Identity Crisis is well-crafted, with strong writing, gorgeous artwork and a truly fascinating premise. Unfortunately, it has at its center an event that so clashes with what I want in superhero comics, and falls into a trap that the worst hack should be ashamed of, much less an award-winning novelist, that I just can't fully enjoy it. I am warning you right now that I am going to spoil the identity of the murder victim in this review, not because I have no respect for the secrecy of this story but because I can't properly describe my reaction without going into some detail about the murder. So if you don't want to know, don't read the review. It is just slightly possible that Meltzer will overcome what I feel is the enormous mistake at the center of this book, which I rate just about as highly as turning Hal Jordan into a mass murderer or killing off Karen Page, by creating a truly powerful mystery that will send shockwaves throughout the DC Universe and exploring what it means to be a hero. I can't deny being intrigued by the story that Meltzer and Morales have told, and impressed by it on several levels, but I'm also disgusted with it on one very important level, and I don't know that I'll be able to get past that.
Fair warning. One more paragraph to go before I spoil it. I'll start, instead, by discussing what Meltzer gets right, and that's a lot. As with many folks who come in from outside comics, Meltzer's script is pretty wordy, and a casual glance at the page will tell you that an editor should have gone through and pared things down. However, that editor would have had a tough job to do, because for all that the script feels wordy, Meltzer does a pretty effective job of building characters in using those words. Though the act at the center of the plot would indicate otherwise, it's clear that Meltzer truly loves the DC Universe, from the big guns all the way down to smaller characters, and that he's interested in exploring a slightly more realistic, one might even say noir, look at how superheroes and supervillains interact with the world. A big part of this issue revolves around a supervillain trying to buy some equipment, and all the procedure that goes into that kind of thing, and it's fascinating reading. Meltzer's use of minor characters like Firehawk and Elongated Man, not to mention an unusual "C.S.I. of the DC Universe" type gathering, is really well done, and fun for any fan of the DC Universe.
Unfortunately, what Identity Crisis has been sold on, and indeed what this first issue turns on, is the death of a JLA member. As it turns out, this JLA member is honorary only, and it's sort of cheap to sell this death as something that's going to hugely affect the DC Universe. The speculation ranged, at least from what I saw, from Elongated Man to Green Lantern Kyle Rayner to Firestorm Ronnie Raymond, but you know who it is? Sue Dibny. I can hear many of you saying: "Who?" The wife of Elongated Man, that's who. Really, though, my annoyance with that aspect of the story can be blamed on marketing for using what is a pretty deceptive line of hype, unless of course more Leaguers start dropping as the story goes on.
Mind you, while the decision seems like a cheat in that it won't have any real effect (really, how many Elongated Man stories have you read in the past five years?), the reason I disliked it so much was because Elongated Man and his wife were an unusual thing in superhero comics: a happy couple. They represented that superheroes could get away from the drama of possessed love ones, murderous supervillains, the stress of the secret identity, all that crap and maybe find happiness. Now, what is Elongated Man? He's yet another superhero who lost a loved one to a supervillain. And that's not the worst part, actually. No, not only is Sue Dibny murdered in this issue, but it is revealed that she was pregnant with their child. Why? Because that makes the death more tragic. This is a cheap hack trick, the kind of thing we expect to see in schlocky Hollywood blockbusters by guys like Renny Harlin. It's just so exploitative, such a cheap emotional trick, and there is simply no way that the consequences of this can ever fully be explored. More to the point, while all superheroes don't have to be fun and games, there's an escapist element to superhero fiction, especially the same superhero universe that contains Batman, Superman and other icons, that is completely shattered if the villains can get away with things like this. His newly pregnant wife was murdered, Elongated Man is now a completely different (and less interesting) character and the DC Universe has lost some of its innocence, some of its fun. Should tragedy enter a hero's life? Of course it should, it makes for good drama... but if you take it too far, it becomes too much, to oppressive, and the victories can't really be enjoyed as anything other than pyrrhic. That's without even exploring the notion of how many female love interests get this sort of treatment in comics, and whether this is another example of a disturbing trend in comics that was so well documented by the "Women in Refrigerators" website.
It kills me that this one central element makes me dislike the book, because Rags Morales deserves better, he's been great for years and this is really his spot to shine, and he does a fantastic job. There's a lot of emotion in the reactions to this death, and Morales really does a great job of selling those emotions. He is also called upon to draw any number of characters, and he gives them all a recognizable but distinctive look, somewhere on the more human side than we usually see them, and that humanity is really important to make the grief of the characters felt. I hate that Meltzer has done this, but I have to admit that he and Morales do an excellent job of portraying the after-effects in a believable, human way. When Ralph Dibny literally loses his composure at the funeral, it's a pretty spectacularly powerful moment.
I'd like to be able to write off this one glaring flaw as an unfortunate side effect of the nature of event comics and the recent decision by both big companies to view short-term shock value as more important than the caretaking of their long-developed shared universes, but unfortunately I can't. Meltzer also hints at some sort of dark history that led to this event, suggesting that he is going to further tarnish the notion of the heroic ideal that the entire genre is built on. I can't deny that on some level, I'm curious to find out what it was the leaguers did that was so bad as to cause these consequences. But I'm also worried that in trying to explore the "consequences of being a hero" in a more realistic way, Meltzer is missing the point of the genre entirely, and is writing a version of superheroes that I just can't get behind. I should be clear that I fully expect mine to be the minority opinion, and maybe it even should be, but the way that an interesting character is turned into a tragic "pregnant woman murdered" really just pushes my buttons the wrong way, and even though I found most of the issue to be good to great, I couldn't fully enjoy it because of what seems to me a crucial flaw in the foundation.
