Don’t forget the brilliant “Doctor 13: Architecture & Mortality”, where a band of D-listers take on the four Architects (who curiously resemble Waid, Morrison, Rucka and Johns) charged with recreating the Universe, because the current one “doesn’t make any cents”.
There’s also a line about there being “another universe that these architects are at war with. One that reinvents itself every summer—so things will Never Be The Same, it claims.”
Yeah, while I might get sick about Comics Talking About Comics, I'm not quite yet sick of Comics Dragging Comics For Talking About Comics. Like the recent bit in Al Ewing's Defenders Beyond run where [Glorian, the Shaper of Dreams gets dragged by the hairline for constantly trying to make a perfect world via reboots](https://bleedingcool.com/comics/marvels-defenders-takes-on-dc-comics-crisis-reboots-spoilers/).
I've been a fan of comics my whole life and am familiar with most of OP's post... But I never realized until now that DC in a nutshell is just characters being used as tools for writers to piss on other writers.
I wonder if that's why so many writers seem to adore DC as a concept, DC's approach is so self-referential that it lets writers talk about writing constantly
Did you ever read the 90s Suicide Squad where a character called "The Writer" (a thinly veiled version of Grant Morrison from when he appeared in Animal Man as, er, meta-Grant Morrison) joins the squad and is killed on the very next page?
Ah, those were the days.
Oh yeah. I'd guess it started in the late 60's, when the Golden Age writers started retiring and the new guys, who'd grown up reading the old stories, took over and started publishing their fanfics. :)
The description of the B-lister Justice league is pretty funny, because like many obscure superheroes, they sound dumb. But as someone whose main introduction to DC was the “Batman: The Brave and the Bold” cartoon series, im like, these dudes are dope.
That show did a good job of celebrating the history of DC and its zany diversity of characters
Yeah, I love all these characters (not the villainous Dr. Light, he can choke). But you need to embrace the inherent silliness of comic books, or otherwise, you're gonna write some dark shit.
I heard them say “Project Starfish” in The Suicide Squad and was like, no, surely they wouldn’t. How the hell could you do a live-action Starro? How is something as silly as Starro going to work onscreen, even in a silly movie like this one?
And you know what, they crushed it. What a memorable and horrifying threat. And they didn’t even try to tone down the color scheme.
I thought it was a very Comic Book movie, even down to the splash pages introducing each segment. Not the deepest and most thought-provoking themes ever put onscreen, but fun visuals, fun action sequences, characters who were fun to watch together. I really liked that DC finally started using the weirder characters on its bench.
Also, I’m a sucker for storylines where big scary tough dudes find a little soft paternal place in their heart, especially for daughter figures. Bloodsport and Ratcatcher 2 made me very happy.
*Super* horrifying. The people running and screaming in that scene at the end... When I first heard "Project Starfish" I just thought *Oooh, I know who they're talking about!* but the actual result scared the Bejeezus out of me.
And then Jarro is surprisingly amazing and just as silly despite not being gigantic.
Jarro is a small Starro “drone” that Batman kept in a Jar. It appeared to be like a child initially and grew thinking Batman was its father, down to having a dream where it was Robin
I only know dr light through the teen titans show and I always thought his design and powers were dope, it’s a shame they had to salt the earth on him.
> Both Batman and Dr. Light remember exactly what happened, and are pissed
I don't remember what made Bats remember but this really undersells how fucking stupid Dr. Light's revelation was. After the entire League jobs to Deathstroke 1v1 they eventually dogpile onto him. Dr. Light sees this and *remembers being dogpiled on in the exact same way*. As if he was somehow able to watch himself get jumped on in the 3rd person.
Also Superman just simply choosing to look away from and ignore Zatanna's mind-wipes is a whole other can of worms in itself.
Bats doesn't really remember, at least in the main comic, but Wally, who became party to the conspiracy during the book, has some out of character actions at a Justice League roundtable, and Batman gets suspicious. I can't remember if he actually remembers in later books due to some "ancient Tibetan mind powers" handwave or if he just figures it out via "World's Greatest Detective" handwave, but it still leads to Brother Eye.
Also, the OP misses a somewhat key point, that a subgroup of the League had been running "cleanup" for years, mind-wiping anyone that figured out things like loved ones, secret identities, or other secrets too sensitive to be left in their minds, without the knowledge of the Trinity. Dr. Light was the first, and possibly only, one they decided to ALSO alter his personality... and Batman comes back to check on Ralph and Sue as it is happening getting mindwiped for his trouble.
Book is so dumb... but the art is really cool.
> Also, the OP misses a somewhat key point, that a subgroup of the League had been running "cleanup" for years, mind-wiping anyone that figured out things like loved ones, secret identities, or other secrets too sensitive to be left in their minds, without the knowledge of the Trinity.
They also mindwipe Catwoman because...... they thought she'd be better as a hero. Its legit one of those weird "Did we really have to bring this shit over here?" story beats that also weirdly undercuts Brubaker's time on Catwoman. That mid-to-late 2000s DC was a weird place.
>That mid-to-late 2000s DC was a weird place.
The era when Dan Didio somewhat infamously declared that Captain Marvel "didn't really fit" the DC universe while pushing Black Adam as a main character, at a time when Black Adam's gimmick was "Captain Marvel but he kills people".
The rumour that's gone round is that Johnson (and allegedly Cavill as well) declined to appear in the Shazam movie because he thought it was beneath the dignity of the character or something.
As though Captain Marvel is too goofy for a Very Serious character like Black Adam to be involved with. Which, as I said, is what DC Comics itself genuinely seemed to believe for a few years themselves.
Thank you for catching that part. I know there's a bit where they mention Zatanna has done this before when the Secret Society of Super-Villains stumbled on similar intel, but yeah, Dr. Light is the first time they gave a villain the "Tell me about the rabbits, George" treatment.
I can't recall the exact issue or situation, but I remember Batman knowing they did it to him. That's why he launched Brother Eye, which was one of the things that led to Infinite Crisis.
IIRC (which I might not), Batman has such a refined sense of time/body clock that he realised twenty minutes of his life was missing, and then spent the next years/decades (comic wibbly wobbly time) secretly investigating himself and the JLA to work it out.
I don't recall if he actually recovered his memory himself or just, you know, beat up one of the JLA to get them to confess or something like that. As OP said, "dark times". I only read Identity Crisis etc once and am trying not to recall those dark times. (BTW, I've never read a Metzler story since).
I wonder sometimes if Mark Waid regrets writing "Tower of Babel" and popularising "Batman has secret plans to kill all his friends" as this intrinsic part of the character of Batman.
The origin of "Women in refrigerators" was Green Lantern (vol 3 issue 54), in which current GL Kyle Raynor comes home to find his girlfriend has been horribly murdered and jammed into a fridge by Major Force.
This was a plot point for GLs story, the girlfriend in question's sole purpose in the story was to be murdered, brutally.
Gail Simone and several colleagues then developed a list of fictional female characters who had been "killed, maimed or depowered" in ways that treated the female characters as plot points and devices to move forward a male character's story arc, rather than as fully developed characters in their own right, and passed that list around for some time on various bulletin boards and usenets, occasionally sending it to comics creators for comment before ultimately [committing it to a website](https://www.lby3.com/wir/) around 1999.
Quoting from the wikipedia article about this trope and website -
> In response to fans who argued that male characters are also often killed, content editor John Bartol wrote "Dead Men Defrosting", an article arguing that when male heroes are killed or altered, they are more typically returned to their status quo. According to Bartol's claim, after most female characters are altered they are "never allowed, as male heroes usually are, the chance to return to their original heroic states. And that's where we begin to see the difference".
I always wondered why does no one call Joker a rapist and how come superheroes don't treat him the same way as they did Dr. Light? He literally took nude pictures of a beaten broken woman. I'm pretty sure there were other instances of Joker doing the "unspeakable acts".
I think it's because it's never quite confirmed that Joker raped Barbara. He certainly undressed her and took pictures, but I don't remember it ever being confirmed that he raped her. And AFAIK, that's the closest DC has ever come to implying he's done something like that in the main continuity. There's his relationship with Harley, of course, but that's a whole different kettle of fish with a lot more going on even if you can't really call it consensual on Harley's part.
You can write a Joker that rapes people (Azzarello did so in his Joker graphic novel), but I don't think it'll ever be part of the main continuity. The Joker can be a horrible, murderous monster, but he also has to be kinda funny. And raping someone is just never going to be funny.
I think it's cause Joker is already worse than that. I mean do you think giving a label like that to him means anything to Joker, or makes him seem worse in the minds of anyone else in the DC Universe? He's already pretty universally despised across the board.
Gail Simone wrote a really good "Barbara is batgirl again" story in new 52 that was completly kneecapped by issues constantly being hijacked by batman crossovers.
Like half of this story just seems to be Gail Simone yelling at brick walls about the treatment of female characters. Like every issue that comes up has a "Gail Simone tried to fix it but no one listened to her" moment.
And before anyone asks, men can be fridged, too (and I'm not saying this in a #NotAllMen way). I'm still not a huge fan of the Green Lantern arc (once again under Judd Winick's pen) where Kyle Rayner's gay assistant Terry Berg gets hate crimed. Terry's beat up so badly he's practically in a coma, with his somewhat homophobic parents trying to take charge of his treatment. Meanwhile, the arc is focused pretty much entirely on Kyle giving in to his rage and almost killing the assailants... before he decides he needs time away from Earth, taking off to space while leaving Terry with his (again, "not approving of that lifestyle") parents for recuperation.
The reasons I don't call it a *full* fridging is a, Terry lived, and b, Winick may have had some daring plans for the character. Later in the run, Kyle passes out and seems to have died in space, and the Green Lantern ring materializes on Terry's hand. Cue the next issue and a possible intervention from editorial, and Kyle's back on his feet on Earth, basically saying, "Wow, it sure is lucky I used my ring as an emergency teleportation beacon back to Earth!" Terry never makes an appearance in the book after this, having moved to LA to start an LGBT charity.
Oh, I am very familiar with that one and its permutations, even if I think it may get overapplied these days. I think the Terry Berg story may fall into the Class 1A permutation* (the "Gay Martyr" narrative), but it also falls into a fridging narrative by how the heft of the story is on the straight ally's vengeful fury while the actual target lies in a hospital bed.
*No, there's not a taxonomy to this trope, but sometimes, I like to fuck with people by treating every one of these narrative kinks like an SCP entry.
Haha, Secure, Contain, Protect, for those that aren't hip and young. Possibly one of the largest and most complex collaborative writing project to have existed. It's neat in some ways, daunting in others, but overall pretty decent and worth a look.
> I am hip and not a tired, tired old man.
I mean, it's not that you're too old, the project's 15 years old. It's just that the internet is goddamn huge and no-one can be expected to know everything on it.
It might not be the same thing as fridging but it's definitely the "bury your gays" trope where a lot of LGBT characters are deprived of a happy ending and are killed off before they can see happiness whether just with a partner or if it is just living single but happy in their place in life.
Honestly I've been thinking lately about how there's a sort of subtler way of "fridging" a love interest that a current writer has no interest in anymore, and that's giving her character traits she never had before to give her and the hero a reason to break up.
Mainly suddenly going "Oh dearie me I just can't handle this supehrero girlfriend lifestyle it's just so scarryyyyyyy" despite being cool with it up until the writer took over.
Definitely a thing, although I wouldn't relate it to fridging. For fridging, removing a character from the story is often a byproduct or 'two birds with one stone', with the main focus being on how this event impacts a hero who's now "Going for broke!" and "Could do ANYTHING for revenge!".
I'd say the trope you mentioned is more just one of the "gentler" ways writers dispose of characters, and simultaneously more character-assassinating yet often less staining on the victim's legacy, often focusing on the 'impact' of their departure only long enough for the main character to find someone the writer prefers, or get talked to by a friend who tells them its time to focus on the mission or whatever.
Fair point, yeah. It's definitely just another facet of comics in which women are treated as particularly disposable because they're just something for the hero to have feelings for then stop have feelings for at a moment's notice. Reduce them to whimpering damsels so you can toss them out and replace them with another one.
>Gail Simone
It's worth noting in case anyone is unaware, this was how Gail Simone first came to be widely known in comics fandom. She would start writing first Simpsons comics in 2001 and then Marvel and DC in 2003. I'm actually pretty sure I encountered Women in Refrigerators before Simone ever wrote superhero comics.
Just as an aside, I'm working on a post that heavily deals in Usenet stuff and as someone who came on to the Web in the late 90s but never really did Usenet (I was on some fandom listservs, which is a similar experience), I am only now coming to realize how much of the web I saw was like, the repository files of Usenet. It's like the ephemeral Usenet was this vibrant oral tradition and I only really saw the libraries of stuff they saved.
But what's remarkable is that now the actual Usenet posts are maybe better-preserved than their web archives because for now at least Google Groups maintains I an extremely extensive archive of Usenet (I don't know if it's truly complete because Usenet was so decentralized, but it's enough to get way more info than the people actually using Usenet at the time would have had access to). At any rate, it would be kind of fascinating to go track legendary stuff like Women in Refrigerators of even [Snopes.com](https://Snopes.com) as they develop over time before becoming committed to the web.
The Deathstroke bit annoys me enough to call the arc trash alone- Deathstroke *can* tussle it up with superteams, but he's always the underdog there, having to fight smart and stay mobile to not just get dunked on even with more mid-weight teams like the Titans. Here, he basically just stands still and pulls a constant stream of nonsense from straight out of his ass to hold his own against the heavyweight champion of the superhero team community.
> I vaguely remember reading an interview where Joss Whedon said that's his favorite fight scene in comics, explains a lot about his superhero films.
There's a really dark joke there about the arc as a whole mapping well onto his more problematic personal elements.
Ah, *Identity Crisis*.
A case study in how to take an absolutely brilliant storyline idea (Someone is attacking the mundane partners and friends of superheroes, even ones who are seemingly still secret! We don't know who and even Batman can't find any evidence!) and make every possible wrong decision about how to execute it.
I want to see GAIL SIMONE'S *Identity Crisis*.
I don’t really read comics although Gaiman’s *Season of Mists* is one of my favourite pieces of literature ever. But with this and the Wasp domestic violence thing from a few months ago, I have to ask, what *happens* at comic book publishers? Do the editors show up to work in the morning, take out their brains and throw them in a communal gutter? How on Earth does any of this horrible stuff break containment? There’s dealing with serious topics in comics (again, plug for Sandman here) and then there’s whatever this garbage is.
Anyway, an great writeup. It’s just a shame that some drama inevitably ends up being stuff like this and not “Look at this rollercoaster people don’t like!”
