. Let's face it, Clark Kent is an alien God pretending to be a loser to have a personal life, while Peter Parker is a loser who admirably perseveres against it. Spider-Man's stories shoudn't be larger than life. Superman's shouldn't be about missing rent, getting dumped, going to the john or rape.

Both companies make great comics, but different, and that's how they should be imo.

On a funny note, I never got the 'rape' implication in IC until people talked about it on the web. Till then I was like 'no...surely they don't mean rape, right?'. That's how out of place I thought it was.

If it weren't for Brubaker's Captain America and Exiles, and working a couple evenings in a shop so I get to read stuff for free, I don't know as I'd be reading any of it. The shop is small and hasn't ordered any Civil War beyond the pull-listers, so I haven't read any of it, and I really don't care. I'll find out what happened in Wizard in six months anyway.

I'm reminded of the Tick comicbook spinoffs "Paul the Samurai" and "Man-Eating Cow" which both ended with a two-issue (four comics) crossover called "Crisis on Finite Tick Spin-Offs" ... a fun little story. I don't see that today's older comics readers really want change in the characters they've been reading for forever, and even if you can get a kid into comics these days how is a continuity-heavy crossover going to get/keep them interested, especially when there's no reference footnoting* to the backstory that's being referenced/mucked with?

* Footnoting, incidentally, is what got me more deeply interested in comics when I started in the mid-80's. Spidey says something about a past event, the footnote says what issue it happened, and next week I'm begging mom to take me to the store so I can find the issue ... och, my wallet ...

Especially the original, unedited version.

I too went back to look at these three parts of the whole DCU Crossover eventacular (only in less detail than you are going into).

I think most people agree. The setup was good. It was a horribly dark beginning to a mystery that went pearshaped. Suddenly the murder mystery wasn't the main point and the red herrings became more interesting throughout the year following as they popped up in various other titles (Luthor's armour in Teen Titans for instance).

As for the rape scene, I think you had some good points. It was primarily used to show how the men deal with it, not the women. Although on the flip side I do think it helps go back and show that the bright and shiny spit polished past wasn't the same under that brilliant surface. I do like the idea of exploring the stuff that gets glossed over. People didn't talk about sex so they brushed the rape under the carpet and didn't acknowledge it because that's how they thought you did things. That's a powerful idea. It was a man's world so something like the rape of a girlfriend affected the men "more" in some weirdly disturbing irrational way. They did what they did because that's what was done. It was the Modernist ideal now explored through a post-modern lens.

Still, using rape and death to explore the morality of backward talking mind-magic isn't the best way to do things in my book. You're using two very real and horrific acts to explore comic-book superhero magic - there's no way that something silly can be seen as anywhere near as horrific as rape and/or murder. Using real life crimes to explore made up ones just rings too hollow.

I'm not so sanguine about Identity Crisis being a bad mystery as you are, Greg. It was billed as a mystery, and it was such a poorly contrived one that it made the Encyclopedia Brown books from my childhood look like brilliant pieces of detective fiction. The build-up was fine for the most part, but the reveal was pathetic. I almost expected someone to pull a rubber mask off of Jean at the end and reveal that it was actually Professor Hyde-Whyte (oh, those meddling kids...)

Leaving the mystery aside, then, the other aspect of the book is as a commentary on superheroes as people. I've read too much at this point for this aspect to have been of much interest to me. In fact, as I was reading the story, the mind-wipe issue only kept reminding me of Mark Gruenwald's Squadron Supreme miniseries - which handled the same issues, but was (IMO) more well thought-out than IdC managed. I kept finding myself comparing IdC to SS as I read it, and every time I found it lacking.

Finally, the rape issue. Without this, I probably would have just shrugged about the whole thing. Without the rape, the story was just a bland story with a disappointing mystery and some supporting cast deaths - summer cross-over fare, for the most part.

The rape, though, was offensive and lazy. Why did Sue need to be raped? Why not just attacked? If Light had assaulted her to near-death, would that not have worked to motivate both the mind-wipe by the heroes (make the psycho into a pussycat because he wouldn't play by "the rules" and leave the "civilians" out of things) AND the eventual suspicion of Light as Sue's killer (after all, he tried to kill her once before). But she's a female character, so of course the attack has to involve a rape, and that's lazy storytelling. That sort of thing pushes me right out of things that I'm reading, and makes me start to analyze the work more than just sitting back and enjoying it, so once that reveal occurred, the rest of the series just soured for me.

So overall, IdC was a wide miss for me. I enjoyed IC much more than I thought I would coming off the heels of IdC, and if it weren't for the rape retcon, I might have enjoyed IdC more than I did.

Has the accuracy of the Arkham story been established?

Then again DC always have to fix things that weren't broken to begin with just to justify what they're doing.

A lot of commentary tend to conflate what Wally calls a 'mindwipe' (Zatanna's 'forget' spell) with what Hawkman calls 'cleaning up' Dr Light ('what others have called the lobotomy). There's a big difference between the two - as Green Arrow says at one point, 'making them forget our real names was one thing... altering someone's personality... that was the end.' I agree - I'm inclined to think that zapping someone with a forgeting spell is a little shady but otherwise acceptable comic-booky way of resolving some of the issues that go with this genre's beloved convention of secret identities.

Of course, Batman also cops a 'mindwipe', and we should distinguish the ethical dilemma that goes with that from the different ethical dilemmas that go with, respectively, windwiping baddies and 'lobotomising' Light.

