Heroes in Crisis #1: No Safe Space

Let’s start with the positive. Clay Mann’s art is beautiful and he manages to construct a perfectly paced story despite a scatter-shot story, jumping back and forth between moments. He moves effortlessly between staccato therapy sequences with multiple frames, barely different (a technique used to slow down narrative time) to sweeping splash pages or limited frame pages. Clay Mann is a name to keep tabs on, because he’s clearly a rising star in the industry.

End of list.

While I don’t think Tom King is a bad writer, I do think this issue is full of cheap tricks and even cheaper stunts. King’s Batman run has been repeatedly marked with sequences designed to elicit an emotional response, such as the sequences between Bruce and Dick just prior to Dick’s injury in Batman #55. It is fine to shoot for a visceral reaction, but where I find it weak here is in how thinly-veiled and repetitive the method has been– a trick he has carried over to Heroes in Crisis. We see a long sequence in which Roy talks about his demons and his somewhat ridiculous reasoning.

This sequence comes shortly after the reveal that Roy is among the death toll at Sanctuary. At its core, the sequence reads as a desperation ploy to remind the reader that they are supposed to care that Roy is dead. Longtime readers already care or they don’t care depending on their tastes and history with the characters. As if the large name deaths weren’t enough, the same tactic is used with a few B-list characters (with more to come, since not every dead character got their moment in the sun in this first issue), attempting to play on the grief of the reader, almost condemning them if they feel no grief.

While all of these events and flashbacks are occurring, we see the Booster/Harley confrontation that is presumably at the heart of the title. In the months of solicits and coverage, we were told that this story would be linked to a notion of Post-Traumatic Stress, and in Harley, we see that stress manifests in a potentially problematic manner. To the person who has no experience with PTS, Harley’s actions read as a sort of norming of violence as an outlet to PTS, despite the fact that violent sufferers of PTS are, in reality, outliers. I can see this developing into a larger problem as the story progresses, and at this juncture, I don’t see a clear path away from establishing a dangerous stereotype regarding a very real problem.