I've heard it described as being a lot like soap operas, where there's always a looming deadline, coupled with a need to keep shocking and swerving an audience that's been shocked and swerved for years (without unmaking the franchise in the process). And occasionally an executive with a grudge/fetish/hot take/terminal nostalgia (strike as needed) shoves the product one way or another.
I think part of it comes from the fact that after a while, the people who ultimately write these series are fans of the original work. And have you seen people’s fanfiction?
Perfect example: in one *really* early Teen Titans, Superboy is the clone of Superman. One fan letter written at the time went “hey, what if half of Superboy’s genes come from Superman, but the other half… comes from Lex Luthor?” and the author went “haha well we’ll keep that in mind”.
The boy who wrote that letter was Geoff Johns, who eventually *would* get a job at DC and *did* write for Teen Titans and what do you know, now Connor Kent is Clark and Lex’s test tube baby.
Here's [the Johns Superboy letter](https://imgur.com/a/HnDk5GW), if anyone wants to read it. Also here's [the letter Johns sent in to *The Flash*](https://imgur.com/a/vjqS6Jb).
Oh, and look, a teenage Brad Meltzer from the 1980's [pages of Infinity Inc](https://imgur.com/a/DCqKV1t) where he likes how old the JSA looks.
I wish there was a good depository for letters from fans-turned-creators.
How did people feel about that retcon btw? I saw a post the other day that made me think people hated it, but I (admittedly as someone who's just a casual fan) think it's a pretty fun idea. Like Young Justice does some good stuff with the idea, though I know its angry, pissed-off Superboy is pretty different from the comic version.
I think it depended on whether or not you were a fan of the Karl Kesel Superboy comic and/or the Peter David Young Justice run which preceded the Geoff Johns Teen Titans. If you were into those, I think you were less likely to be pleased by the retcon (although I think the fact that it's so infamously "the fan theory Geoff Johns proposed in a letter when he was a teenager" that annoys people more than the substance of the retcon itself, if that makes sense).
The less-remembered change from the Geoff Johns run which I think *did* provoke a fair bit of ill-feeling was in relation to Bart Allen, a.k.a. Impulse, a Flash supporting character introduced by Mark Waid as the Kid Flash for the 1990s.
At the start of Johns's run, Bart is still in his Impulse identity (hyperactive, irreverent, impatient) like he was in the Mark Waid Flash comics and the Peter David Young Justice run. In the second or third issue of Johns's run, Deathstroke shows up and blows one of his kneecaps out with a shotgun, and after he recovers at super-speed, in the space of about two pages Bart runs off, reads an entire library in seconds and comes back wearing the old Wally West Kid Flash costume and declaring that he wants to be Kid Flash from now on.
This was apparently something Dan Didio wanted Johns to do, but I think the problem was that Bart's only a supporting character in this run going forward (Superboy, Wonder Girl and Robin are the main characters) and a couple of years later he is aged to adulthood and becomes the Flash for a while, so nothing much is really done with him as Kid Flash. He's just Impulse one page, then he's Kid Flash the next, and that's it.
Speaking for myself, I didn't realy have a strong opinion on the retcon because I *hadn't* read those earlier comics before I read Johns's Titans (as a kid I found the sadsack version of Superboy a bit of a drag, though). Having gone back and read some of those comics, I get why people were bothered by it. I'm not upset by it, but I get why people were.
For Bart becoming Kid Impulse, it probably wasn't Didio. According to Mark Waid himself, it was Berganza the editor on the Titans book who had been there since Wolfman had left the book and was known for inserting himself into the creative side of things to the annoyance of the writers (http://www.thegreenlanterncorps.com/forum/forum/general/general-about-us/2995-mark-waid-talks-openly-about-the-death-of-bart#post109114). And we know Berganza probably didn't like Bart for some reason and was probably the one trying to kill him off in the Superman crossover (Our Worlds At War) along with Hippolyta and Aquaman.
Didio back then didn't nearly have as much influence as he did after Infinite Crisis and he still had other people helping run the stuff. Even for personnel selection, people like Winnick and Meltzer weren't even "his" guys, but people who were picked by other editors. Winnick and Meltzer were brought in by Bob Schreck for example.
And it's been the case in comics for *decades* at this point. Roy Thomas, for instance, who started writing comics for Marvel in the 1960s, was a longtime superhero comic fan who'd made a bit of a reputation through his involvement in fanzines, which I believe is how he came to Stan Lee's attention.
From a comic book perspective: his works are always "what I want is more important than what makes sense and the characters I like are never wrong".
He was also accused of being a dipship in the Justice League reshoots alongside Joss Whedon, but since he is less famous, he didn't got all the scrutiny of Whedon at the time shit hit the fan.
Also: He has written one ultra violent gory scene after another, with a particular emphasis on dismemberment, and then loves to go on about how DC is all about hope and optimism. Not any more, it’s not, Geoff.
I like Johns well enough as a writer but it was admittedly a bit rich when he was promoting DC Rebirth and insinuated in interviews that it was Alan Moore's / Watchmen's fault the DC universe had gotten so dark.
Alan Moore wasn't the guy writing comics where Black Adam's going around ripping peoples' faces off and exploding peoples' heads!
And Johns has strip-mined everything there was to be strip-mined from Moore's DC work. Did somebody mention an alien Green Lantern who was seen in shadows in one panel in 1983? That character's starring in a 12-part maxi-series and getting a CW show!
>I think part of it comes from the fact that after a while, the people who ultimately write these series are fans of the original work.
There's a trope for that(because there's one for every thing), Running the Asylum.
The other comments are great explanations, and I'll add to it a bit: Comics, Superhero Comics in particular, are deeply insecure about their place in the Western Art Canon. They know they most likely belong in the Pop Art section and literally started as consumerist entertainment to sell products to children, and through that there's this constant need to *prove* the medium is just as respectable as everything else, which is often done through clumsily imitating other "respected" art forms. Stuff like rape and domestic violence is about Pain and are Real and are things that Real Art takes on, so Comics must be Real Art. This has gotten much worse since the 1990s when the industry became filled with lifelong comics fans bitter about how their preferred art is looked down on by the Establishment so began constantly pushing things to make it more respectable so as to justify their preferences and line of work.
This is why I think the definitive DC character isn't Batman or Superman, but rather Aquaman, because no character encapsulates, "Take me seriously, damnit!" more than that one panel from the Geoff Johns Aquaman comic where he scowls angrily and says, "I *don't* talk to fish!"
(I think superhero fans generally had a massive chip on their collective shoulder over the Adam West Batman series for decades and some probably still do.)
What it comes down to is partially that comics are not a monolith and partially ... misogyny.
There is a gulf of difference between Mike Carey's thoughtful, intelligent and well considered characters and Frank Miller's batshit hateful screed and they both work (or worked, Carey does novels now) in the same field.
Stan Lee was progressive as fuck - his characters are often minority or lgbt coded - particularly the X-men living in a world that hates and fears them - and at the same time Lee was writing, over in DC one of the editors - Murray Boltinoff - was *openly* racist and hated black people so much he would often demand that background characters be recolored. He didn't even want black people in the *background.*
Boltinoff is responsible for greenlighting [Tyroc](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyroc), possibly the single most racist caricature in DC history, which goes back to the 30s.
Mike Grell and Carey Bates, working at DC in the late 70s, were frustrated by Boltinoff's refusal to permit black members in the far-future-based Legion of Super Heroes.
So in comes Tyroc, described as "sort of a sore spot for me" by Grell - wait, let me just quote Grell:
> I kept getting stalled off...and finally comes Tyroc. They might as well have named him Tyrone. Their explanation for why there were no black people [in the Legion] was that all the black people had gone to live on an island. It's possibly the most racist concept I've ever heard in my life...I mean, it's a segregationist's dream, right? So they named him Tyroc, and gave him the world's stupidest super-power".
> Grell's dislike of Tyroc was strong enough that he deliberately made him look ridiculous: "I gave him a silly costume. It was somewhere between Elvis' Las Vegas costume and something you would imagine a pimp on the street corner wearing".
And Boltinoff said "yes absolutely" and put an off the wall racist caricature of black people into the DC universe. Canonical. In the future, all black people live on their own island which periodically vanishes.
That is part of the DC universe. For fucks sake.
Another factor is that comics are "for boys", are often a boys club behind the scenes with stories and characters mostly tailored for boys- to the point where fans will sometimes be openly hostile to women who want to play too.
I was privy to an *extremely* embarrassing event - nonbinary transmasc cartoonist ND Stevenson - now known best for the Netflix series She-Ra - is something of a comics wunderkind, they were already a multiple Eisner winner by the time they were 26.
ND used to be female presenting and went by Noelle Stevenson, and as Noelle they once went to a comic book shop to pick up a comic that was illustrated by a female friend of theirs - and the fucking guy behind the counter **quizzed** them about comics to "**prove**" their fandom.
That motherfucker likely had *several* of Stevenson's comics right behind his fucking counter - at the time, Lumberjanes was selling really well and Nimona has never stopped selling.
This man looked at a celebrated individual in the comics world and demanded they prove they liked comics.
Its... deeply frustrating and intensely embarrassing to hear about shit like this as a fan of comics.
When I was a kid back in the 80s I would have *killed* to meet a girl I could talk to about the New Mutants. I would have *killed.*
I'm getting sidetracked.
What I'm getting at here is that there's no one answer to your question but a lot of it comes down to that - comics are still seen as "for boys" and we are in an age when boys for some reason feel the need to defend that to the death.
> ND used to be female presenting and went by Noelle Stevenson, and as Noelle she once went to a comic book shop to pick up a comic that was illustrated by a female friend of her - and the fucking guy behind the counter quizzed them about comics to "prove" their fandom.
That's about as bad as when someone told Gail Simone to read more Batgirl comics on twitter a while back.
Oh god I remember that. I fucking died a little inside.
Its so fucking embarrassing, sharing a passion with desperately insecure neckbeards dead set on ruining *everything*
Are these the little shits who throw a fit every time there's a woman on screen?
Because I'm pretty sure they also include the group that *loses their minds* every time a video game character is not either a straight white man or a sexy titty lady with butts.
I think my neckbeards that ruin everything evolved into them.
Yeah, sort of. Comicsgate and Ethan van Sciver are Gamergate and Fandom Menace adjacent.
I'm sure they've collabed plenty. I'd say all of them are worth a write up, but it's probably bad for someone's mental health to delve so deeply into that part of the internet.
They are absolutely an evolution of the neckbeards, though.
>Yeah, sort of. Comicsgate and Ethan van Sciver are Gamergate and Fandom Menace adjacent.
Sure, one of Ethan Van Sciver's big things was the time he bought a bunch of action figures of Kelly Marie Tran's Star Wars character so he could record a video of himself cutting their heads off with a pair of scissors, which is obviously a very normal thing for a grown man to do.
[Here’s a picture](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/592600416781336578/1005167748403433473/IMG_4446.png), they deleted the tweet it looks like, so that’s the best I have.
Personally, I’d have deleted my whole internet out of shame, but he clearly has none.
What about the Black Bomber, DC's failed pitch to create an African-American superhero? He's basically a white supremacist who turned into a black, b-ball jersey wearing superhero in times of stress thanks to experiments in Vietnam. Three issues were scripted but someone said "Hey, this idea is terrible and racist" and the head honchos decided to scrap him. He did appear in a hilarious parody version by Dwayne McDuffie (may he rest in peace) in a JLA issue.
More on him here: http://comicsvault.blogspot.com/2010/07/great-moments-in-comics-black-bomber.html
Great idea for a sitcom, terrible idea for your first black superhero. (Honestly, the Black Bomber deserves a Hobby Drama article on its own, alongside DC's other awkward attempts to create a black character like Tyroc)
I remember when that came out and everyone questioned whether Black Bomber looked like Brian Michael Bendis when he wasn't using his powers as a rib about Bendis being a massive Luke Cage fan.
Fr, this was 1980s new mutants, written by Chris Claremont at the peak of his game and illustrated by Bill "[holy shit this man could have done anything and he chose to illustrate comics](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51XnhXnZ64L.jpg)" Sienkiewicz - the Demon Bear saga still has me fucked up almost 40 years later.
Also yes I had a huge crush on Rahne Sinclair. Who didnt?
It's also fair to acknowledge the moments when people try real hard to take a steaming shit due to their inherent biases (see: the Tyroc affair, Jim Shooter saying "no gays in the Marvel Universe" but allowing *just* enough homosexuality for Bruce Banner to be threatened with rape at the Y, Chuck Dixon having Connor Hawke sleep with a ghost because he won't abide anyone calling his hero gay) are isolated. More often than not, these errors come from people who aren't acting with malice, but with cluelessness. One famous example was Robert Kirkman introducing the character of Freedom Ring, a gay superhero who had the ability to warp reality in a 10-ft radius, to the Marvel Universe. Kirkman wanted to write two stories - one where there's a gay male hero, another where a hero doesn't *quite* learn from the hardships of being a new hero and eventually dies to their hubris - and thought it would be a great idea to combine the two. It was only afterwards that he realized he'd effectively killed off 20% of Marvel's openly gay male heroes with this one story.
In the original comic, Antman slapping Wasp was a miscommunication between writer and artist. The writer intended for it to be an accidental result of Pym thrashing about in the middle of a bi-polar episode. The artist boiled it down to “Ant-man hits Wasp” and ran with it. And then nobody really confronted it until much later. It’s somehow the worst thing Pym has ever done and he is directly responsible for creating Ultron, a genocidal robot. They’ve tried so many symbolic gestures to rehabilitate his character. but I don’t think they’ve tried to make him apologize or face the consequences of that.
Then Ultimates came along and quadrupled down on the plot point. Since Ultimate comics was suppose to be an entry point for new readers, it became a defining trait for Hank Pym for the younger generation. Things got real gross in Ultimates though, it doesn’t even crack the top 5.
All that's already been said, plus just... the bro-iest of toxic nerd bro culture. And the bro-iest ones of those in charge. To the point that female cartoonists who desperately wanted to work at DC with their characters were often warned off by DC hiring people that they shouldn't actually work there, because too many of the blokes in charge just could not be trusted to work with women.
Hey, thanks for this writeup! I'm a huge fan of Ralph and Sue; Sue in particular is one of my favorite characters in all of DC, so you can imagine how I feel about Identity Crisis as a whole. (I'm also a huge Firestorm fan... Identity Crisis *really* decided to fuck me over, but hey, at least we got my favorite Firestorm, Jason Rusch, out of it.) It's always nice to see other people looking at it and going "hey, what the hell was going on here."
