Why is there all this hate for Identity Crisis?

[TheCape]

It's been an age, but I recall that her original insanity was caused because she was kidnapped and exposed to a specific kind of radiation to make her insane. She got healed. But her being a blank slate to you is exactly like people who go into HiC with a blank-slate for Wally.

The story they tied it to was such a nice story for folks like me (who liked Ollie back before he became a terrible person). Very good story. Hate that it go trashed with IC. I also don't see anything in post-COIE versions of many of these characters that would make them mindwipe Bruce. And wasn't Post-COIE Bruce okay with mind-wiping white martians in one story? I haven't read that one, but I have heard that.

Also, did we see someone else's hands gagging Jean? I've read that, but am not going to look at the issue to check. If so, that's pretty big cheat and unfair to an audience trying to solve a mystery.

Here is someone else's takeDon't agree with all of it, but definitely agree with some.

Yeah Bruce wiped out the White Martians memories in Morrison's JLA (or maybe it was Mark Waid, he was writting the book around the same time), but i guest that you could argue that Bruce was less willing to cross that line in the satelite era, so maybe he was more pissed about then mind wiping him.

[Tzigone]

Yeah Bruce wiped out the White Martians memories in Morrison's JLA (or maybe it was Mark Waid, he was writting the book around the same time), but i guest that you could argue that Bruce was less willing to cross that line in the satelite era, so maybe he was more pissed about then mind wiping him.

Sure, but if you use that logic, then you must use others' Satellite Era personalities, too, and they would not have mindwiped Bruce then, even if they had been willing to mindwipe Light, which I also don't think they'd have done.

[Rod G]

At least it’s not Dark Nights Metal.

[Dred]

Quite possibly most damning of all, it was just a very, very, very poorly written story. The entire plot of a whodunnit lies in the whodunnit bit being executed well and the ending was such a monumental asspull of idiocy. The book was rife with lots of stupid writing moments but the pure, core story of it was dead on the delivery table.

[OpaqueGiraffe17]

Identity Crisis is not a great story, but it did have some redeeming qualities. I do think it did interesting things with both the superhero community and the supervillain community (I think Calculator was a standout.) I also think the mystery was actually kinda solid. Only thing I've read about Jean Loring besides this was Sword of the Atom where she cheated on Ray and was pretty unlikable in general, so I don't have a problem with her being the villain.
The problem was that it went too far in a lot of areas, clearly going for controversy and shock value that came across as excessive and unessesary. The Deathstroke fight was dumb too.
All in all, i still consider it a guilty pleasure.

[Dred]

Jean Loring with her handy dandy flame thrower she keeps around just in case she needs to frame someone for her accidental killing because she wanted to get Ray to love her even though Ray already loved her and it was she who decided to split up with Ray.

Just a mess of a story. Tracking any part of it from start to finish gets you scratching your head and wondering how it got out of scripting, much less to print.

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

That might be because Identity Crisis... as far as I remember... for a time... is featured as this bestseller, game-changing, something... in comics recommendation sites, so people getting into comics pick it up and whoa! This is dark!
Kinda like The Killing Joke.
As far as I remember too, though, it didn't stay long in the recommendation.
I may be wrong about this, coz I based it on memory...

More importantly, kinda like Infinite Crisis, Identity Crisis won't have a problem among people who has no knowledge of the Pre-Crisis, because that's the big thing about both stories. They make Pre-Crisis heroes darker, you view them in a different light. In Identity Crisis they made the Pre-Crisis League and Dr. Light committed something unethical and horrible acts, in Infinite Crisis, they straight up made Pre-Crisis heroes the villains.

All of those won't matter if the Pre-Crisis don't matter to the reader.

Like that's pretty much my journey. Comics first attracted me in a long time during the Identity-Infinite Crisis era, and all I can think of was wow cool, a detective story and an event involving every characters imaginable. Over the years once I found out about Pre-Crisis though, my opinion turned to Well This is Horrible

This is a really good point. If you’re a newer more casual fan, you don’t really care as much. Dr. Light might be the joke character you’ve seen as a cartoon, so “whoa, he’s actually really bad”, and I guess if the Dibney’s mean nothing to you and you want to get lost in Deathstroke it’s fine. Batman actually comes out looking fine and tbh the writer was smart enough to keep the Trinity out of the controversial ****. So Olly, Zantana, and the silver age heroes who aren’t around take the heat.

