Identity Crisis

I'm not in love with this story. I liked it a lot and I thought the themes were incredibly interesting, but it was lacking for me. Both the art and the storytelling were exceptional and I was really impressed with the pacing of the book. Plus, the covers are incredible. Check out the cover for issue #2:



The novel opens onto a standard stakeout scene featuring the Elongated Man and his co-worker Firehawk. This scene is set “thirty minutes from now” and you get this sense that something important is going to happen when you get to the “now” panel. And something drastic does happen, which sets off this series of events that leads to a lot of emotional scenes and secrets being unveiled. It's a clever story and (although I'm not the biggest DC fan) I appreciated all the little details put into the novel. So what's up with my three star rating, you might ask. Well, here's the thing: the female characters in this novel (like so many other superhero comics) are all just support characters. In the first chapter of this book we get to see the view points of many superheroes–Robin (Tim Drake), Black Lightning, Clark Kent, and even Nightwing. This made me pretty excited. I had thought that we would get some point of view moments with some of the female heroes even if it's just a couple of panels. Instead, most of the story is narrated by Green Arrow. And I'm not saying this is a bad thing–he has quite an interesting point of view (I especially liked hearing him justify his choices). But what about the female perspective?

In the entire novel, there are only two times that we get the female perspective. The first is from Sue Dibny (Elongated Man's wife) right before she is killed and the other time is Lois Lane. In both of these situations, their lives are being threatened, and compared to their superhero husbands, they are powerless and vulnerable. Again, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. I loved reading the scenes of Sue setting up the surprise gift for her husband. What I don't like is that the writing totally omits the perspective of the female superheroes on the team. They hardly have a voice, yet they are powerful and their actions have many consequences. For example, it would have been interesting to view some of the scenes from Zatanna's point of view instead of constantly seeing Ollie's perspective of the events. I mean, Zatanna was the one who actually had to do the mind-wiping, everyone else just voted. How does she feel about all that responsibility? What kind of thoughts did she have about mind-wiping Bruce? How did that impact her? Sure, these feelings might be explored in some other DC title, but in a comic about the Justice League I for one would like to see equal representation.

It might seem like I'm nitpicking at the story, but I'm just really tired of female characters being sidelined. I want to see them highlighted–not just as support characters, but as a main character with their own voice. Because of that, this gets three stars from me.