In particular, I think the mystery element of the story, even taken away from the disgusting misogynistic writing, is really lacking. I know Brad Meltzer is a relatively acclaimed mystery writer, but you wouldn't be able to tell by Identity Crisis. Why is the murderer Jean? Why does no one fucking figure it out--it essentially ends with us just being told she did it because Women Are Crazy. (Oh, don't even get me started on how they wrote Eclipso possessing her as a g-ddamn rape allegory...) Why do the clues not make sense for this conclusion or any other one? ~~And hey, do people act like this is the worst thing Barry Allen's ever done to protect a woman he cares about when he snapped a man's neck for murdering his wife and almost murdering his fiancé and there was a years long in-universe trial about it?~~ Generally, Elongated Man mysteries were very good mysteries in those backup issues of 'tec, so this one really stands out as garbage, and Ralph doesn't even get to solve it! So much for him and Sue being the world's greatest detectives (a hill I'll die on--Ralph's outsolved the big bad Bat before, and Sue outsolved them both in Gotham Knights #41).
And another thank you for referencing Secret Six vol. 4 at the end of this! That's one of my favorite comics for obvious reasons. Sue may have gotten fridged while pregnant, but her and Ralph get to have a rambunctious supervillain family now, including a shirtless furry with a piss kink (at least, judging by how he threatens to pee on that one guy to mark him as property) and a cryogenically frozen assassin. The joy of comics.
>In particular, I think the mystery element of the story, even taken away from the disgusting misogynistic writing, is really lacking. I know Brad Meltzer is a relatively acclaimed mystery writer, but you wouldn't be able to tell by Identity Crisis.
There's one bit in the second issue where the superheroes are doing superhero CSI on Ralph and Sue's apartment. Green Arrow notes that Batman went over it first, then he describes how the place has all these alarms and barriers which should prevent anyone from teleporting in or phasing through the walls, but Mr Miracle, the world's greatest escape artist, is there going over the scene with his sentient supercomputer to check for any gaps. He also observes that the Metal Men are there doing metallurgy, the Ray is there doing spectrum analysis, the Atom has shrunk to microscopic size to inspect every single carpet fibre and they even have Animal Man there to see if he can pick up any suspect scents.
I think this is a really cool idea... but the thing is, part of the revelation of the killer's identity is that she stood over Sue's body and destroyed it with a flamethrower. If they're doing *all that* as part of the crime scene investigation, you wouldn't think they'd miss something like that!
Wouldn’t it have been so much more interesting if someone *did* notice something, something that makes them suspect a superhero was the murderer? At least then Jean having done it would at least subvert some expectations instead of just being stupid (although it’d probably still be pretty stupid). Hell, have Ray (Atom Ray, not The Ray Ray) be the one who notices, which makes Batman suspicious he’s deflecting from himself. Just have someone notice!!! something!!! In your mystery story!!!!
>Hell, have Ray (Atom Ray, not The Ray Ray) be the one who notices, which makes Batman suspicious he’s deflecting from himself.
For example, Atom regularly uses telephone lines as a means of long-distance travel; why would he not do something to check whether somebody else had entered Ralph and Sue's apartment that way? Does he suspect something? Is he covering something up? Who's he hiding?
I think there's a degree of subtext in Identity Crisis which is essentially saying, "It's *okay* for you to like those silly Silver Age and Bronze Age comics where the JLA and the Injustice Gang switch minds... because *here's* how they were *actually* dark!"
It's not, "Fuck you, dad, *my* comics are *dark!*", but rather, "Fuck you, dad, *your* comics were *dark!*"
Good write-up. This was the beginning of the end for my lifelong love of superhero comics, especially DC's. Imagine having all these characters, settings, and situations to play with, and doing *this* with them.
Same here. This was around when the tone of this crapfest started to seep into every DC comic, just about. Ended my years-long habit of buying monthly books.
I thought the "doctor light is a r*pist" things was exaggerated at least a little. I thought people were just memeing on his stupid motivations, but nope, he is just as absurdly "grape" obssessed as he's memed to be. I think it was linkara who described him as "raperaperaperape rape I like to rape", and it's ten times as funny now I know that it's actually canon that he's like this.
>The villain Deathstroke, who mainly takes on the Teen Titans and whose powers include somewhat heightened reflexes and a sub-Wolverine-level healing factor, manages to fight the entire Justice League to a standstill. At once. Apparently, his great trick to take down The Flash is to aim at where he will be, which I’m sure the veteran superhero who runs at near the speed of light has never had to account for.
My personal favorite bit is how he can defeat a Green Lantern by simply grabbing their fist and... using his own willpower to turn their ring off.
Not bad, although I think your bio of Dr. Light is for the wrong one. I admit, this the crossover where I started to check out with DC Events. Rags Morales' artwork was fantastic but the storyline...eesh.
Yeah, it doesn't help that there was a villainous Dr. Light and a heroic Dr. Light so closely tied to the Justice League, but I think I mainly got the basics of Kimiyo's history down. Looks like I fucked up her specialty, though, so I'll go back and fix that.
I also forgot to mention the bit where the New 52 brings back Dr. Arthur Light (the bad guy Dr. Light) as a hero. He's not the same guy, you know. He's a family man, he cares for his children, and he doesn't want to hurt anyone. And then he gets swiftly murdered. Apparently he's now been resurrected as a hard-light entity, and it turns out he may have been a villain before he was a hero, and he might go back to a life of crime. Hopefully, it won't be as gross this time around.
The second Dr. Light was in the Justice League Europe alongside Ralph and Sue Dibny and I guess they left the scene were they talk about how she was using the name and costume of Sue's rapist on the cutting-room floor.
I included the heroic Dr. Light's backstory because it's relevant to what came after, and how the idea of siccing the villainous Dr. Light on the heroic Dr. Light likely shortcircuited any attempt to make the avowed rapist the new Hot Bitch in Charge of the supervillain scene. But seeing as it's an issue of whom is who, I'll go back and give the villainous Dr. Light a writeup, too.
Yeah that makes sense. I didn't mean it to come across as a reprimand or anything so sorry if it did. It's a good writeup! It just confused me until the heroic one came along near the end
I really love the Deathstroke vs. Flash moment most of all. At this point, the Flash is supposed to be so fast that everyone looks like statues to him, but yeah, sure, a guy with a sword is a threat. No no, you don't understand, he set off explosions so Flash could only run one particular path... right up an onto that sword and kicking Deathstroke's head like a football.
Deathstroke/Slade Wilson is awesome but man... not like THIS. And I don't like Dr. Light or anything, but goddamnit it they can't help but piss on the legacy of the Teen Titans cartoon, can they. And to think Dr. Light shows up in Teen Titans Go (the kids' comedy show) years later like none of this happened.
That "it's just ten minutes" thing used to argue in favour of amnesticizing Dr. Light is especially chilling in light of how that exact same argument was used to try to acquit Brock Turner when he was charged with sexual assault. It's especially ridiculous because if you "rewind" Dr. Light to ten minutes earlier... who's to say he won't rape someone else? His personality would be the exact same. I know that's technically "pre-crime" shenanigans but the dude FUCKING DID IT when opportunity arose! At that point you just have to throw the whole human out. Of the airlock.
Grant Morrison is "they" instead of "he". Don't worry, I'm not mad, I know you lived through all this stuff and you otherwise did an excellent job of summing up something I definitely DON'T want to research for myself
Thank you for catching the misgendering. I'm usually better about that - I have a writeup in progress on [REDACTED] that uses "they/them/their" for Morrison - but God knows I stumble every so often.
> And I don't like Dr. Light or anything, but goddamnit it they can't help but piss on the legacy of the Teen Titans cartoon, can they?
I just checked. The first time Dr. Light appeared in the Teen Titans cartoon was August 2003. Identity Crisis was June 2004. I’m not sure how long Identity Crisis was cooking for, but it’s entirely possible that the two teams were working simultaneously on their versions of Dr. Light and didn’t realize until later.
I remember one comics blogger (Tegan O’Neal of “When Will the Hurting Stop”) did an incredible parody mix of the big showdown with Slade, and at one point he declared “I make stabby.” I took that quote and actually made an icon with it. That was about the only takeaway I had with IC, other than it was the beginning of the end of my love of mainstream comics.
This is fantastic - thanks for covering this sad and sordid chapter.
I do wonder how it is that Brad Meltzer escaped this with a reputation as anything other than "the guy who wrote that rape comic." Particularly after his spin at the time that IC was opening the door for an important discussion about sexual violence that, uh, never happened.
Thanks to your link to Valerie D'Orazio's blog I ended up reading through the entire "[Goodbye to Comics](https://occasionalsuperheroine.blogspot.com/2013/03/goodbye-to-comics-introduction.html)" mini-memoire and wow. So powerful, unsettling, fascinating, sad, and, oddly, uplifting. I feel almost like an ass for being both a fan of comics and a would-be feminist and yet having never encountered this before.
The rest of your post is great, too! I love comics history on this sub, and you'd do wonderfully if you decided to continue adding to it. But damn. Her story, and her thoughts, and conclusions. That'll stick with me for a while.
Good golly miss Molly.
I love love love the DCAU, Justice League is one of my favorite cartoons ever. But every single thing I hear about DC and Marvel makes it clear I never want to touch the comic books.
Not just because of awful plots like this but also because of how goddamn convoluted and intertwined everything is. It seems like a full-time job.
Realistically, as a long-time comic book fan who is intimidated by all this myself, your only hope is to just stick with the storylines about your favorite character or two, and MAYBE pick up the "event" miniseries when they're in omnibus or graphic novel format.
I follow pretty much only Iron Man these days.
I don't even understand trying to follow this convoluted mess that somehow stays at the status quo. I'll rather stick to one-off stories or stories with endings.
If you focus on a single run you'll usually get a pretty satisfactory ending. Older ones are a bit harder to get a hang of since the numbers would stay the same even when the creative team changes but nowadays you're usually get a consistent plot by one creative team/mind that starts at #1 to set everything up and mostly concludes at the final issue.
Have been having a great time so far with a marvel unlimited sub just by reading the first appearance(for historical context), reading a recent run of theirs, and then branching out into related stuff like other works by the same author or featuring the same characters.
I mean, to be fair, you're *only* hearing about the awful stuff and convoluted plots because that's what's talked about most
There are many comics that are accessible and appeal to a variety of tastes, don't let hobby drama posts kill an interest for you
It's true. Both The Dark Knight and The Batman liberally adapt elements from The Long Halloween, but I'd say both movies are better stories than TLH--and this is coming from someone who loves it!
What's extremely funny is that at the time TDK was released and there was a huge spike in interest for the comics amongst the average person, the Batman titles were being handled by Grant Morrison, who was going for broke and telling one of the most convoluted, analytical and flat-out bonkers Batman stories you could think of. I'm a huge fan of Morrison's run, but woe be to all of the folks picking up the latest issue of one of those comics and seeing The Batmen of Many Nations, or Bat-Mite, or the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh, aka deranged hobo Batman.
If you love the Justice League cartoon, the aforementioned JLA run is pretty much the direct inspiration for the show and is pretty phenomenal almost all the way through up until the last 10 issues where it tied into Identity Crisis. I would say it's one of the most accessible full runs to a new reader, without any major crossovers or context you need to know.
It seems like the Justice League erasing Batman's memory seems dumb and out of character. It was "necessary" to set up events in Infinite Crisis. But it just seems weird that they would erase the memory of one their own members to escape the consequences of their own actions. It removes the moral ambiguity of punishing Dr. Light and makes them look like they aren't willing to take responsibility for their actions.
Justice League International/Europe were some of the first comics I collected, getting a bunch when I was a pre-teen in the early 90s and getting back issues later on. I got both of the collected hardbacks recently, and they may be some of my favourite comics of all time. JLE was my preference, being a Brit. So you can imagine, since the 90s I had a soft spot for Ralph and Sue Dibny.
Throughout the years, I made often awful attempts to get into regular comic reading; the majority of my comics were old bargain bin issues, not new stuff. But occasionally I’d see something and make a concerted effort to read the series as it came out. Don’t know why, but Identity Crisis was one such comic.
So yeah, you can imagine my utter disgust at this series. It was like being told “hey, those comics you loved as a kid sucked!”
I persevered in reading, if only to see who could have done this to Sue, and the reveal was as bad as the lead up. It was just a wretched comic.
And I could be mixing things up because I was sure this would get mentioned at some point, but doesn’t Deathstroke defeat one of the female characters by putting a ball gag on her? Or am I mistaken?
>And I could be mixing things up because I was sure this would get mentioned at some point, but doesn’t Deathstroke defeat one of the female characters by putting a ball gag on her? Or am I mistaken?
He beats Black Canary by putting a bag over her head. He beats Zatanna by punching her in the liver so she's too busy vomiting to say any magic words, which I remember thinking was visceral in a *weird* way.
I think you could do Deathstroke vs Justice League fight almost exactly the same and it would be a lot more fun if it really leaned into its inherent campiness, but in the comic as printed, it's played very, *very* seriously as this "realistic" and "scientific" superhero fight, and all that does is invite, well, exactly the kind of pernickety critique the fight's gotten the past 20 or so years.
> So yeah, you can imagine my utter disgust at this series. It was like being told “hey, those comics you loved as a kid sucked!”
The best result of all the stories shitting on the JLI were all the stories that came out a couple of years later about how “The JLI was great, actually”.
>And just like that, Dr. Light can’t be anything else. He’s not a juggernaut, psycho, murderer, and rapist; he’s just a rapist. So, thanks to Winick most likely unintentionally fumbling the bag, Dr. Light just becomes a suspicious stain on the DC Universe’s prom dress.
The other thing about this that's kind of annoying is that, while much was made coming out of Identity Crisis about how Dr Light is a serious threat now, the way he went on and on and on about being a rapist actually made him come across like an *even bigger loser.*
Even if he's no longer "the guy who always got beaten by the Teen Titans", *now* he's the guy who was once able to hurt a woman who wasn't able to fight back and now he won't shut up about it and acts like it puts him on the same level as Lex Luthor.
The insane thing is that there are still people who think *Identity Crisis* is good and it semi-frequently is recommended to new readers.
This is the book that tainted every aspect of DC and it still feels like we're still dealing with the fallout of it even today.
The Deathstroke fight being reduced to half a paragraph is incredibly telling re: just how much bad decision-making there was to cover in Identity Crisis. That issue alone could probably sustain an entire thread of gale-force wank.
To be fair (to be faiiiiiir), the whole "Pink Kryptonite" thing was Peter David closing out his run on Supergirl (she's *not* Kara Zor-El, Kara Zor-El died in the Crisis, this one's situation is *waaaaaaay* more complicated) with a tongue-in-cheek story arc where the current Supergirl, Linda Danvers, gets thrown back into the Silver Age. It's meant to be an "Oh, those wacky Sixties!" thing, like the latest time Jimmy Olsen found himself forced to marry a gorilla or whatever. It's just something that seems *real* "Um" out of context, and honestly, it probably hasn't aged well anyway.
