Identity Crisis #3-#4

So far, we have seen:

Ralph Dibny wax poetic about his beautiful wonderful wife who in no way will meet a tragic demise in about ten pages, nosirreebob

Okay, so I lied
The saddest funeral in the history of comicdom
I’m not lying about that (seriously, bring tissues)
Our heroes jump so far to so many conclusions they must all be part flea
Dr. Light retconned into a rapist because DRAMA
I mean the male Dr. Light, not the heroine
Why would give yoursel the same names as a villain, anyway?
I mean really, that is just asking for trouble, lady, what were you thinking?
Our “heroes” about to get pwned by Deathstroke the Terminator

And that’s exactly where we pick up in Issue Three—Justice League vs. Deathstroke.  Guess who’s winning.

 

For some reason, I still refuse to believe the Justice League is this incompetent.  I love Deathstroke, but he’s not indestructible.  Close to it, maybe, but there is no way in Hades he should be beating the League quite this easily.  I can understand Elongated Man running in half-cocked and getting pwned as a result, but most of the rest of the Leaguers present have powers and weapons that work from long distances.  Green Arrow, Zatanna, Black Canary, AND Green Lantern could have attacked him and Dr. Light at the same time from the safety of a rooftop.  Boom!  Battle over! 

But noooo, they decide to attack him one at a time the way the Ninja Turtles always do before getting their shells handed to them.  At least at first.  After way too many pages of being used to mop the floor, our “heroes” finally screw their heads on correctly and attack Deathstroke all at once.  Unfortunately, while this has the desired effect of slowing down their adversary, it also triggers Dr. Light’s memories of the night he was mind-wiped.

 

And my response to this is… so what?  So he remembers that Zatanna took his memories and lobotomized him.  Does remembering what they did automatically mean the lobotomy is undone and he can go back to his rapey ways?  Or is he still mentally impaired?  How does this work exactly?

Regardless of the technicalities, Light is so angered by this revelation that he… creates a giant light explosion, I guess. 

Or maybe something in the past has changed and is now erasing him from existence a la Back to the Future.  Give it to ‘im, Marty!

By the time the League wakes up, Deathstroke and Light have escaped (though we aren’t told this for several issues) and Superman is standing over them, demanding to know why they went after Light without telling anyone.  Green Arrow is afraid that Flash will rat them out in regards to the whole oh-by-the-way-we-totally-lobotomized-that-guy thing, but Flash just says that it was his own idea, so that Ralph would have the opportunity to get to Light first.  Which is the perfect opportunity for Superman to lob the bombshell at them.

 

“Well, golly gee, Superman, of course we knew it wasn’t Dr. Light!  We just went after him because his costume is stupid-looking!”

Flash pulls GA aside and demands to know who else’s brains the League has “tickled,” as Green Arrow puts it.  (Ah, euphemisms…) Even though Superman is standing right there.  And has super-hearing.  Obviously the Flash isn’t as fast in the brain as he is on his feet…

Anyway, Green Arrow tells him about the time the Secret Society of Supervillains bodyswapped with the League and, while in the heroes’ bodies, took the opportunity to remove the masks and get a look at what the heroes really look like.  Okay, that’s fine.  That actually makes a lot of sense and is something I can imagine a villain doing.  But when they all swap back…

 

Um, how do the villains know Hal and Barry’s real names?  It’s not like they’re celebrities or anything.  Maybe they’d know Bruce Wayne, but the others are just regular citizens, last time I checked.  They may have taken off the masks and seen their faces, but they wouldn’t know them from Adam—a problem played with, by the way, in the Justice League: Unlimited episode “The Great Brain Robbery” where Lex swaps bodies with the Flash.

"I have no idea who this is."

See?  This trick doesn’t even work for the mighty Lex Luthor, so why would it work for these losers?

And this flashback is even more evidence of why the rape scene is pointless and stupid, because if Meltzer wanted to create a story exploring the ethics of mind-wiping your villains, then here you go.  A perfectly good scenario—one among dozens of similar scenarios, if GA is to be trusted—in which the heroes have to decide if they should mind-wipe their enemies, under what circumstances, how much is too much, etc.  We don’t need the rape to address or bring up these questions, because it’s right here.  Why in the name of X’hal anyone thought that a gratuitous rape scene was preferable to simply having the heroes trying to protect their identities any way they can, I cannot begin to imagine.  Oh, right, DRAMA!!1!

