Heroes in Crisis 7
Written by Tom King
Pencils and Inks by Clay Mann, Travis Moore and Jorge Fornes
Colors by Tomeu Morey
Time travel gives me a headache, and I suspect once the next issue of Tom King’s miniseries hits next month, I’m gonna need a bottle of Excedrin to get rid of the colossal migraine this book is about to give me.
From the FIRST ISSUE, we’ve been told that the most likely suspects in the killing of all these heroes at Sanctuary – the mental health clinic out in the middle of nowhere established by Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman – were Harley Quinn and Booster Gold. They’ve been on the run and trying to prove that the other did it this whole series. Finally, we get a confrontation here, as Batgirl and Blue Beetle look on, doing very little to ease the situation.
OK, sure, Batgirl tells Harley not to kill Booster, but when Harley finally shoves a stake down towards the man from the future, it’s not like she tosses out a Batarang or a bolo or something to stop it. Thankfully, Harley listened and just stabbed the ground next to Booster’s head.
Booster, for his part, is broken from his trying to save Bruce Wayne’s parents in King’s BATMAN book, plus the Sanctuary killing, so he’s ready to die here. But still, whatever faith Batgirl had in Harley was completely misplaced. It’s not like she ever denies the fact that she’s a lunatic.
I am, however, now completely shipping Booster and Harley as a couple. That may make me weird, but I’m OK with it.
The sequences with Batgirl, Harley, Booster and Beetle are a lot of fun, and allow for some JLI-style levity in a story that is fairly dour. They’re assisted by The Flash and Batman searching for Harley and Booster in the Batcave, as they argue over Flash’s speed in between Barry Allen’s jaunts to other continents. While the Booster-Harley scenes are pretty important to the story, the Flash-Batman scenes felt a little out of place and shoehorned in only because of the CROSSOVER between their respective books last month, which was promoted as a tie-in to this.
But the most important part of this issue takes place outside of either of those two scenes. The talking head segments of this issue – which have been used effectively to introduce the people who were at Sanctuary and some of their motivations for being there – focus entirely on Wally West, as does another scene where he uses his powers to… grow a new Poison Ivy? Bring her essence out of a flower? I have no idea.
The important thing to note, though, was Booster’s discovery that the dead body of Wally West in the first issue is five minutes off from the time it should have died. Booster being a time traveller, he’s the only one who could really figure it out.
Was Wally’s pain – losing his wife and kids when Barry Allen affected Flashpoint and being brought back from the Speed Force to a world where he’s all alone – enough to cause him to kill all those other heroes before committing somehow killing himself? That’s a pretty drastic turn for one of the more positive and upbeat characters DC Comics has ever produced.
I admit, Tom King has me intrigued, but I’m still not sure it’s in a good way. With only two issues left in this limited series, there’s probably a lot of ground to cover to make sense of everything. Those last two issues are really going to make or break this series.