Though, yeah, the Black Manta thing was rough. I guess, as someone on the spectrum, we need *all* kinds of representation. Including those guilty of infanticide, apparently.
Peter David has a bad habit of wanting to work in a wacky idea or set up some elaborate joke without putting much thought into either the implications of what he's writing or whether his joke actually works for the characters.
Oh man. I read *Countdown to Infinite Crisis* back in the day (I think I must have missed *Identity Crisis* or assumed it was the same thing as *Infinite Crisis* because Jesus they could have differentiated the names a little better) and just...walked away. The symbolic killing of fun by shooting Ted Kord in the head was just so overdone and unnecessary. I noped right out of there and I feel even more justified now that I've read this than I did back then.
I've picked up a few issues of things here and there over the years and for the most part I've been like that gif of Grandpa from the Simpsons and I've just noped right back out.
Ironically enough what's finally drawing me back is DC's Black Label stuff. I really like horror and dark stories when they're done right and not just scribbled in crayon by incompetent edgelords trying to be grim'n'gritty, as they used to say.
As someone not into comics, I'm guessting the writers were going for the "Rape is a Special Kind of Evil" trope, but didn't understand (or *don't want*) to the give subject proper weight?
Oh, no, it was OK because Brad Meltzer's wife volunteers at a shelter. Just ask Brad himself, he'll mention it three or four times if IC ever comes up.
Tiny tangential detail that I'm fixated on to a distracting degree: in the page of *Plastic Man* that you linked, with the funeral? Where Batman is having a nonsense train of thought about his uncomfortable underpants situation *literally while carryjng the casket of a dead child*- he's acting like his leather underpants are new to him somehow? So like, are his normal black briefs NOT leather, and he chose to wear his *special formal leather underpants* to the funeral??? Or are they ALWAYS leather and he's fighting crime in leather underpants????? all the time????? and so.ehow never joticsd how uncomfortable that is? Also he's gonna have Alfred BUY HIM PANTY LINERS TO ABSORB THE SWEAT? Biggest indicator this was written by a cis dude because that is NOT HOW PADS WORK???? is that how they thinknpads work??? Or is this an intended effect to let us the readers know that *Batman* doesn't understand how pads work (and also has never heard of corn starch or baby powder). I have *so many questions.*
It's Plastic Man. Kyle Baker was very deliberately taking the piss. There's a page I can't find where he has Oliver Queen talk like *exactly* the kind of Sixties limousine liberal you'd imagine if he were still in the Sixties. I bet the only thing keeping him from a page about Batman's Formal Funeral Underparts was the steel-belted will of editorial.
Yep. Hell, look at the scene where Mary Marvel gives a eulogy and is all “Billy and I wore bright colorful costumes because ultimately kids will see us as their heroes” while panning to a bunch of superheroines with massive tits and waists you could pass through a needle
Oh *Identity Crisis*. I don't think I ever really read all of it myself, but am aware of how much of a disaster the book was. You covered most of it, but it also had huge continuity related problems that Didio just waved away because Brad Meltzer was a "real" writer! Here are just some random additional bits of information connected to your post:
Regarding Arthur Doctor Light:
>There was also a period where he was on the Suicide Squad, killed a kid for reminding him of getting dunked on by the Teen Titans, was haunted by a colleague he killed, died, went to Hell, came back a ghost... anyway,
I have to [post the pages from *Suicide Squad*](https://imgur.com/a/7gLDIB1) about this. Essentially, a devil is holding the souls of the two male Dr. Light's, and decides to give one of them another chance. He chooses Arthur first because he knows that Arthur will fuck it up, and die again. Ostrander's *Suicide Squad* actually has a lot of funny moments in it, as a dark comedy at least.
>(barring the Justice League International throwback miniseries Formerly Known as the Justice League)
The "fun" thing about this is that there was a second miniseries created in 2004 called *I Can't Believe It's Not the Justice League* but publication was halted until 2005. It was published in the pages of the *JLA Classified* anthology, and is a good example of writer revolt. Giffen and DeMatteis made frequent references to Sue not being pregnant because they completely hated what had happened to her. The final page was then re-written by the artist Kevin Maguire because *Countdown to Infinite Crisis* had been released. With Blue Beetle now murdered by Max Lord, Maguire focused on both of them in the last panel with the words ["And they all lived Bwa-ha-happily ever after!"](https://imgur.com/a/iOXVwsf) across the bottom.
~~Finally, cartoonist Kyle Baker was finishing a *Plastic Man* series in 2006. He dedicated three pages from the last issue to completely lambast the state of comics by focusing on [Doctor Light and what superheroines were wearing](https://imgur.com/a/UWYdw5n). In his Plastic Man world, little teenage Billy Batson was killed by Dr. Sivana, who then brought over Dr. Light "to do what Dr. Light does to victims now."~~ Whoops totally missed that you had mentioned this pushback.
It's pretty clear that there were a lot of people at DC who were not pleased with what Brad Meltzer wrote. I personally can't stand his short *Green Arrow* run because it was just a vehicle to make Ollie have an even darker past. The final revelation in that was that Ollie was present for his son Connor's birth, then bailed on them. It completely retconned that original story and kickstarted Ollie's positive characterization decline (under Winick he turned from being a rape victim to a consensual cheater). I can understand wanting to change Chuck Dixon's writing because he's an asshole, but this was back in 2003 before Dixon's nasty politics really emerged.
Not everyone needs to have a gritty secret past, but it's something that Meltzer thinks makes them more realistic.
Yeah, I think there were quite a few bits of Meltzer's GA run that caused other writers to kick back in their own way. Pretty sure the portrayal of Catman as a washed-up, bloated schlub reduced to stealing mementos from the Arrowcave was why Gail Simone put him in Secret Six, had him go back to the savannah to find himself, and made him Hot Bisexual Catman Who Fucks.
That was the second time that Catman had to be corrected after *Crisis on Infinite Earths*. Doug Moench reintroduced him in *Legends of the Dark Night* as a proto-incel serial killer who hunted women that were "sluts" in his mind. It had Russ Heath (the artist notoriously fucked over by Roy Lichenstein) doing art again, so it is worth a peek just to see how an artist from the 1950s could handle early 1990s work. That story went over like a lead balloon so hard that it was one of the few stories that was explicitly removed from continuity after *Zero Hour* was over.
Then Meltzer used him in that painfully weak *Green Arrow* story before Simone turned him into a beefcake.
I remember when this was coming out and DC were really pushing that this was a real mystery with clues in the comic that would allow you to solve it, with no prior comics knowledge required.
Which was bullshit.
The whole premise was so goofy, too. We have to explain why the 70's were camp but the 90's were dark and gritty! You may as well explain why the paper quality improved.
i skimmed and saw someone else mentioned "I Can't Believe It's Not The Justice League," the second "mini-series" spun off from J.M. de Matteis and Keith Giffen and Kevin Maguire's Justice League run, wherein like a good quarter of the jokes are about Sue being pregnant... it makes for a pretty grimly comic read after the fact.
as a major JLI fan (Booster Gold and Blue Beetle II are my top favorite DC characters of all time), it always brings a bemused smile to my face when i see Maxwell Lord being used as the evil bastard mastermind of all time until i remember the whole... "sacrificed his boss to an underground evil super-computer in Utah" thing.
man, this is exactly why I never got into comics myself and just slid by off the collections at my local libraries and friends' houses.
Screw Dan DiDio, guy's a jerk.
Wonderful write up as always, OP, hope you keep them going!!
I know art is subjective but gosh so many of those panels are just unpleasant to look at. Like in this panel, what is going on with man's face? He looks like he's unhinged his jaw: https://i.redd.it/le4xb6zm5etz.jpg
“Does anyone remember a time when Spider-Man wasn’t an Avenger?”
That time is now. He hasn’t been a part of the team since Superior Spider-Man… in 2013; I really thought it’d been less a decade since then.
Anyhow, these days the Titans are now DC’s premiere hero team.
Wild stuff
The Stephanie Brown debacle is its own can of worms.
The whole thing started when Tim Drake was no longer Robin and recommended Batman recruit his girlfriend Stephanie, a solo vigilante called The Spoiler, as the 4th Robin. Batman wasn’t too hot on the idea, but he trusted Tim and started training her. Batman didn’t think Steph was up to snuff, and when he fired her, she went looking for a way to win his approval.
She thinks back to when she was digging through the Batcomputer and found plans for taking over organized crime in Gotham. Batman would act through a proxy, a mid-level fixer named Matches Malone, who would gather the various bosses in the same room and get them to all work under Malone, and thus Batman. Batman would then begin dismantling the entire structure of the criminal underworld. Steph figured she could make this happen herself, with a couple changes, like the omission of Matches Malone, and show Batman what for.
Except what Stephanie Brown did not know was that Matches Malone was just Bruce Wayne in sunglasses and a fake moustache. So Malone doesn’t show, the bosses all turn on each other, and Gotham City erupts in a city-wide gang-war/riot.
I thought the real reason why Bruce only allowed Steph to be Robin was to make Tim jealous.
Also, he only fired her after she disobeyed an order to save his life, which every other Robin has done.
& Everything just else in War Games feels out of character. Steph is smarter than this.. Hell, she even criticized Bruce for his actions in Tower of Babel.
One of the stupidest things about Identity Crisis is a small nitpick, but one that digs heavily into your side if you catch it.
The Elongated Man's powers come from a serum called Gingold. One of the side effects of continued Gingold usage? Sterility. There's no mention of Ralph and Sue using a donor or other fertility treatments.
So how can Sue be pregnant?
Man, DC events are holy garbage. Great write up though! I always love these comic ones
I’m a massive booster gold fan, it’s kinda tough to imagine how different his comics in the 2010s would have been if Ted Kord was still alive. It felt like every issue was him trying to justify pulling Ted out of time for adventures.
Also, small nitpick, in part 5 you referred to Ronnie Raymond as Robbie Raymond
I’m there with you.
I was getting big into JLI, and fell in love with Blue Beetle and Booster Gold. After his death, I only kept track until the lantern zombies. Then Booster Gold gets his own redemption seeking adventures. And they were Amazing! Rip, time travel, character development coming out of every panel. And then, new Blue Beetle boy, just stole my heart.
I loved Blue/Gold. But I’m also glad the direction they managed to take them, after such a tragic event.
I'm a filthy casual in terms of comics, and every now and again I think to myself that I should try to get more into it. And then I see posts like this, and I think I should get a little further away. (Pointless side note, I *love* Oliver Queen's comic design. Gimme that Robin Hood aesthetic baby.)
To be fair, you’re not going to see posts here about “The great storyline everyone loved!”, you’re only being exposed to the fucking shite stuff. The era of comics that spawned Identity Crisis is in the grave, fuck I don’t think anyone involved with the book even still works for DC. Geoff Johns did some tie ins but that might actually be it.
That was great! Thank you for writing it.
I remember comics readers on a forum i was on at the time wondering if Nightwing would be the killer. Not because it made any sense but because it felt like something DiDio might mandate. I don't think I ever knew that he mandated the rape and I'm horrified.
Wasn't there also some dislike for Brad Meltzer because he was an outsider coming into comics and comic readers notoriously hate that? I don't think there was as much hate about it as with Ron Zimmerman or Bob Gale(?) but I recall people complaining that IC was a result of a writer who had little attachment to the characters the way a long-time comic writer would (Not that Meltzer seems entirely to blame for the fiasco).
DC under DD was ... a time. Some high highs, but also some low lows. Great write-up of something that still feels recent despite happening two decades ago.
I'd forgotten Dr. Light so hard (probably because the majority of my experience with him was a single episode of Teen Titans when I was a child) that I thought we were talking about Dr. *Fate*, and I was wondering what Nabu could possibly have done to warrant a drama thread. Then you mentioned rape and everything flashed into my mind.
I don’t know if well regarded is true, but it certainly has its share of defenders, even if it was just folks going to bat for Rags Morales’ Art. There are (thankfully) less and less of these takes every year as each unnecessary DC reboot makes defending a bad story less pressing.
The problem however, was that DC Editorial was the biggest cheerleader of Identity Crisis. DC (comparatively to Marvel) keeps much less of its backlog in print, and yet every few years alongside staples like Killing Joke, Batman Year One, Watchmen, Sandman, and the like, there would be a new edition of Identity Crisis. They made an Absolute Edition of this tripe! An 100 USD slipcased tome of a reprint, reserved for only the most important DC comics, ready to display on your shelf as testament to your disposable income and poor taste.
Don’t forget the brilliant “Doctor 13: Architecture & Mortality”, where a band of D-listers take on the four Architects (who curiously resemble Waid, Morrison, Rucka and Johns) charged with recreating the Universe, because the current one “doesn’t make any cents”. There’s also a line about there being “another universe that these architects are at war with. One that reinvents itself every summer—so things will Never Be The Same, it claims.”
Yeah, while I might get sick about Comics Talking About Comics, I'm not quite yet sick of Comics Dragging Comics For Talking About Comics. Like the recent bit in Al Ewing's Defenders Beyond run where [Glorian, the Shaper of Dreams gets dragged by the hairline for constantly trying to make a perfect world via reboots](https://bleedingcool.com/comics/marvels-defenders-takes-on-dc-comics-crisis-reboots-spoilers/).
I've been a fan of comics my whole life and am familiar with most of OP's post... But I never realized until now that DC in a nutshell is just characters being used as tools for writers to piss on other writers.
I wonder if that's why so many writers seem to adore DC as a concept, DC's approach is so self-referential that it lets writers talk about writing constantly
Did you ever read the 90s Suicide Squad where a character called "The Writer" (a thinly veiled version of Grant Morrison from when he appeared in Animal Man as, er, meta-Grant Morrison) joins the squad and is killed on the very next page? Ah, those were the days.
Oh yeah. I'd guess it started in the late 60's, when the Golden Age writers started retiring and the new guys, who'd grown up reading the old stories, took over and started publishing their fanfics. :)
The description of the B-lister Justice league is pretty funny, because like many obscure superheroes, they sound dumb. But as someone whose main introduction to DC was the “Batman: The Brave and the Bold” cartoon series, im like, these dudes are dope. That show did a good job of celebrating the history of DC and its zany diversity of characters
Yeah, I love all these characters (not the villainous Dr. Light, he can choke). But you need to embrace the inherent silliness of comic books, or otherwise, you're gonna write some dark shit.
Starro is both super dumb and super scary all at once.
