One suggestion–should we all use the spoiler tag for a few days? I’m gettin’ my comics tomorrow, but not everyone will.
I second the motion. I’ll get mine tomorrow night, but I don’t want to accidentally get spoiled before then.
I third it!
I’m making a special trip to the comics shop right after work tomorrow just to get this issue but I got no qualms using [spoilers]
I likely won’t see it until late this week / early next, so I’ll fifth through tenth Fenris suggestion.
Spoiler tags it is!
As for me, I’ve squestered myself from any and all comic book-related message boards and websites I frequent just so I can be absolutely sure no one will spoil the book for me. As long as I don’t see “OMG IT WAS HAWKMAN” scroll by on CNN, I should be all set.
Hah! If ever a DC Hero’s backstory warranted the phrase “Identity Crisis”… Hawkman would be it.
Don’t read the spoilers if you don’t want IC spoiled for you…
[spoiler]Jean Loring is batshit insane!
While in bed with Ray, she asks about the gun and note sent to Jack Drake, something that the heroes didn’t leak to anyone. Ray catches her on it and she reveals her whole plan to him.
She didn’t mean to kill Sue, you see. She found one of Ray’s costumes in that trunk of his stuff and figured that if she attacked Jean, heroes would be spending more times with their loved ones, meaning Ray would come back to her. Unfortunately, since she was pretty inept at shrinking, she accidently killed Sue and then burned her in an attempt to destroy the evidence.
Ray takes her to Arkham and then dissapears.
Meanwhile, from the epilogue, it looks like Ralph is pretty much nuts now, too. Unless he really is carrying on a conversation with Sue’s ghost.
I just read it through the first time, so I’m not entirely sure how I feel about the ending. I would have liked some more loose ends to be tied up - that page with Dr. Light last issue, what that whole deal was with Bolt in issue #1, Boomy Jr.'s parentage etc (I know that a lot of this stuff is being covered in other titles, but it still kind of sucks for someone who was just reading IC to have to pick up Flash or Teen Titans to find something out).
Also, if Ralph is really crazy, that sucks. It also sucks that he ended up doing absolutely nothing for the entire story.[/spoiler]
[spoiler]Well, the SDMB was right about Jean. I think it’s clear that it wasn’t an accident. I figured that Jean was perhaps the killer, but not a psycho.
I liked all the loose ends. There’s a lot changed in the DCU after this story, which I think is what makes it worthy of the word “CRISIS” in the title.
I do wonder if we’ll be seeing Ms. Atom again. Congrats to everyone here at SDMB who called the murderer correctly.[/spoiler]
(Fixed the spoiler. -JMCJ)
Geez, Spec. Careful with the spoilers, dude.
I’ve called the mods to fix the coding.
I am surprised at the outcome, it seems the series had a very high density of red herrings. Which annoys me.
Spreading out my post to give others a chance to not read the above post until the tags are fixed.
Yeah, I suck. I immediately asked a mod to come fix it, but so far to no avail.
Why oh why can’t this board allow editing outside of the Great Debates? I mean Jesus, these sorts of things wouldn’t happen if I could fix my post.
I got spoiled when shy guy’s post showed up in my email. My email program opened it automatically when I deleted a message before it, and wham! Ah well, it’s what I suspected anyway. I’ll still enjoy reading the issue tonight.
[spoiler]
Ok, I just finished reading it so these are first thoughts and are subject to change without notice.
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Eh. I really mean it. Eh. It left me cold.
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I didn’t buy the “SEXIST!” hysteria that was thrown around early on, but I do have a problem with a plot straight out of “I LOVE LUCY” (Lucy and Ethel think that Ricky and Fred don’t pay enough attention to them, so they pretend that there’s a burgaler afoot.) Jean wants to play snugglebunnies with Ray? Um. It’s out of character (Jean was an ice queen), it’s vaguely sexist (could you imagine, say, Green Arrow doing this to get Black Canary back?). A Usenet theory I coulda bought–Ray was the sperm-donor for Sue’s kid. I could also buy that she’s just batshit insane.
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If it was the Atom suit, why didn’t Jean explode when she used it? Ray has a super power that no-one else does; the ability to NOT explode when regrown after being shrunk by ultraviolet light shown through white-dwarf star material fabric.
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Ralph nuts? No. Sorry. This broke my suspension of disbelief. Ralph does not go nuts. (And as an aside, Gingold is a soft-drink…a soda. It ain’t alcoholic). And if Ralph isn’t nuts and he is talking to the Sue’s ghost, that could be cool, if she’s just a ghost. If, however, she’s the new Spectre, I’m gonna be pissed.
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You guys know I’m no fan of Uber-Bats who’s always prepared so he always wins. That said, did anyone buy that Bats isn’t a realist who always looks at unpleasant truths? The “Batman knows what he wants to know” stuff is WAAAY out of character, but since Ollie (a known blowhard) said it, maybe we can discount it. In any case, I’ll bet $5.00 that the “Bats was mindwiped” thing leads to at least one, maybe two or three bad sequels. [/spoiler]
Fenris
[spoiler]I totally agree with you.
Also, someone on another board pointed out that Jean and Ray were already divorced by the time Tim Drake became Robin III. That would make it seem a little unlikely that Ray would have told her his secret ID.