My only problem with this scene (as opposed to the dozen or so I have with the rape) is that I don’t get why the heroes didn’t bother to find out their enemies’ secret identities while still in the villains’ bodies.  They could have removed the villains’ masks just as easily as the villains removed theirs, and then they would have been at a stalemate with the Society which could have prevented their needing to mind-wipe them at all.  Or would peeking under the mask have been too morally repugnant for our upstanding heroes?

Speaking of morally repugnant, remember how Superman is very well within hearing range while Green Arrow and the Flash have this conversation?  Were you wondering why GA would do something like that?  Wonder no more.  “People aren’t stupid, Wally,” he says.  “They believe what they want to believe.”

 

Yeah.  Actually, not yeah.  No.  Just no.  I REFUSE to believe that Superman would EVER support personality-changing the villains for ANY reason.  This is Superman.  This is the Big Blue Boy Scout.  This is one of the purest, most optimistic heroes in the galaxy.  This is the man who had trouble forgiving Wonder Woman for killing Maxwell Lord, even though it was the only way she could save Superman’s life.  Having the Man of Tomorrow implicitly support an action that is, at best, morally ambiguous is beyond out of character for him, because when he does feel that someone deserves a more serious punishment than a trial and a prison sentence, he sends them to the Phantom Zone, which is essentially an interdimensional jail.  And he only does this with the worst of the worst.  People who commit genocide or try to enslave cities, for instance.  I’m not going to start “ranking” crimes from worst to least awful, but Dr. Light is small potatoes compared to the folks that Superman deems dangerous enough to exile.  So no.  Never.  No.  You will not change my mind on this one.  NO.

And even if you don’t agree with me, Green Arrow’s narration from Issue One makes that irrelevant:

Yes, this is referring to the mind-wipe that, according to Green Arrow, Superman knows nothing about.  The same mind-wipe that, according to Green Arrow, Superman knows about and accepts.  Clearly the problem with this comic isn’t the pointless rape scene or the heroes’ endless array of stupid decisions.  It’s Green Arrow’s narration boxes.  If he’d just shut his yap, half the plot holes would disappear faster than the Justice League’s morals.

And while I think of it, if Light’s personality really did undergo such an obvious transformation, how did the League manage to keep the mind-wipe secret all these years?  Wouldn’t someone—a hero, a villain, a security guard, a prison psychiatrist, a relative (if he has any)—have noticed this and started asking questions?  Or is everybody on the planet aside from Flash and Green Lantern in on the joke?

 

“How dare you judge me for doing something that I myself know to be ethically questionable which is why I’ve kept it secret all these years!”

Anyway, now that that’s out of the way, we can move onto a brand new subplot: Captain Boomerang, a formerly D-list villain who has apparently slid off the alphabet entirely, tries to find the now-grown son whom he gave up for adoption years ago.  Thanks to the Calculator, Boomerang has his kid’s address but is too nervous to go talk to him.  Aaaand that is all.  Well.  Um.  Thanks?

This is followed by even more filler scenes—Tim Drake, a.k.a. Robin, hangs with his dad Jack, and Jimmy Olsen develops photographs of Sue’s funeral while chatting with Perry White.  They don’t have anything to do with anything, though I would like to show you this:

Just keep Perry’s observations in mind when we get to the end of the series, okay?  Also, that is one ugly Jimmy Olsen.  You don’t need to remember that last part, I just needed to say it.

Issue Three ends with Jean Loring being attacked and hanged in her home.  Fortunately, Issue Four begins with Ray Palmer traveling through the phone line (she was on the phone with him when she was attacked, much like Sue was on the phone with Ralph) and rescuing her from certain death. 

Okay, time-out: if Ray Palmer can shrink down and travel through phone lines and stuff to get into people’s houses, why does it occur to no one that the killer could be using a similar route?  We’ve discussed phasing, teleportation, and magic, but not this.  I’m beginning to suspect that the League never did switch back to their regular bodies and these losers are actually the Secret Society.  That would certainly explain all the stupid.

 

In the next scene, we see Mister Miracle (whose mask is kinda freaking me out, though I’m not sure why) and Superman examining Loring’s house for clues.  Loring didn’t get a very good look at her attacker, but the League immediately assumes that it was a dude.  Why?

 

Yes, because women break out in hives if they try to wear men’s clothes.  Or maybe the attacker is a woman and wore men’s boots under the assumption that your deep-rooted sexism would throw you off her trail.  Note to self: Research indicates that a cross-dressing-themed villain would be successful…

I, for one, welcome our new lady overlords.