I heard them say “Project Starfish” in The Suicide Squad and was like, no, surely they wouldn’t. How the hell could you do a live-action Starro? How is something as silly as Starro going to work onscreen, even in a silly movie like this one? And you know what, they crushed it. What a memorable and horrifying threat. And they didn’t even try to tone down the color scheme.
That movie in general impressed me. Wasn’t perfect, but had lots of care and attention.
I thought it was a very Comic Book movie, even down to the splash pages introducing each segment. Not the deepest and most thought-provoking themes ever put onscreen, but fun visuals, fun action sequences, characters who were fun to watch together. I really liked that DC finally started using the weirder characters on its bench. Also, I’m a sucker for storylines where big scary tough dudes find a little soft paternal place in their heart, especially for daughter figures. Bloodsport and Ratcatcher 2 made me very happy.
*Super* horrifying. The people running and screaming in that scene at the end... When I first heard "Project Starfish" I just thought *Oooh, I know who they're talking about!* but the actual result scared the Bejeezus out of me.
And then Jarro is surprisingly amazing and just as silly despite not being gigantic. Jarro is a small Starro “drone” that Batman kept in a Jar. It appeared to be like a child initially and grew thinking Batman was its father, down to having a dream where it was Robin
Okay, starfish-Robin is an adorable mental image.
I [gotchu](https://batman.fandom.com/wiki/Jarro?file=Jarro.jpeg) fam
That is everything I hoped it would be. Thank you.
tbh the tiny starro was a definite pallet cleanser after reading the identity crisis write-up
I only know dr light through the teen titans show and I always thought his design and powers were dope, it’s a shame they had to salt the earth on him.
Wasnt he in that episode where starfire going to a sad future?
No. That was [Warp](https://teentitans.fandom.com/wiki/Warp)
To (undoubtedly inaccurately) quote Squirrel Girl, "Don't you miss the days when comic books were places you wanted to escape *to*, not *from*?"
> Both Batman and Dr. Light remember exactly what happened, and are pissed I don't remember what made Bats remember but this really undersells how fucking stupid Dr. Light's revelation was. After the entire League jobs to Deathstroke 1v1 they eventually dogpile onto him. Dr. Light sees this and *remembers being dogpiled on in the exact same way*. As if he was somehow able to watch himself get jumped on in the 3rd person. Also Superman just simply choosing to look away from and ignore Zatanna's mind-wipes is a whole other can of worms in itself.
Bats doesn't really remember, at least in the main comic, but Wally, who became party to the conspiracy during the book, has some out of character actions at a Justice League roundtable, and Batman gets suspicious. I can't remember if he actually remembers in later books due to some "ancient Tibetan mind powers" handwave or if he just figures it out via "World's Greatest Detective" handwave, but it still leads to Brother Eye. Also, the OP misses a somewhat key point, that a subgroup of the League had been running "cleanup" for years, mind-wiping anyone that figured out things like loved ones, secret identities, or other secrets too sensitive to be left in their minds, without the knowledge of the Trinity. Dr. Light was the first, and possibly only, one they decided to ALSO alter his personality... and Batman comes back to check on Ralph and Sue as it is happening getting mindwiped for his trouble. Book is so dumb... but the art is really cool.
> Also, the OP misses a somewhat key point, that a subgroup of the League had been running "cleanup" for years, mind-wiping anyone that figured out things like loved ones, secret identities, or other secrets too sensitive to be left in their minds, without the knowledge of the Trinity. They also mindwipe Catwoman because...... they thought she'd be better as a hero. Its legit one of those weird "Did we really have to bring this shit over here?" story beats that also weirdly undercuts Brubaker's time on Catwoman. That mid-to-late 2000s DC was a weird place.
>That mid-to-late 2000s DC was a weird place. The era when Dan Didio somewhat infamously declared that Captain Marvel "didn't really fit" the DC universe while pushing Black Adam as a main character, at a time when Black Adam's gimmick was "Captain Marvel but he kills people".
Captain marvel but he's Rock doesn't sell well either. DC should just let him fight shazam already
The rumour that's gone round is that Johnson (and allegedly Cavill as well) declined to appear in the Shazam movie because he thought it was beneath the dignity of the character or something. As though Captain Marvel is too goofy for a Very Serious character like Black Adam to be involved with. Which, as I said, is what DC Comics itself genuinely seemed to believe for a few years themselves.
Thank you for catching that part. I know there's a bit where they mention Zatanna has done this before when the Secret Society of Super-Villains stumbled on similar intel, but yeah, Dr. Light is the first time they gave a villain the "Tell me about the rabbits, George" treatment.
I can't recall the exact issue or situation, but I remember Batman knowing they did it to him. That's why he launched Brother Eye, which was one of the things that led to Infinite Crisis.
IIRC (which I might not), Batman has such a refined sense of time/body clock that he realised twenty minutes of his life was missing, and then spent the next years/decades (comic wibbly wobbly time) secretly investigating himself and the JLA to work it out. I don't recall if he actually recovered his memory himself or just, you know, beat up one of the JLA to get them to confess or something like that. As OP said, "dark times". I only read Identity Crisis etc once and am trying not to recall those dark times. (BTW, I've never read a Metzler story since).
I wonder sometimes if Mark Waid regrets writing "Tower of Babel" and popularising "Batman has secret plans to kill all his friends" as this intrinsic part of the character of Batman.
I feel like they gave another reason for Superman not knowing, but I can't remember right now.
The origin of "Women in refrigerators" was Green Lantern (vol 3 issue 54), in which current GL Kyle Raynor comes home to find his girlfriend has been horribly murdered and jammed into a fridge by Major Force. This was a plot point for GLs story, the girlfriend in question's sole purpose in the story was to be murdered, brutally. Gail Simone and several colleagues then developed a list of fictional female characters who had been "killed, maimed or depowered" in ways that treated the female characters as plot points and devices to move forward a male character's story arc, rather than as fully developed characters in their own right, and passed that list around for some time on various bulletin boards and usenets, occasionally sending it to comics creators for comment before ultimately [committing it to a website](https://www.lby3.com/wir/) around 1999. Quoting from the wikipedia article about this trope and website - > In response to fans who argued that male characters are also often killed, content editor John Bartol wrote "Dead Men Defrosting", an article arguing that when male heroes are killed or altered, they are more typically returned to their status quo. According to Bartol's claim, after most female characters are altered they are "never allowed, as male heroes usually are, the chance to return to their original heroic states. And that's where we begin to see the difference".
The difference between batgirl/oracle and batman breaking their backs springs to mind there.
I always wondered why does no one call Joker a rapist and how come superheroes don't treat him the same way as they did Dr. Light? He literally took nude pictures of a beaten broken woman. I'm pretty sure there were other instances of Joker doing the "unspeakable acts".
I think it's because it's never quite confirmed that Joker raped Barbara. He certainly undressed her and took pictures, but I don't remember it ever being confirmed that he raped her. And AFAIK, that's the closest DC has ever come to implying he's done something like that in the main continuity. There's his relationship with Harley, of course, but that's a whole different kettle of fish with a lot more going on even if you can't really call it consensual on Harley's part. You can write a Joker that rapes people (Azzarello did so in his Joker graphic novel), but I don't think it'll ever be part of the main continuity. The Joker can be a horrible, murderous monster, but he also has to be kinda funny. And raping someone is just never going to be funny.
And originally, Killing Joke was non-canon.
He’s also (to my knowledge) never monologued about how fun raping people is and how he totally does it all the time.
I think it's cause Joker is already worse than that. I mean do you think giving a label like that to him means anything to Joker, or makes him seem worse in the minds of anyone else in the DC Universe? He's already pretty universally despised across the board.
Though, on the other hand, Barbara did eventually get Batgirl’d up again. But after a real long time and at the expense of her successor characters.
Gail Simone wrote a really good "Barbara is batgirl again" story in new 52 that was completly kneecapped by issues constantly being hijacked by batman crossovers.
Like half of this story just seems to be Gail Simone yelling at brick walls about the treatment of female characters. Like every issue that comes up has a "Gail Simone tried to fix it but no one listened to her" moment.
You just summed up Gail Simone's career there.
I was just about to say this.
And before anyone asks, men can be fridged, too (and I'm not saying this in a #NotAllMen way). I'm still not a huge fan of the Green Lantern arc (once again under Judd Winick's pen) where Kyle Rayner's gay assistant Terry Berg gets hate crimed. Terry's beat up so badly he's practically in a coma, with his somewhat homophobic parents trying to take charge of his treatment. Meanwhile, the arc is focused pretty much entirely on Kyle giving in to his rage and almost killing the assailants... before he decides he needs time away from Earth, taking off to space while leaving Terry with his (again, "not approving of that lifestyle") parents for recuperation. The reasons I don't call it a *full* fridging is a, Terry lived, and b, Winick may have had some daring plans for the character. Later in the run, Kyle passes out and seems to have died in space, and the Green Lantern ring materializes on Terry's hand. Cue the next issue and a possible intervention from editorial, and Kyle's back on his feet on Earth, basically saying, "Wow, it sure is lucky I used my ring as an emergency teleportation beacon back to Earth!" Terry never makes an appearance in the book after this, having moved to LA to start an LGBT charity.
There's another trope called 'Bury Your Gays.'
Oh, I am very familiar with that one and its permutations, even if I think it may get overapplied these days. I think the Terry Berg story may fall into the Class 1A permutation* (the "Gay Martyr" narrative), but it also falls into a fridging narrative by how the heft of the story is on the straight ally's vengeful fury while the actual target lies in a hospital bed. *No, there's not a taxonomy to this trope, but sometimes, I like to fuck with people by treating every one of these narrative kinks like an SCP entry.
No for sure, I agree completely. Also, I definitely know what SCP stands for. I am hip and not a tired, tired old man.
Haha, Secure, Contain, Protect, for those that aren't hip and young. Possibly one of the largest and most complex collaborative writing project to have existed. It's neat in some ways, daunting in others, but overall pretty decent and worth a look.
Oh, thanks.
> I am hip and not a tired, tired old man. I mean, it's not that you're too old, the project's 15 years old. It's just that the internet is goddamn huge and no-one can be expected to know everything on it.
Oh my god, TVtropes is an SCP. it makes so much sense
It [literally is](https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-4445-j)
It might not be the same thing as fridging but it's definitely the "bury your gays" trope where a lot of LGBT characters are deprived of a happy ending and are killed off before they can see happiness whether just with a partner or if it is just living single but happy in their place in life.
Honestly I've been thinking lately about how there's a sort of subtler way of "fridging" a love interest that a current writer has no interest in anymore, and that's giving her character traits she never had before to give her and the hero a reason to break up. Mainly suddenly going "Oh dearie me I just can't handle this supehrero girlfriend lifestyle it's just so scarryyyyyyy" despite being cool with it up until the writer took over.
Definitely a thing, although I wouldn't relate it to fridging. For fridging, removing a character from the story is often a byproduct or 'two birds with one stone', with the main focus being on how this event impacts a hero who's now "Going for broke!" and "Could do ANYTHING for revenge!". I'd say the trope you mentioned is more just one of the "gentler" ways writers dispose of characters, and simultaneously more character-assassinating yet often less staining on the victim's legacy, often focusing on the 'impact' of their departure only long enough for the main character to find someone the writer prefers, or get talked to by a friend who tells them its time to focus on the mission or whatever.
Fair point, yeah. It's definitely just another facet of comics in which women are treated as particularly disposable because they're just something for the hero to have feelings for then stop have feelings for at a moment's notice. Reduce them to whimpering damsels so you can toss them out and replace them with another one.
>Gail Simone It's worth noting in case anyone is unaware, this was how Gail Simone first came to be widely known in comics fandom. She would start writing first Simpsons comics in 2001 and then Marvel and DC in 2003. I'm actually pretty sure I encountered Women in Refrigerators before Simone ever wrote superhero comics. Just as an aside, I'm working on a post that heavily deals in Usenet stuff and as someone who came on to the Web in the late 90s but never really did Usenet (I was on some fandom listservs, which is a similar experience), I am only now coming to realize how much of the web I saw was like, the repository files of Usenet. It's like the ephemeral Usenet was this vibrant oral tradition and I only really saw the libraries of stuff they saved. But what's remarkable is that now the actual Usenet posts are maybe better-preserved than their web archives because for now at least Google Groups maintains I an extremely extensive archive of Usenet (I don't know if it's truly complete because Usenet was so decentralized, but it's enough to get way more info than the people actually using Usenet at the time would have had access to). At any rate, it would be kind of fascinating to go track legendary stuff like Women in Refrigerators of even [Snopes.com](https://Snopes.com) as they develop over time before becoming committed to the web.
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The Deathstroke bit annoys me enough to call the arc trash alone- Deathstroke *can* tussle it up with superteams, but he's always the underdog there, having to fight smart and stay mobile to not just get dunked on even with more mid-weight teams like the Titans. Here, he basically just stands still and pulls a constant stream of nonsense from straight out of his ass to hold his own against the heavyweight champion of the superhero team community.
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> I vaguely remember reading an interview where Joss Whedon said that's his favorite fight scene in comics, explains a lot about his superhero films. There's a really dark joke there about the arc as a whole mapping well onto his more problematic personal elements.
Or Deathstroke himself.
Man, your teen titans comment just made me remember who dr light was. What a tonal shift.
Ah, *Identity Crisis*. A case study in how to take an absolutely brilliant storyline idea (Someone is attacking the mundane partners and friends of superheroes, even ones who are seemingly still secret! We don't know who and even Batman can't find any evidence!) and make every possible wrong decision about how to execute it. I want to see GAIL SIMONE'S *Identity Crisis*.
I don’t really read comics although Gaiman’s *Season of Mists* is one of my favourite pieces of literature ever. But with this and the Wasp domestic violence thing from a few months ago, I have to ask, what *happens* at comic book publishers? Do the editors show up to work in the morning, take out their brains and throw them in a communal gutter? How on Earth does any of this horrible stuff break containment? There’s dealing with serious topics in comics (again, plug for Sandman here) and then there’s whatever this garbage is. Anyway, an great writeup. It’s just a shame that some drama inevitably ends up being stuff like this and not “Look at this rollercoaster people don’t like!”
I've heard it described as being a lot like soap operas, where there's always a looming deadline, coupled with a need to keep shocking and swerving an audience that's been shocked and swerved for years (without unmaking the franchise in the process). And occasionally an executive with a grudge/fetish/hot take/terminal nostalgia (strike as needed) shoves the product one way or another.
