Some thoughts about Heroes in Crisis #1

There's a crisis that not even some of the world's greatest heroes can stop.

The Trinity are investigating the strange events that are currently happening but they won't be fast enough since people from their own community are starting to die.

Yes, "there's a crisis that not even some of the world's greatest heroes can stop" and that is this book.

You see, people have been dreading the arrival of this series for a while. Why? Because the premise seemed ill-fitted since the beginning. The idea of a new crossover event starting with multiple deaths of superheroes just seems like a cheap way to create shock value, not to mention that this would mean that most of those heroes won't be used in the future and of course, the possibility of good stories with them gets immediately erased. This premise is so bad that many people started to compare it with the infamous James Robinson miniseries Justice League: Cry for Justice which suffered from the exact same problems.

And after this issue, the comparison becomes even more obvious.

Tom King was chosen to write this book. As you might know, King is an immensely hit and miss writer for me, he can surprise me with inspired books like Mister Miracle while also completely destroy all my hope on him with his Batman run. Some of the most obvious problems with his work are the necessity to ignore previously established characterization simply to follow his own themes and of course, the atrocious dialogue he can create.

Heroes in Crisis starts with quite a few of those ticks. You can start cringing right from the beginning when Harley references one of the most famous pancake commercials in an inexplicable way to sound "witty" and things don't go much better from there. The dialogue itself is problematic, is not natural which is something that I was expecting from King but at least I was hoping for lines that wouldn't make me regret the read.

But of course, that's not the worst part. No, the worst part are the deaths.

Yes, superheroes die in this opening chapter and that sadly includes some of my favorite characters in the DCU. The story starts to escalate with the murders of a few obscure heroes and ends with more famous ones. All of this connects to Sanctuary but as far as this issue goes, is just pure death with very little plot progression and terrible conversations along the way.

And this wouldn't bother me so much if at least these people received a more appropriate send-off. I mean, they get a page where they speak about their personalities but it comes with some of the worst examples of King's dialogue and thus negates its intention. Really, this is almost comical, I'm almost expecting this to be retconned halfway because I really, REALLY hope that DC is smart enough to realize that getting rid of these particular characters is a mistake, especially in this ridiculous way. Hell, even Identity Crisis, which has its detractors, had a more emotional punch to its deaths and had more plot progression in its opening chapter.

Clay Mann handles the artwork and is the only salvagable thing in this. His characters are beautiful and offers a pretty polished and powerful style that follows the story as well as it can.

Well, this started terribly and I'm not sure how things can be improved. Good Lord, hope things start to get retconned already.