But what does the League have in the way of actual evidence?  Well, the knot in the noose matches the kind of knots used by the villain Slipknot.  (Have I used the word “knot” enough?)  Wonder Woman and Green Arrow go to question the guy, even though he’s in jail and a simple check of the prison security would determine whether or not he’d been AWOL during the attacks on Dibny and Loring and/or if anything funky happened during those same times.  I was tempted to write this off as another example of overzealous detective work a la suspecting Bolt when they know for a fact he couldn’t have killed Sue, buuut given the revolving door that is prison in the DC Universe, I guess you can’t be too careful.

Not that it matters anyway, since Slipknot is as much in the dark as the Justice League, sending them back to square one. 

And now, nerds and nerdlings, it’s time to play “Which of These Scenes Has Anything to Do with the Plot!”  Is it

a) some random villains from earlier debating whether or not Sue’s murder was a good thing…

 

b) Captain Boomerang finally getting acquainted with his son Owen Mercer, who is way the heck too excited about his dad being a supervillain by the way…

 

Or

c) Green Arrow going to visit his technically dead buddy Hal Jordan, who is now the Spectre and therefore knows who killed Sue but can’t tell because we wouldn’t have a story if he could?

 

If you selected any of the above as your answer, then I’m sorry, but you are far too optimistic.  All of the options I gave you amount to eleven pages of nothing.  I’m beginning to think that Meltzer had planned on writing four issues and was told at the last minute that he had to stretch it out to seven.

In the midst of all the padding, we do get a few pages of Batman (wait, when did he become relevant to the plot?) trying to figure out who the killer is.  As far as he’s concerned, it all comes down to one simple question: “Who is John Galt?” “Who benefits?”  This is accompanied by a two-page montage of all the people who have “benefited” from the attacks: Tim is spending more time with his dad, Owen finds out he has a dad, Ralph Dibny inherits a truckload of money from his ridiculously wealthy late wife…

(Wait, is Batman implying that Robin, Jack Drake, and Elongated Man are suspects?)

Speaking of Ralph, this is the first panel we’ve seen him in for a while.  Whatever happened to his quest for justice for his senselessly murdered wife?  The moment Jean is attacked, Elongated Man just seems to fade into the background.  Which, again, renders the rape flashback pointless, because if Meltzer was going to switch the focus from Sue and Ralph to the entire Justice League anyway, why spend so much time on them in the first place?  You spent two issues thoroughly acquainting us with Ralph and Sue, their history, and their relationship, and then… poof.  Pointless.  Gone.  Has nothing to do with the rest of the story.

We end at the Daily Planet with Lois Lane, wife of Superman, who has just received a threatening letter—presumably from Sue’s killer—indicating that he/she knows Superman’s real identity and that Lois is next on the hit list.  Why the killer decided to start sending notes all of a sudden is beyond me.  It would also be stupid and suicidal, if our heroes had enough brain cells to think of EXAMINING THE HANDWRITING ON THE DAMN THING.

 
(Okay, so the fact that it’s in all capitals might prevent them from pinning down the author of the note, but surely they could glean something from this thing.  At least they could flipping try.)

These two issues, while not as egregiously offensive as the first two, still aren’t very good.  Now that I have something to rant about aside from the awfulness of the rape scene, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the problems with Identity Crisis run far deeper than a few ill-conceived plot dead-ends.  The thing is slowly revealing itself to be a train wreck of unbelievably stupid characters and a meandering plot that can’t figure out what it wants the focus to be.  Heck, the fight with Deathstroke alone took up thirteen pages (the comic itself is only thirty!), and might I remind you that this fight was the result of Sue Dibny’s rape, which is in and of itself entirely useless?

The New York Times quote on the cover of the trade paperback says that Identity Crisis “uses all of Mr. Meltzer’s skills as a thriller novelist.”  I’m assuming that was meant as a compliment (the person putting together the TPB certainly did), but the more I read of this series and its plot holes, contradictions, padding, and incompetent characterization, the more it looks like a stealth insult.

Next Time: “Mr. Drake, get out of the house.” “No.” “Mr. Drake, get out of the house.” “No.” “Dad, get out of the house.” “No.” “Dad, quit playing around and get out of the freaking house!!” “What, and miss my chance to do something useful in this comic?” *BLAM BLAM BLAM*

Images from Identity Crisis #3, Identity Crisis #4, Justice League: Unlimited, Identity Crisis #1, and Wikipedia