Heroes in Crisis: Tom King Spreads Mediocrity Beyond His Failing Bat-Title

Welcome back to another edition of Comic Relief! where we talk about all the goings on in the world of nerd!

If there is one comicbook writer that has more than earned the ire of comicbook fans in the past few months it's Tom King. While King had a lot of acclaim for his Mr Miracle book, his most notable work right now is the main Batman title that King has helmed since DC's 2016 soft reboot: DC Rebirth. King's quality of writing this book has alway fluctuated all over the place from some issues being worth their weight in gold, and others being worth their weight in fecal matter. That being said he pretty unanimously turned the entire community against him with the long awaited Wedding Issue of Batman #50 where after about a year of build up, King had Catwoman be a runaway bride and it was all a ploy by Bane. It is easily one of THE WORST issues of ANY comic I have ever read, and in all honesty it should have ended this man's career. However, instead he got handed a major crossover event because apparently there is no justice in this world. That crossover released it's issue one today, so let's talk Heroes in Crisis.

So the premise of this book had initially intrigued me when they released the synopsis some months ago: 

There’s a new kind of crisis threatening the heroes of the DC Universe, ripped from real-world headlines by C.I.A.-operative-turned-comics-writer Tom King: How does a superhero handle PTSD? Welcome to Sanctuary, an ultra-secret hospital for superheroes who’ve been traumatized by crime-fighting and cosmic combat. But something goes inexplicably wrong when many patients wind up dead, with two well-known operators as the prime suspects: Harley Quinn and Booster Gold! It’s up to the DC Trinity of Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman to investigate—but can they get the job done in the face of overwhelming opposition?

The initial hooks that grabbed my interests were things like PTSD clinic for Super heroes for one. I thought as topical as a subject as PTSD is, it was surprising that noone had really done anything with PTSD in books outside of the obvious subjects like Punisher. In addition I love Booster Gold, and what's even more was that Tom King has written Booster before in a 3 issue side story of Batman and absolutely killed it. That being said, it is Tom King, so my level of enthusiasm wasn't sky rocketing, but I had a little hope. That was until I read issue 1 this morning, and dear god was it bad.

I would write down a bit about how the story of this comic book fit together throughout the issue, what it was setting up for, but honestly I can't because I have absolutely NO CLUE about what I just read. This issue was such a mess I had to set down my ipad for two minutes, walk around my apartment and come back to it because I felt like I was missing something MASSIVE. I just had no clue what was going on. While this kind of writing may work in a film where you start off clueless and then things are enlightened for you later on, it has an adverse effect in a major crossover event where things are supposed to be fairly linear. You are already juggling several protagonists, and their stories, we don't need a constant time jumps it's a headache. Beyond this issue being just a huge headache to read, it also kills off two fan favorite characters. If you care about spoilers beware, but the two fan favorites are posted in the image below:

Wally West and Roy Harper are Dead....

Wally West's Flash and Arsenal are dead, apparently of a shooting (a fact that we only know from the synopsis as the issue didn't bother to tell us a single damn thing), and what's worse is that this is actively all that we see. I mean we JUST got Wally back at the beginning of Rebirth. HE JUST CAME BACK. This is so cheap, and honestly I shouldn't be surprised, I should have seen this coming. What's even more tragic is that as bad as these deaths were, they weren't even the worst part of the book. The worst part of the book is how utterly useless all the main characters are and how out of character they are written. Harley Quinn, a liscensed Psychiatrist declares that she doesn't believe Trauma exists. Batman, a man with an IQ of 192 is written like a man with an IQ of 2. Superman, just sits down and cries a lot this issue. Wonder Woman is making jokes while examining murdered heroes, and Booster just gets stabbed by Harley Quinn a lot and acts mildly annoyed saying "Stooooopppppp!"

Needless to say this issue is not worth your time as it's only saving grace is some fairly decent artwork. Tom King if you are reading this,this is the second time you have ruined comics for me in the past few months. Please retire your pen and paper and fade away because DC was better off without you in it. You were a lackluster replacement for the Snyder/Capullo team on Batman, and now you are going out to ruin the rest of these books, so please, on behalf of every person who reads DC, just stop.

This has been another edition of Comic Relief! we will see you again soon!