#like yeah it’s still a tragedy cause of they whole Julie going to jail thing but they LIVE

[lamentable-comedy]

Ralph and Julie are alive? Ralph and Julie are alive. Do you ever think about that??? Think about how Ralph Montgomery and Julie Capsom are alive???? How Arden took one of the most well know tragedies, possibly in the world, and changed the ending so they LIVE??!???!?? In the “they’re going to die” play???????? In the “hi the story hasn’t started yet but just a heads up they will die— we know this is based on an older story, but just in case you didn’t know, they are going to die at the end” play????? And they LIVE??????????????

It’s been four and a half years since I listened and I haven’t stopped thinking about how Ralph and Julie are alive. They made it out. Just this once. Just this once, they made it out alive.

[thecomicsnexus]

All of us

HEROES IN CRISIS #9 JULY 2019 BY TOM KING, CLAY MANN AND TOMEU MOREY

SYNOPSIS + REVIEW

Half of this issue is useless confessions from several characters, mostly one panel each. They tie into the “concept” of the series.

In a nutshell: Heroes in Crisis’ goal, was to show everyone that heroes cannot be heroes all the time and that they too suffer from trauma. You know, just in case you stopped reading comics in 1968.

The issue opens with Booster, Beetle, Harley and Batgirl crashing on the moment when Wally was about to kill Wally. Let’s stop and think that a bit:

Wally from the past fucked up, so he went five days into the future to kill himself and place his body in the past. He would then stay in hiding for five days until he gets the visit from his past self to kill him.

Harley finds out that Poison Ivy was re-grown... somehow... maybe the speed force did it?

The apparition of these heroes makes Wally stop killing the other Wally. Now, at this point something is really strange and it is hard to follow which Wally you are seeing. Past Wally is in crisis now because he has to kill future Wally, but future Wally had time to process what he did and he is no longer in the same mental state. So he comforts past Wally and tells him that he is not alone. At this point Booster, Beetle, Harley, Ivy and Batgirl are mostly just watching them and making comments among themselves.

Then we get the explanation as to why Wally did what he did. He didn’t want to undo his mistake by traveling back in time, because that is what Barry did and created a new universe, erasing his family. All of this, because Barry likes to keep secrets from everybody and didn’t share with Wally all his suspicions about Doctor Manhattan.

Wally wanted to make up for his mistake and do something good, but he knew he would be caught almost immediately and go to jail. So he framed Booster and Harley to buy some time, deliver the confessions to Lois, so that the whole world could see what their heroes did, that took them to the sanctuary. Why? because that would prevent other heroes (or normal people) from feeling isolated like Wally was when the tragedy happened.

Of course, Wally’s tragedy happened because he watched all the confessions and felt horrible inside afterwards, so I don’t see how he could believe in that theory.

I appreciate the intention, but revealing other people’s secret traumas and feelings is morally wrong. The witness heroes think that this was something good, I don’t see how doing that is good, beyond the effect it caused in others. I guess an ex-CIA agent (King) doesn’t see other people’s secrets as something sacred.

Booster Gold comes up with the idea of completing the loop by just replacing Wally with another body of Wally, who was also five days older. To do this, they will need to go to the 25th century, speed-clone past Wally and... I guess also kill him.

Past Wally, still considering killing himself, questions this by saying “Aren’t we heroes? Shouldn’t I sacrifice myself?”. To which Booster answers with this piece of gold: “Dude, we’re heroes, yeah, cool. But we’re brothers, too, right? sisters. We share this absurdity. This life. We’re people. We’re family. And sometimes, I’m telling you, THAT can come first”. I guess Tom King is Booster Gold and wanted to tell us that, because IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING!

And Wally ends up in jail, in uniform. And obviously will become part of the Suicide Squad.

And the issue ends. The story ends, without ever finding itself. Because until issue eight, it was about the people that had to work in removing impurities and what that does to them, and in this issue it was all about showing people they are not alone.

Continuity also doesn’t mean a thing, which makes me think editors are redundant.

Look at the scene where Lagoon Boy dies:

And then how we see him dying issues later:

See Steel there? Turns out he died of asphyxiation:

You could say that perhaps Wally added that to frame Harley, but I don’t know. If you are doing an autopsy, at some point you will find out that that wasn’t the cause of death.

And who was the Green Lantern that died in Sanctuary?

In the end, I know King is an unreliable narrator, and that works well in some of his stories, but it didn’t work here. He stopped writing the characters to write himself, and speak through these characters. He came down from heaven to tell us that the best way of helping people with mental issues is exposing our mental issues as well, so that no one thinks they are freaks. And I agree with the idea, as long as it is willingly. I often think that everyone is a bit insane, that if I sometimes have to put reality under the magnifying glass, others could be doing the same. But what does that have to do with what happened here? Readers already know that these heroes were “complicated”. He just made Wally reveal to the people in the DCU that heroes were “complicated” like them. Will this affect anything? Possibly... for a year, then everyone will forget about it.

I should mention that there seems to be a Doomsday Clock hint in this issue, through Metamorpho’s confession.

So Doomsday Clock is still happening in the future, and this story is never mentioned there (which makes sense, because that story started like two years ago).

I feel that the ending was too sloppy. I know he meant well, but he could have done this with other characters, at Image. At the end of this story, Roy Harper is still dead, killed by one of his best friends. Along with several other characters, MOST OF THEM TITANS.

Clay Mann did an amazing job, it’s a shame that the story wasn’t at the same level.

I give the issue a score of 6