And those distinctions have implications for how we judge the characters. For example, I take the discussion about Superman and how he 'hears what he wants to hear' to refer to his knowledge of the mindwiping of villains (and not of Batman, and not of lobotmising Light) - a practice not quite to Superman's tastes, but not that bad, in a comic-booky sort of a way. I know a lot of people were steamed to think that Superman was be written as if he condoned those other two actions - I don't think it reads that way. Also, this means we should give Green Arrow a bit more of a break that he has been given - after all, he opposed the lobotomising, even clocked Hawkman because of it and has been arguing with him ever since.

Also, the reason why the Wally comes to know that Batman was in the original punch-up with Dr Light is explained: Light showed him the scene when he freaked out (Light can 'do optics').

cheers!

Except me, of course... which I guess makes me more morally lofty than even a hypothetical fiction. Nice.

Anyway, as for Identity Crisis, I didn't like it. Okay, I bought the first issue, and I knew I wouldn't like the rest. Yes, while I'm an avid "follow creators over characters" reader, I will admit to Elongated Man being my favorite character.

But here's the thing. I eventually read the rest, and, you know, it was decent... until #7, which is the worst comic ever written. It's so mind-numbingly dumb that's it's utter shite. And it doesn't clear up any but one of the multiple plot threads brought up by the mini-series... so, yeah, it's all a waste of time for a bunch of set-up and a solution that makes no sense.

Why would Jean Loring know everyone's secret identity? I can't believe this supporting character we haven't seen in years would know who Tim Drake is. I very much dislike DC's current "everyone knows who everyone is" policy.

But the dumbest... DUMBEST thing ever... was "So I brought a flamethrower just in case." AAAGH! If there's so much security in their apartment, how does it not notice someone grow to human size with a bloody flamethrower and walk around setting people on fire? Why the flamethrower? Arrrrghhhhh

It's just bad comics. Countdown wasn't much better, that was the worst issue of whatever year it was, too.

Kal, by the sound of it, you're looking at things from a practical standpoint, but when you're talking about most superheroes, especialy the older ones as we are, it doesn't work very well. Most of them are people who go out there and put their lives on the line for no personal gain. They don't do it for money or fame or anything. They only do it because it's right. That's hardly practical, is it? But it's central to their characters. And having something so massively impractical be that important to them undercuts a lot of your points about what they should be. Besides, morality itself isn't very practical when you think about it.

However, Kal, I agree that there needs to be more variety in the types of stories told in comics, superhero ones especially, but that doesn't mean the DC universe is the place to do it. It's exactly the same thing Greg pointed out when he stated, basically, that Identity Crisis was a good story, but the wrong story for these characters.

By the way, Brian, great quote.

Unfortunately, I can't even pawn the rape off on those excuses, as it seems to be his style to do something horrific to his characters at least once or twice a story (suicide, rape, etc...).

Your biggest mistake is thinking there was a thematic point to be made here. The only point of this mini was to set up 2 years and 300 dollars worth of tie-ins, minis and one-shots.

So let's lock her up with all of Batman's nastiest villians instead and see how long it takes for them to get her to tell all...

"Only a bitter little adolescent boy could confuse realism with pessimism"

(though in that case you kind of feel it's Morrison addressing his own excesses of Arkham Asylum).

As for the cheesiness versus "realism" I offer a big old "meh." Watchmen and All-Star Superman are polar opposites, but they have most of the same fans. I think there is room for both. Unfortunately, I think that comics have, for too long, been about good guy versus bad guy. You have superhero versus supervillain and you solve the issue by the more moral one beating the snot out of the other. Isn't that a little twisted? Not that you can't make a good story out of that, but can superhero comics be allowed to recognize what other mediums do: that good and evil aren't black and white, and violence very, very rarely solves any problems?

This is, in my opinion, the biggest problem afflicting the Superman titles. People write Superman like he is perfect. He shouldn't be. Martin Luther King Jr is about as great a hero as we've ever seen, but he cheated on his wife. I think our message to both adults and children should not be "Always be morally perfect" but rather "Always try to do your best and if you slip up... it's okay. You're still a good person."

So as for Green Arrow, Zatanna, Hawkman, etc... yeah. They did do bad things, but... come on. If we're being realist here, everyone of us would call the JLA horribly immoral for not outright killing Joker. Even the biggest human right's activist would want to see him dead. He is a mass murder who escapes from Arkham the day after he is put in. He should die. And for the record, I'm against the death penalty. Either that makes me a hypocrite or I realize there are extreme cases in which people have to go against their morality for the greater good. That's how we get the phrase "Necessary evil."

As for Ray putting his wife in Arkham, my reading was that he wanted to punish her and he was out of his mind with grief and revoltion.

This brings me to another major point in superhero comics. "Should heroes change the world or keep the status quo?" My answer: they should change the world. We write a lot of comics about how trying to change the world by yourself leads to corruption, hatred, and ultimately fails. While there is some truth in that, what message does it send to the reader? "Don't rock the boat. Obey authority. If you try too hard to really fix the world, you'll turn into a meglomaniacal villain." I understand that if Reed Richard built a device to cure world hunger and if Superman and Wonder Woman brought about world peace, the Earth would no longer look like ours and we could no longer empathize with it, but I honestly think that writing this excuse is going to make a lot of wannabe real life heroes learn that it is best not to try to effect real change in the world.

Maybe that last comment has nothing to do with the post, but I saw an opportunity to debate morality and I have trouble passing that up.