The final issue of "Identity Crisis" is out, and it was easily my #1 Gotta Read First book of the book. Often, out of the week's pile, I'll hold my favorite title for last and slum through the weaker books first, but when a storyline is this good I can't wait for it.
I'm actually a little disappointed in the resolution of the big murder mystery, mainly because it comes in out of nowhere. It just didn't feel like a good mystery should feel: that sudden announcement that completes the puzzle once you hear it, even though you never could have guessed it. I'll have to go back and do the entire series in one sitting and see if it flows better... I don't recall many clues that would lead you to the riddle's answer in issue #7, but maybe I missed something. And finding out that it's just [NAME DELETED] who went randomly nuts isn't exactly rewarding.
No, "Identity Crisis" will be remembered not for the murder(s) of several important minor characters, but for the huge cool revelation in the middle. It's a great new subtext to the history of the DC heroes, not something dopey and forced like adding Triumph to the JLA charter... but something awesome, something real-world, something that makes perfect sense, like when Magneto (the master of magnetism) ripped out Wolverine's metal skeleton. Don't feed me crap that The Incredibles is a fresh and inventive look at super-heroes in the real world; comics have been doing "super-heroes in the real world" for 20 years now, without resorting to satirizing the conventions of the genre with jokes that were born in the first few issues of MAD Magazine. "Identity Crisis" is a good example.
I'm going to tell you what the big cool bit was. I won't ruin the murder mystery, but I will discuss this. It happened early in the storyline, so I'm not wrecking much if you haven't read it yet. (Waiting for the trade paperback, eh?)
Rewind back to the "satellite" era of the Justice League. Usually this Silver Age zone is thought of as a cleaner, simpler time. Villains were hokey. For reasons I won't explain (you have to read it to believe it), the League votes to lobotomize Dr. Light. Well, half the League - Superman, Batman, and several others aren't around when the vote is called... so it becomes a dirty secret carried by the rest. The notion is that Light is going to keep doing what he's doing, so they try to wipe his mind... take out the villainous bits. Naturally, Zatanna has to do it with her paranormal powers.
Some context here: Dr. Light has been a joke of a villain for decades. There's a great sequence where Flash remembers fighting Dr. Light back when he was a Teen Titan, and he comments how the guy was always a loser... getting regularly beat by the junior heroes. And this is why. In their efforts to "clean him up," they went too far and substantially altered his personality. And, fanboys dance, that is what Hawkman and Green Arrow have been fighting about all these years! It's a great debate... how far should the League go to stop the madness of villains? Absolute power corrupts absolutely, Lord Acton says.
And then Green Arrow drops the bomb that the Dr. Light case wasn't the only time they did it.
Aaaaah! It's not often that a comics event miniseries actually lives up to the oft-repeated marketing tripe that "this will affect the entire DC universe!" But that ugly little center at the heart of the Justice League will. We've already uncovered another victim of the League's largesse: another '60s era dork, the Top. His story is running in the current Flash books. What this does is offer an explanation to cover some of the geekier, the lamer, the sillier aspects of DC continuity... especially characters created in the 50s and 60s that don't hold up well today. Dr. Light himself will likely emerge from "Identity Crisis" with a darker, meaner revamp. (Which is sort of a shame because I have always been partial to the 1990s JLA/JLE hero named Dr. Light, an Asian woman with light-based powers who unfortunately wore much the same costume as the villainous Dr. Light.) You watch, villain-Light will end up with a new costume, a new name, and a new potential as a major villain in the DCU.
Smart stuff. One less-than-satisfying resolution aside, this is the series of 2004.
But how about those Michael Turner covers though. That guy is becoming a parody of his own work. He's one hell of a pin-up artist, but his stuff just can't carry an entire book because all the characters look identical. Go read his Supergirl story arc in recent issues of "Superman/Batman" and see if you can identify any female character by her face alone. He's like a latter day Rob Liefeld, but unlike Liefeld, Turner may have actually studied anatomy at one point.