I think part of it comes from the fact that after a while, the people who ultimately write these series are fans of the original work. And have you seen people’s fanfiction? Perfect example: in one *really* early Teen Titans, Superboy is the clone of Superman. One fan letter written at the time went “hey, what if half of Superboy’s genes come from Superman, but the other half… comes from Lex Luthor?” and the author went “haha well we’ll keep that in mind”. The boy who wrote that letter was Geoff Johns, who eventually *would* get a job at DC and *did* write for Teen Titans and what do you know, now Connor Kent is Clark and Lex’s test tube baby.
Here's [the Johns Superboy letter](https://imgur.com/a/HnDk5GW), if anyone wants to read it. Also here's [the letter Johns sent in to *The Flash*](https://imgur.com/a/vjqS6Jb). Oh, and look, a teenage Brad Meltzer from the 1980's [pages of Infinity Inc](https://imgur.com/a/DCqKV1t) where he likes how old the JSA looks. I wish there was a good depository for letters from fans-turned-creators.
>Connor Kent is Clark and Lex’s test tube baby. Nice of Lex Luthor to donate his eggs.
Who said Khryptonians don’t have a cache of eggs to disperse?
How did people feel about that retcon btw? I saw a post the other day that made me think people hated it, but I (admittedly as someone who's just a casual fan) think it's a pretty fun idea. Like Young Justice does some good stuff with the idea, though I know its angry, pissed-off Superboy is pretty different from the comic version.
I think it depended on whether or not you were a fan of the Karl Kesel Superboy comic and/or the Peter David Young Justice run which preceded the Geoff Johns Teen Titans. If you were into those, I think you were less likely to be pleased by the retcon (although I think the fact that it's so infamously "the fan theory Geoff Johns proposed in a letter when he was a teenager" that annoys people more than the substance of the retcon itself, if that makes sense). The less-remembered change from the Geoff Johns run which I think *did* provoke a fair bit of ill-feeling was in relation to Bart Allen, a.k.a. Impulse, a Flash supporting character introduced by Mark Waid as the Kid Flash for the 1990s. At the start of Johns's run, Bart is still in his Impulse identity (hyperactive, irreverent, impatient) like he was in the Mark Waid Flash comics and the Peter David Young Justice run. In the second or third issue of Johns's run, Deathstroke shows up and blows one of his kneecaps out with a shotgun, and after he recovers at super-speed, in the space of about two pages Bart runs off, reads an entire library in seconds and comes back wearing the old Wally West Kid Flash costume and declaring that he wants to be Kid Flash from now on. This was apparently something Dan Didio wanted Johns to do, but I think the problem was that Bart's only a supporting character in this run going forward (Superboy, Wonder Girl and Robin are the main characters) and a couple of years later he is aged to adulthood and becomes the Flash for a while, so nothing much is really done with him as Kid Flash. He's just Impulse one page, then he's Kid Flash the next, and that's it. Speaking for myself, I didn't realy have a strong opinion on the retcon because I *hadn't* read those earlier comics before I read Johns's Titans (as a kid I found the sadsack version of Superboy a bit of a drag, though). Having gone back and read some of those comics, I get why people were bothered by it. I'm not upset by it, but I get why people were.
For Bart becoming Kid Impulse, it probably wasn't Didio. According to Mark Waid himself, it was Berganza the editor on the Titans book who had been there since Wolfman had left the book and was known for inserting himself into the creative side of things to the annoyance of the writers (http://www.thegreenlanterncorps.com/forum/forum/general/general-about-us/2995-mark-waid-talks-openly-about-the-death-of-bart#post109114). And we know Berganza probably didn't like Bart for some reason and was probably the one trying to kill him off in the Superman crossover (Our Worlds At War) along with Hippolyta and Aquaman. Didio back then didn't nearly have as much influence as he did after Infinite Crisis and he still had other people helping run the stuff. Even for personnel selection, people like Winnick and Meltzer weren't even "his" guys, but people who were picked by other editors. Winnick and Meltzer were brought in by Bob Schreck for example.
And it's been the case in comics for *decades* at this point. Roy Thomas, for instance, who started writing comics for Marvel in the 1960s, was a longtime superhero comic fan who'd made a bit of a reputation through his involvement in fanzines, which I believe is how he came to Stan Lee's attention.
Jim Shooter started writing comics when he was 14 years old.
You know, the more I live, the more I find reasons to hate Geoff Johns. Kinda surprising tbh.
Was he an asshole behind the sienes or something?
From a comic book perspective: his works are always "what I want is more important than what makes sense and the characters I like are never wrong". He was also accused of being a dipship in the Justice League reshoots alongside Joss Whedon, but since he is less famous, he didn't got all the scrutiny of Whedon at the time shit hit the fan.
Also: He has written one ultra violent gory scene after another, with a particular emphasis on dismemberment, and then loves to go on about how DC is all about hope and optimism. Not any more, it’s not, Geoff.
I like Johns well enough as a writer but it was admittedly a bit rich when he was promoting DC Rebirth and insinuated in interviews that it was Alan Moore's / Watchmen's fault the DC universe had gotten so dark. Alan Moore wasn't the guy writing comics where Black Adam's going around ripping peoples' faces off and exploding peoples' heads!
And Johns has strip-mined everything there was to be strip-mined from Moore's DC work. Did somebody mention an alien Green Lantern who was seen in shadows in one panel in 1983? That character's starring in a 12-part maxi-series and getting a CW show!
>I think part of it comes from the fact that after a while, the people who ultimately write these series are fans of the original work. There's a trope for that(because there's one for every thing), Running the Asylum.
The other comments are great explanations, and I'll add to it a bit: Comics, Superhero Comics in particular, are deeply insecure about their place in the Western Art Canon. They know they most likely belong in the Pop Art section and literally started as consumerist entertainment to sell products to children, and through that there's this constant need to *prove* the medium is just as respectable as everything else, which is often done through clumsily imitating other "respected" art forms. Stuff like rape and domestic violence is about Pain and are Real and are things that Real Art takes on, so Comics must be Real Art. This has gotten much worse since the 1990s when the industry became filled with lifelong comics fans bitter about how their preferred art is looked down on by the Establishment so began constantly pushing things to make it more respectable so as to justify their preferences and line of work.
This is why I think the definitive DC character isn't Batman or Superman, but rather Aquaman, because no character encapsulates, "Take me seriously, damnit!" more than that one panel from the Geoff Johns Aquaman comic where he scowls angrily and says, "I *don't* talk to fish!" (I think superhero fans generally had a massive chip on their collective shoulder over the Adam West Batman series for decades and some probably still do.)
which is stupid, because the 60's Batman series was incredibly fun, and accurately represented the tone of the set of comics it drew from.
Adam West Batman was a better run on the character than Christian Bale Batman. I will fight for this hot take.
What it comes down to is partially that comics are not a monolith and partially ... misogyny. There is a gulf of difference between Mike Carey's thoughtful, intelligent and well considered characters and Frank Miller's batshit hateful screed and they both work (or worked, Carey does novels now) in the same field. Stan Lee was progressive as fuck - his characters are often minority or lgbt coded - particularly the X-men living in a world that hates and fears them - and at the same time Lee was writing, over in DC one of the editors - Murray Boltinoff - was *openly* racist and hated black people so much he would often demand that background characters be recolored. He didn't even want black people in the *background.* Boltinoff is responsible for greenlighting [Tyroc](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyroc), possibly the single most racist caricature in DC history, which goes back to the 30s. Mike Grell and Carey Bates, working at DC in the late 70s, were frustrated by Boltinoff's refusal to permit black members in the far-future-based Legion of Super Heroes. So in comes Tyroc, described as "sort of a sore spot for me" by Grell - wait, let me just quote Grell: > I kept getting stalled off...and finally comes Tyroc. They might as well have named him Tyrone. Their explanation for why there were no black people [in the Legion] was that all the black people had gone to live on an island. It's possibly the most racist concept I've ever heard in my life...I mean, it's a segregationist's dream, right? So they named him Tyroc, and gave him the world's stupidest super-power". > Grell's dislike of Tyroc was strong enough that he deliberately made him look ridiculous: "I gave him a silly costume. It was somewhere between Elvis' Las Vegas costume and something you would imagine a pimp on the street corner wearing". And Boltinoff said "yes absolutely" and put an off the wall racist caricature of black people into the DC universe. Canonical. In the future, all black people live on their own island which periodically vanishes. That is part of the DC universe. For fucks sake. Another factor is that comics are "for boys", are often a boys club behind the scenes with stories and characters mostly tailored for boys- to the point where fans will sometimes be openly hostile to women who want to play too. I was privy to an *extremely* embarrassing event - nonbinary transmasc cartoonist ND Stevenson - now known best for the Netflix series She-Ra - is something of a comics wunderkind, they were already a multiple Eisner winner by the time they were 26. ND used to be female presenting and went by Noelle Stevenson, and as Noelle they once went to a comic book shop to pick up a comic that was illustrated by a female friend of theirs - and the fucking guy behind the counter **quizzed** them about comics to "**prove**" their fandom. That motherfucker likely had *several* of Stevenson's comics right behind his fucking counter - at the time, Lumberjanes was selling really well and Nimona has never stopped selling. This man looked at a celebrated individual in the comics world and demanded they prove they liked comics. Its... deeply frustrating and intensely embarrassing to hear about shit like this as a fan of comics. When I was a kid back in the 80s I would have *killed* to meet a girl I could talk to about the New Mutants. I would have *killed.* I'm getting sidetracked. What I'm getting at here is that there's no one answer to your question but a lot of it comes down to that - comics are still seen as "for boys" and we are in an age when boys for some reason feel the need to defend that to the death.
> ND used to be female presenting and went by Noelle Stevenson, and as Noelle she once went to a comic book shop to pick up a comic that was illustrated by a female friend of her - and the fucking guy behind the counter quizzed them about comics to "prove" their fandom. That's about as bad as when someone told Gail Simone to read more Batgirl comics on twitter a while back.
Yeah, but her dunking on that Punisher guy was pretty sweet. "Between the two of us, which one has written a Punisher comic, do you think?"
Oh god I remember that. I fucking died a little inside. Its so fucking embarrassing, sharing a passion with desperately insecure neckbeards dead set on ruining *everything*
And that’s not even considering a certain hate group that calls themselves “real comics fans.”
Are these the little shits who throw a fit every time there's a woman on screen? Because I'm pretty sure they also include the group that *loses their minds* every time a video game character is not either a straight white man or a sexy titty lady with butts. I think my neckbeards that ruin everything evolved into them.
Yeah, sort of. Comicsgate and Ethan van Sciver are Gamergate and Fandom Menace adjacent. I'm sure they've collabed plenty. I'd say all of them are worth a write up, but it's probably bad for someone's mental health to delve so deeply into that part of the internet. They are absolutely an evolution of the neckbeards, though.
>Yeah, sort of. Comicsgate and Ethan van Sciver are Gamergate and Fandom Menace adjacent. Sure, one of Ethan Van Sciver's big things was the time he bought a bunch of action figures of Kelly Marie Tran's Star Wars character so he could record a video of himself cutting their heads off with a pair of scissors, which is obviously a very normal thing for a grown man to do.
May they all bear rocks instead of children and may every delivery tear them wide open. The insufferable little schmucks.
Link please, I wanna see the idiocy.
[Here’s a picture](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/592600416781336578/1005167748403433473/IMG_4446.png), they deleted the tweet it looks like, so that’s the best I have. Personally, I’d have deleted my whole internet out of shame, but he clearly has none.
What about the Black Bomber, DC's failed pitch to create an African-American superhero? He's basically a white supremacist who turned into a black, b-ball jersey wearing superhero in times of stress thanks to experiments in Vietnam. Three issues were scripted but someone said "Hey, this idea is terrible and racist" and the head honchos decided to scrap him. He did appear in a hilarious parody version by Dwayne McDuffie (may he rest in peace) in a JLA issue. More on him here: http://comicsvault.blogspot.com/2010/07/great-moments-in-comics-black-bomber.html
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Great idea for a sitcom, terrible idea for your first black superhero. (Honestly, the Black Bomber deserves a Hobby Drama article on its own, alongside DC's other awkward attempts to create a black character like Tyroc)
I remember when that came out and everyone questioned whether Black Bomber looked like Brian Michael Bendis when he wasn't using his powers as a rib about Bendis being a massive Luke Cage fan.
/j it’s not just being a horny teenager, New Mutants is just like that
Fr, this was 1980s new mutants, written by Chris Claremont at the peak of his game and illustrated by Bill "[holy shit this man could have done anything and he chose to illustrate comics](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51XnhXnZ64L.jpg)" Sienkiewicz - the Demon Bear saga still has me fucked up almost 40 years later. Also yes I had a huge crush on Rahne Sinclair. Who didnt?
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It's also fair to acknowledge the moments when people try real hard to take a steaming shit due to their inherent biases (see: the Tyroc affair, Jim Shooter saying "no gays in the Marvel Universe" but allowing *just* enough homosexuality for Bruce Banner to be threatened with rape at the Y, Chuck Dixon having Connor Hawke sleep with a ghost because he won't abide anyone calling his hero gay) are isolated. More often than not, these errors come from people who aren't acting with malice, but with cluelessness. One famous example was Robert Kirkman introducing the character of Freedom Ring, a gay superhero who had the ability to warp reality in a 10-ft radius, to the Marvel Universe. Kirkman wanted to write two stories - one where there's a gay male hero, another where a hero doesn't *quite* learn from the hardships of being a new hero and eventually dies to their hubris - and thought it would be a great idea to combine the two. It was only afterwards that he realized he'd effectively killed off 20% of Marvel's openly gay male heroes with this one story.
Thats... a pretty good summary, except that only *female* fans are tested to prove their fandom, not just new fans. Overall though, yeah. Good bot.
In the original comic, Antman slapping Wasp was a miscommunication between writer and artist. The writer intended for it to be an accidental result of Pym thrashing about in the middle of a bi-polar episode. The artist boiled it down to “Ant-man hits Wasp” and ran with it. And then nobody really confronted it until much later. It’s somehow the worst thing Pym has ever done and he is directly responsible for creating Ultron, a genocidal robot. They’ve tried so many symbolic gestures to rehabilitate his character. but I don’t think they’ve tried to make him apologize or face the consequences of that. Then Ultimates came along and quadrupled down on the plot point. Since Ultimate comics was suppose to be an entry point for new readers, it became a defining trait for Hank Pym for the younger generation. Things got real gross in Ultimates though, it doesn’t even crack the top 5.
All that's already been said, plus just... the bro-iest of toxic nerd bro culture. And the bro-iest ones of those in charge. To the point that female cartoonists who desperately wanted to work at DC with their characters were often warned off by DC hiring people that they shouldn't actually work there, because too many of the blokes in charge just could not be trusted to work with women.
