Heroes in Crisis #1 Review and **SPOILERS**

There is no Sanctuary

Writer: Tom King 

Artist: Clay Mann 

Colors: Tomeu Morey 

Letters: Clayton Cowles 

Cover By: Clay Mann and Tomeu Morey 

Variant Covers By: J.G. Jones & Paul Mounts; Francesco Mattina, Mark Brooks, Ryan Sook 

Associate Editor: Brittany Holzherr 

Editor: Jamie S. Rich 

Cover Price: $3.99 

On Sale Date: September 26, 2018

**NON SPOILERS AND SCORE AT THE BOTTOM**

Oh boy, there’s a Crisis afoot, and the skies aren’t even red…yet! It’s the Autumn--event? That we’ve all been waiting for, Heroes in Crisis! Let’s jump right into that ol’ number one issue and see what all the fuss is about.

Explain It!

All of ‘em are doing it. First responders, members of the military, social workers, reporters—heck, even therapists are all going to therapy. Each of us carries a burden of some kind, made of our experiences and what we’ve seen, and to share it would assuage us while burdening another. The transference of these horrors is a most human thing, the beginnings of what can establish a community. So it makes sense that Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman would set up a remote superhero sanitarium called Sanctuary that is run entirely by Kryptonian robots.

And not just Kryptonian robots, but robots made to look like Ma and Pa Kent, plus some other lady. You have all this hologram technology lying around, it gets used to tell Batman that supper’s ready but no one thinks that a holographic psychologist, one that can change form to suit the patient, might make more sense than a couple of throwbacks to Superman’s Silver Age android addiction. So the thing that happened here is that everyone that was at Sanctuary, including the robots, have been brutally murdered. That includes a bunch of people you don’t know, plus Wally West and Roy Harper. There’s your big spoiler reveal! The two of them are lying together in a pool of blood, and Superman confirms their deaths. I don’t feel too bent out of shape about it, though, because I’m not buying the permanence of anything that happens here.

The whole thing is framed around a meeting between Booster Gold, a resident of Sanctuary who fled as everyone was murdered, and Harley Quinn, who finds Booster Gold hanging out at a diner and endeavors to finish the job—or so we think, until the last page, when Harley claims that Booster is the one that did the slaying! It would be a shocking twist, if we had an inkling that Harley Quinn was even accused of those murders in the first place. As it is, both she and Booster just seem wildly out of character for the entire book, until the last page bombshell. For all that it mattered, you could have had Harley Quinn and Booster Gold just step out at the end and announce that ‘twas Booster that slaughtered the heroes.

In terms of storytelling, the issue develops a nice formula of nine-panel grid entrance interviews for Sanctuary, some back-and-forth between Harley and Booster, and the Trinity discovering the massacre at Sanctuary, simultaneously revealing its particulars to the reader. Clay Mann’s artwork seems to have reached a new plateau, the figures and faces look impeccable, and he makes great use of the nine-panel grids to show subtle differences in gesture and posture that work perfectly. But the dialogue for every known character seems off, and the stuff between Booster Gold and Quinn felt like violent filler instead of anything pertinent. We’ll see how wrong I am as this series continues.

Bits and Pieces:

We finally learn about that mysterious superhero brain spa, Sanctuary, just in time for it to go out of business. Heroes die, heroes live, and I'm left feeling that this is one of those Imaginary Stories from the 1950s and 60s that won't have any lasting repercussions. Maybe it's because familiar characters don't behave in the way that I'm used to? Probably.

7/10

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