Over the past few months of DC advertising HEROES IN CRISIS, what they’ve said about it, and the fact IDENTITY CRISIS is now on here I think that HIC could be the new IDENTITY CRISIS of the Rebirth era. It’s got all of the billings of that. It’s a very humanizing and deconstructive take on the characters of the DC Universe that will supposedly send ripples across the main continuity that lead up to even bigger events like INFINITE CRISIS.
If this is true then I’m REALLY excited for it.
Identity Crisis was an incredible story. It was probably the most “adult” main-stream" comic DC ever produced. But in some ways I think it hurt comics by sucking some of the fun and awe out of them. If all the super-heroes are sulking and brooding like The Batman, the world they inhabit becomes too oppressively grim. Sorry to reference this here on a DC site, but if you want “real world” problems and issues and still retain the action and awe, look no farther than Lee and Ditko’s Amazing Spider-Man. Half a century later this is still the template for great comics.
Questioning one’s role in the world and such isn’t a bad thing. It doesn’t make them constantly brooding or sulking. They are allowed to have serious moments and be multi-faceted. They were like that before IDENTITY CRISIS and will be after. I don’t get this sudden mindset people have developed recently over that. It doesn’t inherently make them like Batman…
It may be the template but that is specific to Spider-Man and it’s why it isn’t constantly applied to every character in comics and using a Marvel method for DC doesn’t make sense either.
One of the best part about DC’s characters is that they are human, even if they are aliens. They have human moments. It’s why people have always said that DC’s heroes have always been gods trying to be humans and why they’re still more relatable than any other and I say this as a guy who likes Marvel too but their characters outside of the X-Men aren’t 100% good at that.