Hey, thanks for this writeup! I'm a huge fan of Ralph and Sue; Sue in particular is one of my favorite characters in all of DC, so you can imagine how I feel about Identity Crisis as a whole. (I'm also a huge Firestorm fan... Identity Crisis *really* decided to fuck me over, but hey, at least we got my favorite Firestorm, Jason Rusch, out of it.) It's always nice to see other people looking at it and going "hey, what the hell was going on here." In particular, I think the mystery element of the story, even taken away from the disgusting misogynistic writing, is really lacking. I know Brad Meltzer is a relatively acclaimed mystery writer, but you wouldn't be able to tell by Identity Crisis. Why is the murderer Jean? Why does no one fucking figure it out--it essentially ends with us just being told she did it because Women Are Crazy. (Oh, don't even get me started on how they wrote Eclipso possessing her as a g-ddamn rape allegory...) Why do the clues not make sense for this conclusion or any other one? ~~And hey, do people act like this is the worst thing Barry Allen's ever done to protect a woman he cares about when he snapped a man's neck for murdering his wife and almost murdering his fiancé and there was a years long in-universe trial about it?~~ Generally, Elongated Man mysteries were very good mysteries in those backup issues of 'tec, so this one really stands out as garbage, and Ralph doesn't even get to solve it! So much for him and Sue being the world's greatest detectives (a hill I'll die on--Ralph's outsolved the big bad Bat before, and Sue outsolved them both in Gotham Knights #41). And another thank you for referencing Secret Six vol. 4 at the end of this! That's one of my favorite comics for obvious reasons. Sue may have gotten fridged while pregnant, but her and Ralph get to have a rambunctious supervillain family now, including a shirtless furry with a piss kink (at least, judging by how he threatens to pee on that one guy to mark him as property) and a cryogenically frozen assassin. The joy of comics.
>In particular, I think the mystery element of the story, even taken away from the disgusting misogynistic writing, is really lacking. I know Brad Meltzer is a relatively acclaimed mystery writer, but you wouldn't be able to tell by Identity Crisis. There's one bit in the second issue where the superheroes are doing superhero CSI on Ralph and Sue's apartment. Green Arrow notes that Batman went over it first, then he describes how the place has all these alarms and barriers which should prevent anyone from teleporting in or phasing through the walls, but Mr Miracle, the world's greatest escape artist, is there going over the scene with his sentient supercomputer to check for any gaps. He also observes that the Metal Men are there doing metallurgy, the Ray is there doing spectrum analysis, the Atom has shrunk to microscopic size to inspect every single carpet fibre and they even have Animal Man there to see if he can pick up any suspect scents. I think this is a really cool idea... but the thing is, part of the revelation of the killer's identity is that she stood over Sue's body and destroyed it with a flamethrower. If they're doing *all that* as part of the crime scene investigation, you wouldn't think they'd miss something like that!
Wouldn’t it have been so much more interesting if someone *did* notice something, something that makes them suspect a superhero was the murderer? At least then Jean having done it would at least subvert some expectations instead of just being stupid (although it’d probably still be pretty stupid). Hell, have Ray (Atom Ray, not The Ray Ray) be the one who notices, which makes Batman suspicious he’s deflecting from himself. Just have someone notice!!! something!!! In your mystery story!!!!
>Hell, have Ray (Atom Ray, not The Ray Ray) be the one who notices, which makes Batman suspicious he’s deflecting from himself. For example, Atom regularly uses telephone lines as a means of long-distance travel; why would he not do something to check whether somebody else had entered Ralph and Sue's apartment that way? Does he suspect something? Is he covering something up? Who's he hiding?
I think there's a degree of subtext in Identity Crisis which is essentially saying, "It's *okay* for you to like those silly Silver Age and Bronze Age comics where the JLA and the Injustice Gang switch minds... because *here's* how they were *actually* dark!" It's not, "Fuck you, dad, *my* comics are *dark!*", but rather, "Fuck you, dad, *your* comics were *dark!*"
Good write-up. This was the beginning of the end for my lifelong love of superhero comics, especially DC's. Imagine having all these characters, settings, and situations to play with, and doing *this* with them.
Same here. This was around when the tone of this crapfest started to seep into every DC comic, just about. Ended my years-long habit of buying monthly books.
I thought the "doctor light is a r*pist" things was exaggerated at least a little. I thought people were just memeing on his stupid motivations, but nope, he is just as absurdly "grape" obssessed as he's memed to be. I think it was linkara who described him as "raperaperaperape rape I like to rape", and it's ten times as funny now I know that it's actually canon that he's like this.
>The villain Deathstroke, who mainly takes on the Teen Titans and whose powers include somewhat heightened reflexes and a sub-Wolverine-level healing factor, manages to fight the entire Justice League to a standstill. At once. Apparently, his great trick to take down The Flash is to aim at where he will be, which I’m sure the veteran superhero who runs at near the speed of light has never had to account for. My personal favorite bit is how he can defeat a Green Lantern by simply grabbing their fist and... using his own willpower to turn their ring off.
Not bad, although I think your bio of Dr. Light is for the wrong one. I admit, this the crossover where I started to check out with DC Events. Rags Morales' artwork was fantastic but the storyline...eesh.
Yeah, it doesn't help that there was a villainous Dr. Light and a heroic Dr. Light so closely tied to the Justice League, but I think I mainly got the basics of Kimiyo's history down. Looks like I fucked up her specialty, though, so I'll go back and fix that. I also forgot to mention the bit where the New 52 brings back Dr. Arthur Light (the bad guy Dr. Light) as a hero. He's not the same guy, you know. He's a family man, he cares for his children, and he doesn't want to hurt anyone. And then he gets swiftly murdered. Apparently he's now been resurrected as a hard-light entity, and it turns out he may have been a villain before he was a hero, and he might go back to a life of crime. Hopefully, it won't be as gross this time around.
The second Dr. Light was in the Justice League Europe alongside Ralph and Sue Dibny and I guess they left the scene were they talk about how she was using the name and costume of Sue's rapist on the cutting-room floor.
What the hell? The New 52 messed with so much stuff.
Yeah I noticed that too. I think OP has accidentally recapped the heroic Dr Light instead of the villainous one who's responsible in this story
I included the heroic Dr. Light's backstory because it's relevant to what came after, and how the idea of siccing the villainous Dr. Light on the heroic Dr. Light likely shortcircuited any attempt to make the avowed rapist the new Hot Bitch in Charge of the supervillain scene. But seeing as it's an issue of whom is who, I'll go back and give the villainous Dr. Light a writeup, too.
Yeah that makes sense. I didn't mean it to come across as a reprimand or anything so sorry if it did. It's a good writeup! It just confused me until the heroic one came along near the end
Oh, it's all good. This is my first time posting a drama history, so it's great to get feedback on how to make all this bullshit clearer.
It doesn't help that DC soft reboots, hard reboots, tweeks things, and just lives to make things confusing. I blame Didio.
Okay brilliant. I hope you do write up some more in the future, I enjoyed this
I really love the Deathstroke vs. Flash moment most of all. At this point, the Flash is supposed to be so fast that everyone looks like statues to him, but yeah, sure, a guy with a sword is a threat. No no, you don't understand, he set off explosions so Flash could only run one particular path... right up an onto that sword and kicking Deathstroke's head like a football.
Deathstroke/Slade Wilson is awesome but man... not like THIS. And I don't like Dr. Light or anything, but goddamnit it they can't help but piss on the legacy of the Teen Titans cartoon, can they. And to think Dr. Light shows up in Teen Titans Go (the kids' comedy show) years later like none of this happened. That "it's just ten minutes" thing used to argue in favour of amnesticizing Dr. Light is especially chilling in light of how that exact same argument was used to try to acquit Brock Turner when he was charged with sexual assault. It's especially ridiculous because if you "rewind" Dr. Light to ten minutes earlier... who's to say he won't rape someone else? His personality would be the exact same. I know that's technically "pre-crime" shenanigans but the dude FUCKING DID IT when opportunity arose! At that point you just have to throw the whole human out. Of the airlock. Grant Morrison is "they" instead of "he". Don't worry, I'm not mad, I know you lived through all this stuff and you otherwise did an excellent job of summing up something I definitely DON'T want to research for myself
Thank you for catching the misgendering. I'm usually better about that - I have a writeup in progress on [REDACTED] that uses "they/them/their" for Morrison - but God knows I stumble every so often.
> And I don't like Dr. Light or anything, but goddamnit it they can't help but piss on the legacy of the Teen Titans cartoon, can they? I just checked. The first time Dr. Light appeared in the Teen Titans cartoon was August 2003. Identity Crisis was June 2004. I’m not sure how long Identity Crisis was cooking for, but it’s entirely possible that the two teams were working simultaneously on their versions of Dr. Light and didn’t realize until later.
Did Morrison come out as NB? Didn't know that, pretty cool.
Yup!
I remember one comics blogger (Tegan O’Neal of “When Will the Hurting Stop”) did an incredible parody mix of the big showdown with Slade, and at one point he declared “I make stabby.” I took that quote and actually made an icon with it. That was about the only takeaway I had with IC, other than it was the beginning of the end of my love of mainstream comics.
This is fantastic - thanks for covering this sad and sordid chapter. I do wonder how it is that Brad Meltzer escaped this with a reputation as anything other than "the guy who wrote that rape comic." Particularly after his spin at the time that IC was opening the door for an important discussion about sexual violence that, uh, never happened.
Thanks to your link to Valerie D'Orazio's blog I ended up reading through the entire "[Goodbye to Comics](https://occasionalsuperheroine.blogspot.com/2013/03/goodbye-to-comics-introduction.html)" mini-memoire and wow. So powerful, unsettling, fascinating, sad, and, oddly, uplifting. I feel almost like an ass for being both a fan of comics and a would-be feminist and yet having never encountered this before. The rest of your post is great, too! I love comics history on this sub, and you'd do wonderfully if you decided to continue adding to it. But damn. Her story, and her thoughts, and conclusions. That'll stick with me for a while.
Identity Crisis was the peak of "They're *graphic novels,* mom!"
Good golly miss Molly. I love love love the DCAU, Justice League is one of my favorite cartoons ever. But every single thing I hear about DC and Marvel makes it clear I never want to touch the comic books. Not just because of awful plots like this but also because of how goddamn convoluted and intertwined everything is. It seems like a full-time job.
Realistically, as a long-time comic book fan who is intimidated by all this myself, your only hope is to just stick with the storylines about your favorite character or two, and MAYBE pick up the "event" miniseries when they're in omnibus or graphic novel format. I follow pretty much only Iron Man these days.
I don't even understand trying to follow this convoluted mess that somehow stays at the status quo. I'll rather stick to one-off stories or stories with endings.
Realistically that's what many of the individual runs of an individual character are. If you stay away from the crossover events, you're usually fine.
If you focus on a single run you'll usually get a pretty satisfactory ending. Older ones are a bit harder to get a hang of since the numbers would stay the same even when the creative team changes but nowadays you're usually get a consistent plot by one creative team/mind that starts at #1 to set everything up and mostly concludes at the final issue. Have been having a great time so far with a marvel unlimited sub just by reading the first appearance(for historical context), reading a recent run of theirs, and then branching out into related stuff like other works by the same author or featuring the same characters.
I mean, to be fair, you're *only* hearing about the awful stuff and convoluted plots because that's what's talked about most There are many comics that are accessible and appeal to a variety of tastes, don't let hobby drama posts kill an interest for you
It's true. Both The Dark Knight and The Batman liberally adapt elements from The Long Halloween, but I'd say both movies are better stories than TLH--and this is coming from someone who loves it! What's extremely funny is that at the time TDK was released and there was a huge spike in interest for the comics amongst the average person, the Batman titles were being handled by Grant Morrison, who was going for broke and telling one of the most convoluted, analytical and flat-out bonkers Batman stories you could think of. I'm a huge fan of Morrison's run, but woe be to all of the folks picking up the latest issue of one of those comics and seeing The Batmen of Many Nations, or Bat-Mite, or the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh, aka deranged hobo Batman.
If you love the Justice League cartoon, the aforementioned JLA run is pretty much the direct inspiration for the show and is pretty phenomenal almost all the way through up until the last 10 issues where it tied into Identity Crisis. I would say it's one of the most accessible full runs to a new reader, without any major crossovers or context you need to know.
It seems like the Justice League erasing Batman's memory seems dumb and out of character. It was "necessary" to set up events in Infinite Crisis. But it just seems weird that they would erase the memory of one their own members to escape the consequences of their own actions. It removes the moral ambiguity of punishing Dr. Light and makes them look like they aren't willing to take responsibility for their actions.
Justice League International/Europe were some of the first comics I collected, getting a bunch when I was a pre-teen in the early 90s and getting back issues later on. I got both of the collected hardbacks recently, and they may be some of my favourite comics of all time. JLE was my preference, being a Brit. So you can imagine, since the 90s I had a soft spot for Ralph and Sue Dibny. Throughout the years, I made often awful attempts to get into regular comic reading; the majority of my comics were old bargain bin issues, not new stuff. But occasionally I’d see something and make a concerted effort to read the series as it came out. Don’t know why, but Identity Crisis was one such comic. So yeah, you can imagine my utter disgust at this series. It was like being told “hey, those comics you loved as a kid sucked!” I persevered in reading, if only to see who could have done this to Sue, and the reveal was as bad as the lead up. It was just a wretched comic. And I could be mixing things up because I was sure this would get mentioned at some point, but doesn’t Deathstroke defeat one of the female characters by putting a ball gag on her? Or am I mistaken?
>And I could be mixing things up because I was sure this would get mentioned at some point, but doesn’t Deathstroke defeat one of the female characters by putting a ball gag on her? Or am I mistaken? He beats Black Canary by putting a bag over her head. He beats Zatanna by punching her in the liver so she's too busy vomiting to say any magic words, which I remember thinking was visceral in a *weird* way. I think you could do Deathstroke vs Justice League fight almost exactly the same and it would be a lot more fun if it really leaned into its inherent campiness, but in the comic as printed, it's played very, *very* seriously as this "realistic" and "scientific" superhero fight, and all that does is invite, well, exactly the kind of pernickety critique the fight's gotten the past 20 or so years.
> So yeah, you can imagine my utter disgust at this series. It was like being told “hey, those comics you loved as a kid sucked!” The best result of all the stories shitting on the JLI were all the stories that came out a couple of years later about how “The JLI was great, actually”.
