On the other hand, Johns does better with the thematic fallout rather than the plot points raised by a rampaging Secret Society. It’s a problem with mainstream superhero comics, and it’s one reason that I suspect that massive deconstructions like this never work as well as they probably should. That means the deconstruction cannot hold, and that there’s a little chance of any meaningful development of that plot thread, or satisfying revolution to the dilemma created. In this case, back to where they were before Identity Crisis. You need to, at the story, return the characters to the situation they were in before the story began. At the same time, you can’t kill the villains, because that would remove several useful characters from DC’s continuity. You can’t resolve the situation by allowing the villains to retain knowledge of the heroes’ secret identities, because that makes the identities redundant and destroys the status quo. So the notion Brad Meltzer introduced in Identity Crisis – that the Justice League wiped bad guys’ memories to stop them hurting the heroes’ family – can’t be allowed to break the status quo. Due to the fact that it’s serial fiction, you can’t push them too far and you have to push towards the status quo. Of course, this is arguably a problem with a thorough deconstruction of mainstream superheroes. So it seems a bit cheeky to resolve the fundamental issue created by mindwiping the villians by… mindwiping them better. However, they wiped his memories because he would never go along with them mindwiping supervillains. Batman is justifiably upset because his allies wiped his memories. Don’t get me wrong, there are still consequences of the League’s actions, but Crisis of Conscience ends with the suggestion that the important remaining questions are internal – the consequence not of mindwiping villains, but of mindwiping allies. The problem, based on the end of the story, is that she didn’t lobotomise him properly. This doesn’t, of course, side-step the ethical implications of her actions, but it does seem to imply that the problem with what she did to Arthur Light wasn’t that she lobotimised him. Zatanna opts to pretty much do the thing that she did before, only with more skill. Maybe that’s the point, of course, that the equilibrium created by Zatanna’s spell was just that fragile – but it feels a little anti-climactic.Īt the same time, the resolution to the situation seems a little… shallow. It feels almost a shame that the house of cards erected in Identity Crisis is brought down by so generic a threat. In contrast, Despero arrives here as a fairly typical supervillain bad guy. ![]() In Day of Vengeance, the Spectre served as the antagonist, recruited and corrupted (rather than directly controlled) by Eclipso. Project was, at least, relatively subtle and long-term. Infinite Crisis has really been more about the failure and corruption of heroes, so it feels strange for Despero to arrive in this late in the game with a play straight from Supervillainy 101. ![]() It’s almost a standard supervillain gambit, in an event that has really avoided too many standard supervillain conventions. Evoking countless other stories, Despero decides to distract the League by fermenting personal problems so that he is free to engage the Martian Manhunter without interruption. To be fair, a lot of Crisis of Conscience is taken up with a conflict between the League and Despero, which feels very much like a paint-by-numbers super hero fight.
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