[Shadowedeyes]

I think most people have already mentioned most of the reasons I disliked it, but I'll put it up anyway.

1) The mystery is awful and makes no sense. In a mystery story, this is basically unforgivable. The mystery, once revealed, has to logically flow. This story did not.

2) The Deathstroke fight is laughably bad. He loses in the end because the JLA, who he was able to contingency plan the **** out of their powers(Sometimes in ways that make no sense/require him knowing the future), just jump him and punch him for the win. Okaaay.

3) Rape of Sue Dibny was unnecessary and only for shock value. It was pretty much there to make Elongated Man and the other male JLAers sad, since she herself didn't really get any agency in the story.

4) Zatanna and the other JLA members lobotomizing Dr. Light and mindwiping Batman made them look pretty shitty.

5) Jean Loring's plan doesn't really make much sense, which kinda gets explained away as "She's Crazy!" but still has some weird logical leaps even taking that into account. This point kinda ties in with my first one I suppose.

6) Had to endure rapey Dr. Light in numerous comics afterwards, which was never not awkward to read.

[godisawesome]

I think Identity Crisis is a perfect example of the kind of “Big Event Formula” that can very between being executed “horribly”, “okay but not impressively”, and “good enough to justify its use”; Identity Crisis itself simply suffers from a law of diminishing returns because the formula it kind of kick-started took over DC during the Didio years, so its quality went from somewhere around “Okay but not impressive” down to “horrible” for fans who started getting sick of the formula.

Jack Drake and Ronnie Raymond’s deaths, for instance, would now be considered extremely orthodox and formulaic events you’d expect at any “Event” from DC, and both of those are arguably somewhat melodramatic bits of unnecessary angst that Meltzer himself wasn’t going to follow up on - they can feel like “angst for the sake of angst” that have an almost “obligatory” air to them, and while a character like Jason Rusch arguably justified Ronnie’s death, it took years for Tim Drake’s stories to try and figure out a new formula to replace the loss of his father, and it arguably never really worked that well.

(I’d argue that Geoff Johns being enthusiastic to follow up on his own Big Events is one of the things that can make him a better master fo the “Big Event” formula - Blackest Night being followed by Brightest Day being a major example of that.)

Also, half it’s problems would disappear if it were an Elseworld’s story. Characterization issues, Deathstroke being overpowered, the somewhat obnoxiously predictable “big events deaths”, the weird mix of both nostalgia and a desire to darken that nostalgia, etc., wouldn’t have complaints stemming from them if they weren’t follow ups to earlier stories or if the story itself didn’t have to be followed up on by the main books. Wally West fans wouldn’t be peeved at him jobbing for Deathstroke along with a bunch of other Leaguers if fans didn’t know Wally was better than that, there wouldn’t be a “stain” on any of the Leaguers who mindwiped Batman and scrambled Light that fans knew would never get addressed ina 100% satisfactory way, etc.

There *are* weaknesses that were just always going to be a problem - Jean’s motivation being “‘cause she’s crazy!”, the somewhat sloppy parts of the mystery elsewhere, etc.

But I think it’s main problems is that it started something DC kept repeating, and that something was a formula that demanded a far greater quality control than DC would be able to maintain in the long run. I think the story’s premise is one that could easily be improved on, and that some elements - especially the Batman mind wipe - could be extremely interesting if done with more forethought and analytic debate. But for now, it’s an... Okay to bad...book... as long as you’re not a huge fan of the past it changes, and aren’t critical of the pattern it established, for which Heroes In Crisis is very much a direct descendent.

[Tzigone]

Identity Crisis is not a great story, but it did have some redeeming qualities. I do think it did interesting things with both the superhero community and the supervillain community (I think Calculator was a standout.) I also think the mystery was actually kinda solid. Only thing I've read about Jean Loring besides this was Sword of the Atom where she cheated on Ray and was pretty unlikable in general, so I don't have a problem with her being the villain.
The problem was that it went too far in a lot of areas, clearly going for controversy and shock value that came across as excessive and unessesary. The Deathstroke fight was dumb too.
All in all, i still consider it a guilty pleasure.