And even if you buy that, I personally have a problem with the idea that Batman goes around disclosing the secret ID of everybody he works with to everyone else he works with. “Hello Oliver Queen, how is the arrowing? Have I mentioned that my new Robin is Tim Drake’s former girlfriend, Stephanie Brown? Nice girl, her father was the Cluemaster. I hear you have a new sidekick yourself; what’s her name?” What an identity slut. [/spoiler]
[spoiler]Hrmf. A couple weeks ago cbawlmer asked what we’d be talking about after this was all over with. I replied, “Probably rant and gripe about what a ripoff the actual solution to the mystery was, and explain at length how we could have done it better. At least, that’s what I have marked on my calendar.” This was meant as a joke at the time, but man…
What the crap?! Am I being whooshed here? Was this whole hugely hyped seven issue series merely an elaborate red herring, leading into some other event a few months down the line? Because it really doesn’t seem to me that the ostensible solution to the mystery is particularly worthy of the build-up, at all. Motive for the murder? Childish jealousy, fueled by pointless insanity. Detective work by Ralph Dibny? None. Detective work by Batman? None in evidence, although he seemed to have some kind of pathetic excuse for an intuitive leap there at the end. “Tiny footprints? This can only mean that the killer was* really small!* And since the Atom is clearly beyond suspicion, the only other possible solution is the psycho he’s sleeping with!” Poor Bats; clearly the mind-wiping had some serious side effects to reduce him to this Superfriends-level of deductive prowess.
And wasn’t Jean Loring at Sue’s funeral, surrounded by telepaths? And I guess that all the Kryptonian/Martian/Thanagarian/scary Bruce stuff protecting the Leaguers’ families is incapable of detecting miniaturized individuals after all, a fairly odd oversight when one of the more prominent members routinely travels along phone lines. And how do you safeguard your loved ones after someone who knows all the Leaguers’ secret identities betrays you? Why, you incarcerate them alongside **all the most evil lunatics in the world! **
I am being whooshed, aren’t I? This can’t be the real solution to the mystery, can it? I call foul: you can’t build your whole storyline around the concept of revealing the secret dark heart of the Silver Age, injecting an updated, morally ambiguous sensibility into the characters of that period, and then turn around and finish with a solution that would be unacceptably cheesy even for the stories of that time! To say nothing of the fact that the centerpiece of the whole story, the secret mind wiping of Dr. Light and Batman, had **absolutely nothing to do with anything! ** For crying out loud, a red herring is one thing, but that whole entire subplot could have just as well have taken place in another series completely. I thought this Meltzer guy was supposed to be a published mystery writer? Evidently he doesn’t think the medium of superhero comics is worthy of his best work, because I can’t imagine that his books would get published if they hinge on such threadbare devices as “insanely jealous spouse” and “mystery solved when someone blurts out information only the killer could know.”
Nope; this solution won’t wash. I’m just going to assume that it was actually Zatanna who snapped from the guilt of tampering with the minds of others, went completely mental, and said, “Llik Eus Ynbid dna Kcaj Ekard, dna neht emarf Naej Gnirol.” Because it makes about as much sense.[/spoiler]
Uoy ekat taht kcab! :mad:
[spoiler]I don’t think Ralph’s lost his mind, or even speaking to Sue’s ghost in the strictest sense. Ollie DID tell him to talk to Sue, and that she’d hear every word. And he would know, if anyone would.
As to the Gingold bottles, I had the same thought, but it was mostly a quick double-take before a more logical answer came to mind. The point wasn’t, I think, that he’d been drinking a larger than usual amount of Gingold, for whatever reason - it was that he’d not been taking care of himself or his house while he was mourning for Sue. The trash has been piling up.
Now that there’s closure - the killer has been caught, and he’s had words with her - and Ollie’s given him the ‘talk to her’ advice to at least cut down on his feelings of loss, he’s able to go on with life, and all those Gingold bottles (and pizza boxes, etc) are the accumulation of the last couple weeks of trash, which he’s finally getting around to tossing.[/spoiler]
The rest of your points, I don’t disagree with, but they’re not as problematic to me.
I hated it.
[spoiler]I hate stories where the villian is simply revealed to be insane, unbeknownst to anyone, without any buildup or foreshadowing. It smacks of a cheap cop-out.
Heck, no. It IS a cheap cop-out.
Also, we are supposed to believe that Jean meant Sue no harm, but that she HAPPENED to carry along a bunch of weapons “just in case”? Yeah, right.
Oh, and all that technology never detected the fully enlarged Jean Loring? Yeah, right.
And Jean let herself nearly die, to the point that CPR was necessary to revive her? Okay, so she was insane. I guess that was the only way to salvage that plot point. Sheesh.
[/spoiler]
Hated it.
[spoiler]I think it’s very clear that Jean intended to kill Sue and that her “I didn’t mean to do it” shit was just trying to buy sympathy or leniance.
I liked the ending, and it satisfies all the rules of a classic mystery – everything was available that you needed to put together the identity of the killer, if not the killer’s motivation, we saw the killer in the first act of the story, all suspects from the first half were innocent, etc.
Plus, it sets up a great deal of new things for the DCU to play with, like the new, angry and intelligent-again Dr. Light, the Calculator’s continuing presence as the anti-Oracle, the new Captain Boomerang, and the sure-to-slowly-untangle mindwiping of JLA members by other members. It would have been cheap to have these things come in and wrap up in just one story, I think it’s better to fold them into the continuing storyline generally.[/spoiler]
I agree with Spectrum. I was going to log on and say something similar now that I’ve read the issue, but I’d just be redundant. And I’ve had NyQuil, so I wouldn’t be all that coherent. I am glad that this doesn’t seem to be a throwaway story, but the beginning of something larger.