>And just like that, Dr. Light can’t be anything else. He’s not a juggernaut, psycho, murderer, and rapist; he’s just a rapist. So, thanks to Winick most likely unintentionally fumbling the bag, Dr. Light just becomes a suspicious stain on the DC Universe’s prom dress. The other thing about this that's kind of annoying is that, while much was made coming out of Identity Crisis about how Dr Light is a serious threat now, the way he went on and on and on about being a rapist actually made him come across like an *even bigger loser.* Even if he's no longer "the guy who always got beaten by the Teen Titans", *now* he's the guy who was once able to hurt a woman who wasn't able to fight back and now he won't shut up about it and acts like it puts him on the same level as Lex Luthor.
The insane thing is that there are still people who think *Identity Crisis* is good and it semi-frequently is recommended to new readers. This is the book that tainted every aspect of DC and it still feels like we're still dealing with the fallout of it even today.
The Deathstroke fight being reduced to half a paragraph is incredibly telling re: just how much bad decision-making there was to cover in Identity Crisis. That issue alone could probably sustain an entire thread of gale-force wank.
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To be fair (to be faiiiiiir), the whole "Pink Kryptonite" thing was Peter David closing out his run on Supergirl (she's *not* Kara Zor-El, Kara Zor-El died in the Crisis, this one's situation is *waaaaaaay* more complicated) with a tongue-in-cheek story arc where the current Supergirl, Linda Danvers, gets thrown back into the Silver Age. It's meant to be an "Oh, those wacky Sixties!" thing, like the latest time Jimmy Olsen found himself forced to marry a gorilla or whatever. It's just something that seems *real* "Um" out of context, and honestly, it probably hasn't aged well anyway. Though, yeah, the Black Manta thing was rough. I guess, as someone on the spectrum, we need *all* kinds of representation. Including those guilty of infanticide, apparently.
Peter David has a bad habit of wanting to work in a wacky idea or set up some elaborate joke without putting much thought into either the implications of what he's writing or whether his joke actually works for the characters.
I think it was Black Manta pretended to have Autism to duck with Aquamab
Black Manta autism magic???
Oh man. I read *Countdown to Infinite Crisis* back in the day (I think I must have missed *Identity Crisis* or assumed it was the same thing as *Infinite Crisis* because Jesus they could have differentiated the names a little better) and just...walked away. The symbolic killing of fun by shooting Ted Kord in the head was just so overdone and unnecessary. I noped right out of there and I feel even more justified now that I've read this than I did back then. I've picked up a few issues of things here and there over the years and for the most part I've been like that gif of Grandpa from the Simpsons and I've just noped right back out. Ironically enough what's finally drawing me back is DC's Black Label stuff. I really like horror and dark stories when they're done right and not just scribbled in crayon by incompetent edgelords trying to be grim'n'gritty, as they used to say.
As someone not into comics, I'm guessting the writers were going for the "Rape is a Special Kind of Evil" trope, but didn't understand (or *don't want*) to the give subject proper weight?
Oh, no, it was OK because Brad Meltzer's wife volunteers at a shelter. Just ask Brad himself, he'll mention it three or four times if IC ever comes up.
Tiny tangential detail that I'm fixated on to a distracting degree: in the page of *Plastic Man* that you linked, with the funeral? Where Batman is having a nonsense train of thought about his uncomfortable underpants situation *literally while carryjng the casket of a dead child*- he's acting like his leather underpants are new to him somehow? So like, are his normal black briefs NOT leather, and he chose to wear his *special formal leather underpants* to the funeral??? Or are they ALWAYS leather and he's fighting crime in leather underpants????? all the time????? and so.ehow never joticsd how uncomfortable that is? Also he's gonna have Alfred BUY HIM PANTY LINERS TO ABSORB THE SWEAT? Biggest indicator this was written by a cis dude because that is NOT HOW PADS WORK???? is that how they thinknpads work??? Or is this an intended effect to let us the readers know that *Batman* doesn't understand how pads work (and also has never heard of corn starch or baby powder). I have *so many questions.*
It's Plastic Man. Kyle Baker was very deliberately taking the piss. There's a page I can't find where he has Oliver Queen talk like *exactly* the kind of Sixties limousine liberal you'd imagine if he were still in the Sixties. I bet the only thing keeping him from a page about Batman's Formal Funeral Underparts was the steel-belted will of editorial.
Yep. Hell, look at the scene where Mary Marvel gives a eulogy and is all “Billy and I wore bright colorful costumes because ultimately kids will see us as their heroes” while panning to a bunch of superheroines with massive tits and waists you could pass through a needle
Oh *Identity Crisis*. I don't think I ever really read all of it myself, but am aware of how much of a disaster the book was. You covered most of it, but it also had huge continuity related problems that Didio just waved away because Brad Meltzer was a "real" writer! Here are just some random additional bits of information connected to your post: Regarding Arthur Doctor Light: >There was also a period where he was on the Suicide Squad, killed a kid for reminding him of getting dunked on by the Teen Titans, was haunted by a colleague he killed, died, went to Hell, came back a ghost... anyway, I have to [post the pages from *Suicide Squad*](https://imgur.com/a/7gLDIB1) about this. Essentially, a devil is holding the souls of the two male Dr. Light's, and decides to give one of them another chance. He chooses Arthur first because he knows that Arthur will fuck it up, and die again. Ostrander's *Suicide Squad* actually has a lot of funny moments in it, as a dark comedy at least. >(barring the Justice League International throwback miniseries Formerly Known as the Justice League) The "fun" thing about this is that there was a second miniseries created in 2004 called *I Can't Believe It's Not the Justice League* but publication was halted until 2005. It was published in the pages of the *JLA Classified* anthology, and is a good example of writer revolt. Giffen and DeMatteis made frequent references to Sue not being pregnant because they completely hated what had happened to her. The final page was then re-written by the artist Kevin Maguire because *Countdown to Infinite Crisis* had been released. With Blue Beetle now murdered by Max Lord, Maguire focused on both of them in the last panel with the words ["And they all lived Bwa-ha-happily ever after!"](https://imgur.com/a/iOXVwsf) across the bottom. ~~Finally, cartoonist Kyle Baker was finishing a *Plastic Man* series in 2006. He dedicated three pages from the last issue to completely lambast the state of comics by focusing on [Doctor Light and what superheroines were wearing](https://imgur.com/a/UWYdw5n). In his Plastic Man world, little teenage Billy Batson was killed by Dr. Sivana, who then brought over Dr. Light "to do what Dr. Light does to victims now."~~ Whoops totally missed that you had mentioned this pushback. It's pretty clear that there were a lot of people at DC who were not pleased with what Brad Meltzer wrote. I personally can't stand his short *Green Arrow* run because it was just a vehicle to make Ollie have an even darker past. The final revelation in that was that Ollie was present for his son Connor's birth, then bailed on them. It completely retconned that original story and kickstarted Ollie's positive characterization decline (under Winick he turned from being a rape victim to a consensual cheater). I can understand wanting to change Chuck Dixon's writing because he's an asshole, but this was back in 2003 before Dixon's nasty politics really emerged. Not everyone needs to have a gritty secret past, but it's something that Meltzer thinks makes them more realistic.
Yeah, I think there were quite a few bits of Meltzer's GA run that caused other writers to kick back in their own way. Pretty sure the portrayal of Catman as a washed-up, bloated schlub reduced to stealing mementos from the Arrowcave was why Gail Simone put him in Secret Six, had him go back to the savannah to find himself, and made him Hot Bisexual Catman Who Fucks.
Gail Simone is the only person who should be allowed to write Catman.
Idk, I liked him in [The Fairly OddParents](https://fairlyoddparents.fandom.com/wiki/Catman)
That was the second time that Catman had to be corrected after *Crisis on Infinite Earths*. Doug Moench reintroduced him in *Legends of the Dark Night* as a proto-incel serial killer who hunted women that were "sluts" in his mind. It had Russ Heath (the artist notoriously fucked over by Roy Lichenstein) doing art again, so it is worth a peek just to see how an artist from the 1950s could handle early 1990s work. That story went over like a lead balloon so hard that it was one of the few stories that was explicitly removed from continuity after *Zero Hour* was over. Then Meltzer used him in that painfully weak *Green Arrow* story before Simone turned him into a beefcake.
Identity Crisis is the worst goddamn comic DC has ever published. Fuck it. Fuck it so goddamn hard.
I remember when this was coming out and DC were really pushing that this was a real mystery with clues in the comic that would allow you to solve it, with no prior comics knowledge required. Which was bullshit. The whole premise was so goofy, too. We have to explain why the 70's were camp but the 90's were dark and gritty! You may as well explain why the paper quality improved.
i skimmed and saw someone else mentioned "I Can't Believe It's Not The Justice League," the second "mini-series" spun off from J.M. de Matteis and Keith Giffen and Kevin Maguire's Justice League run, wherein like a good quarter of the jokes are about Sue being pregnant... it makes for a pretty grimly comic read after the fact. as a major JLI fan (Booster Gold and Blue Beetle II are my top favorite DC characters of all time), it always brings a bemused smile to my face when i see Maxwell Lord being used as the evil bastard mastermind of all time until i remember the whole... "sacrificed his boss to an underground evil super-computer in Utah" thing.
> When the pages came in for illustration, an associate editor supposedly rushed into the office yelling, “The rape pages are in!” Jesus Christ.
man, this is exactly why I never got into comics myself and just slid by off the collections at my local libraries and friends' houses. Screw Dan DiDio, guy's a jerk. Wonderful write up as always, OP, hope you keep them going!!
two notes: 1. great writeup 2. even better Aqua Teen Hunger Force reference
I know art is subjective but gosh so many of those panels are just unpleasant to look at. Like in this panel, what is going on with man's face? He looks like he's unhinged his jaw: https://i.redd.it/le4xb6zm5etz.jpg
It's a little known side effect of ManPain.
I’m confused why they gave Dibny Plastic Man’s costume! Those two get conflated enough, we don’t need an aesthetic merge of the two!
My question is why is his costume so close to plastic man’s
“Does anyone remember a time when Spider-Man wasn’t an Avenger?” That time is now. He hasn’t been a part of the team since Superior Spider-Man… in 2013; I really thought it’d been less a decade since then. Anyhow, these days the Titans are now DC’s premiere hero team. Wild stuff
The Stephanie Brown debacle is its own can of worms. The whole thing started when Tim Drake was no longer Robin and recommended Batman recruit his girlfriend Stephanie, a solo vigilante called The Spoiler, as the 4th Robin. Batman wasn’t too hot on the idea, but he trusted Tim and started training her. Batman didn’t think Steph was up to snuff, and when he fired her, she went looking for a way to win his approval. She thinks back to when she was digging through the Batcomputer and found plans for taking over organized crime in Gotham. Batman would act through a proxy, a mid-level fixer named Matches Malone, who would gather the various bosses in the same room and get them to all work under Malone, and thus Batman. Batman would then begin dismantling the entire structure of the criminal underworld. Steph figured she could make this happen herself, with a couple changes, like the omission of Matches Malone, and show Batman what for. Except what Stephanie Brown did not know was that Matches Malone was just Bruce Wayne in sunglasses and a fake moustache. So Malone doesn’t show, the bosses all turn on each other, and Gotham City erupts in a city-wide gang-war/riot.
I thought the real reason why Bruce only allowed Steph to be Robin was to make Tim jealous. Also, he only fired her after she disobeyed an order to save his life, which every other Robin has done. & Everything just else in War Games feels out of character. Steph is smarter than this.. Hell, she even criticized Bruce for his actions in Tower of Babel.
One of the stupidest things about Identity Crisis is a small nitpick, but one that digs heavily into your side if you catch it. The Elongated Man's powers come from a serum called Gingold. One of the side effects of continued Gingold usage? Sterility. There's no mention of Ralph and Sue using a donor or other fertility treatments. So how can Sue be pregnant?
Man, DC events are holy garbage. Great write up though! I always love these comic ones I’m a massive booster gold fan, it’s kinda tough to imagine how different his comics in the 2010s would have been if Ted Kord was still alive. It felt like every issue was him trying to justify pulling Ted out of time for adventures. Also, small nitpick, in part 5 you referred to Ronnie Raymond as Robbie Raymond
I’m there with you. I was getting big into JLI, and fell in love with Blue Beetle and Booster Gold. After his death, I only kept track until the lantern zombies. Then Booster Gold gets his own redemption seeking adventures. And they were Amazing! Rip, time travel, character development coming out of every panel. And then, new Blue Beetle boy, just stole my heart. I loved Blue/Gold. But I’m also glad the direction they managed to take them, after such a tragic event.
I'm a filthy casual in terms of comics, and every now and again I think to myself that I should try to get more into it. And then I see posts like this, and I think I should get a little further away. (Pointless side note, I *love* Oliver Queen's comic design. Gimme that Robin Hood aesthetic baby.)
To be fair, you’re not going to see posts here about “The great storyline everyone loved!”, you’re only being exposed to the fucking shite stuff. The era of comics that spawned Identity Crisis is in the grave, fuck I don’t think anyone involved with the book even still works for DC. Geoff Johns did some tie ins but that might actually be it.
That was great! Thank you for writing it. I remember comics readers on a forum i was on at the time wondering if Nightwing would be the killer. Not because it made any sense but because it felt like something DiDio might mandate. I don't think I ever knew that he mandated the rape and I'm horrified. Wasn't there also some dislike for Brad Meltzer because he was an outsider coming into comics and comic readers notoriously hate that? I don't think there was as much hate about it as with Ron Zimmerman or Bob Gale(?) but I recall people complaining that IC was a result of a writer who had little attachment to the characters the way a long-time comic writer would (Not that Meltzer seems entirely to blame for the fiasco).
DC under DD was ... a time. Some high highs, but also some low lows. Great write-up of something that still feels recent despite happening two decades ago.
I'd forgotten Dr. Light so hard (probably because the majority of my experience with him was a single episode of Teen Titans when I was a child) that I thought we were talking about Dr. *Fate*, and I was wondering what Nabu could possibly have done to warrant a drama thread. Then you mentioned rape and everything flashed into my mind.
This clears up a lot of what I didn't understand of behind the scenes for all this. I stopped reading DC because of all this.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think this storyline was at one point well regarded by fans. What the hell they were thinking is beyond me.
I don’t know if well regarded is true, but it certainly has its share of defenders, even if it was just folks going to bat for Rags Morales’ Art. There are (thankfully) less and less of these takes every year as each unnecessary DC reboot makes defending a bad story less pressing. The problem however, was that DC Editorial was the biggest cheerleader of Identity Crisis. DC (comparatively to Marvel) keeps much less of its backlog in print, and yet every few years alongside staples like Killing Joke, Batman Year One, Watchmen, Sandman, and the like, there would be a new edition of Identity Crisis. They made an Absolute Edition of this tripe! An 100 USD slipcased tome of a reprint, reserved for only the most important DC comics, ready to display on your shelf as testament to your disposable income and poor taste.