Well, Sword of the Atom is a problem for me in general, in that we saw them just shortly before that and their marriage was fine, and all that came out of nowhere just to create the plot and direction wanted for Ray. But beyond that, there's is an absolute world of difference between having an affair and being an insane murderer. Just because a character is not likable does not make it in-character for them to out of nowhere decide to go killing people to get their ex back.

[Dred]

Well, Sword of the Atom is a problem for me in general, in that we saw them just shortly before that and their marriage was fine, and all that came out of nowhere just to create the plot and direction wanted for Ray. But beyond that, there's is an absolute world of difference between having an affair and being an insane murderer. Just because a character is not likable does not make it in-character for them to out of nowhere decide to go killing people to get their ex back.

Their ex who is still in love with you and would get back with you if you just asked. The entire premise of the story is centered on **** not making sense because she's SUDDENLY crazy. There's no cause to her craziness, it's just that spontaneous insanity is the only way you could get from point a to b in that mess.

[Mike]

I have never reread it so I don't remember much about it other than that it read like very BAD fan fiction.

[The Cool Thatguy]

For people who already formed attachments to these characters, it was off-putting. If you're not familiar with the characters, then I guess you wouldn't feel anything about it. However, surely they wanted the audience to have some attachment so they would have a strong reaction.

I have the book GIVE OUR REGARDS TO THE THE ATOMSMASHERS: WRITERS ON COMICS (2004) with a chapter by Brad Meltzer, "How I Spent My Summer Vacation with the Judas Contract." In that he writes his admiration for how Wolfman and Perez set up Terra and sucked him in as a reader, where he cared about the character, and his intense reaction to what happened to her.

It seems to me that he was trying to do that in IDENTITY CRISIS, but he took a short cut. If he had put in the time to set up a character of his own creation and then paid that off with some sort of reversal of fortune, then he'd be playing by the rules that Marv and George used for their story. Instead, he was counting on the set up of the characters from all the writers of the previous four decades and then reversing their fortunes.

Wasn't Meltzer one of the writers who tried to redeem Terra, even though half the point of Judas Contract was 'Terra is an evil b**ch'?

[The Cool Thatguy]

I think most people have already mentioned most of the reasons I disliked it, but I'll put it up anyway.

1) The mystery is awful and makes no sense. In a mystery story, this is basically unforgivable. The mystery, once revealed, has to logically flow. This story did not.

2) The Deathstroke fight is laughably bad. He loses in the end because the JLA, who he was able to contingency plan the **** out of their powers(Sometimes in ways that make no sense/require him knowing the future), just jump him and punch him for the win. Okaaay.

3) Rape of Sue Dibny was unnecessary and only for shock value. It was pretty much there to make Elongated Man and the other male JLAers sad, since she herself didn't really get any agency in the story.

4) Zatanna and the other JLA members lobotomizing Dr. Light and mindwiping Batman made them look pretty shitty.

5) Jean Loring's plan doesn't really make much sense, which kinda gets explained away as "She's Crazy!" but still has some weird logical leaps even taking that into account. This point kinda ties in with my first one I suppose.

6) Had to endure rapey Dr. Light in numerous comics afterwards, which was never not awkward to read.

Yeah, the treatment of women in the mini left a lot to be desired, even from the beginning.

It starts with Ralph and Firehawk on a stake out. Ralph describes Firehawk as a puppy, and is only there to keep her from getting killed.

This is freakin' Firehawk. Partner of Firestorm, and part of the hit squad that took out the damn Anti-Monitor.

And after having virtually no role in the story, she retires. Sigh...

[Hol]

Their ex who is still in love with you and would get back with you if you just asked. The entire premise of the story is centered on **** not making sense because she's SUDDENLY crazy. There's no cause to her craziness, it's just that spontaneous insanity is the only way you could get from point a to b in that mess.

In my opinion it wasn't Jean JUST wanting Ray back...she wanted him to come to her. To come to her rescue. For it to be his idea. Of course she could have gotten him back by asking. But I always thought it was her ego that needed him to pursue her.

And the "just in case" line I always looked at as her being full of #^$&. She always knew exactly what might have to be done.