Tom Russell: February 2007 Archives

Today was the election for Mayor of Dearborn.

Spoilers behind cut.

When I first heard of Identity Crisis, I was livid.

As a fan of the Dibneys, I had an immediate and visceral reaction to the news that Brad Meltzer had murdered Sue in one issue and raped her in the next, the retcon equivalent of necrophilia. And then there was the whole mind-wiping thing...

And then I read it, and I found it, for the most part, to be genuinely compelling and thoughtful. There were some parts that were a little silly (here, Jean, have this crossbow...?) and some parts that were a clichéd and underdeveloped (Captain Boomerang and Son!). But it was a superhero story that took superheroes seriously and enthusiastically, both as icons and as people. They make difficult decisions but I didn't feel that those decisions tainted them in anyway: I didn't feel that I was reading another tiresome adventure into the Dirty Spandex sub-genre.

As a story, it's deeper and more pleasurable to read than, say, Infinite Crisis. No gore or nihilism in Identity Crisis. The trauma is largely off-camera-- largely emotional.

At the same time, they still killed Sue. They still took a giant dump on my childhood. And I'm largely skeptical about any superhero story that requires that level of transgression to get its desired impact.

And yet-- I'm very, very glad that Brad Meltzer wrote it. Not that it was written. I hate the fact that it was written. But I'm glad that Meltzer was the one who did it.

What's that, you say? Tomorrow's Valentine's Day, and you don't have an appropriately geeky gift for that special someone? Fret no more! Tom has come to your rescue!

Because nothing says I love you like M.O.D.O.K.

Over at Comics Should Be Good, a question was posed about your favourite story and mine, Identity Crisis.

Just kidding, Hutch. Hutch? What are you doing with that flame thrower...? Ahhhhhhhh!

Ahem.

The question was, could changes in the dialogue and captions make it a "workable" mystery story. Brian Cronin explains,

I can get behind “I liked it even though it wasn’t,” or “I didn’t really care about mystery aspect, because I liked it for the character work,” or “The mystery was not the point of Identity Crisis, the point was the examination of the heroes vis a vis the mind-wipes, so the murder was secondary, so the fact that it didn’t work was unimportant,” or something like that.

That stuff is totally subjective. I wouldn’t dream of saying you shouldn’t like Identity Crisis.

But “workable mystery,” I believe, is an objective thing.

So I don’t think “it worked for me” cuts the mostard here. The complaint about the mystery in Identity Crisis is that it was a puzzle whose solution did not make sense. Based on the facts presented to us, you simply could not solve the mystery.

And he's right: as a mystery story, it doesn't play fair.

Spoiler for The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) by Agatha Christie below.

Some time ago, I posted a video here from my youtube series, "Tom for Mayor", about my employment status. It has come to my attention that some of the assertions I made in that video were factually incorrect.

I am clearing them up with this video, and posting it to every place I posted the original-- which includes Monitor Duty. Thank you.