The Four Color Media Monitor

In the Flash's tie-in to Blackest Night, the latest victim of character assassination is Captain Boomerang's corpse, and even his contrived son, Owen Mercer:

The younger Captain Boomerang, Owen Mercer, has captured the Black Lantern-animated corpse of his father “Digger” Harkness, tossed him in a pit, and is tossing down people for him to kill. [...] He starts with small-time super-villains whom even the Rogues would find repulsive, and works his way up to innocent bystanders. When the Rogues find out, they toss him into the pit, with predictable results.

[...]making him a child-killer crosses a line with the character. In the same way Dr. Light’s role in Identity Crisis and Inertia’s role in “Full Throttle” made the characters difficult to use again, this is going to be a problem for Owen — more than his death, because I’m still not convinced that any death is going to stick in a miniseries about the proverbial revolving door.

More to the point, I'd say that featuring a child-killer in a book related to that of the Scarlet Speedster's crosses the line for one that wasn't built on such grisly R-rated horrors. In fact, I'm wondering why there's no outrage over the whole scene in first place. The death of Owen himself, doesn't bother me so much as the grisly death of children does. Hey, here's even a comment that says:

I really disliked this issue for a couple of reasons. The Owen thing felt a little forced and creepy-for-the-sake-of-creepy, which comes off for me as more an indictment of the writer than genuinely, constructively creepy.

Hey, that's Geoff Johns for you, an alleged auteur who sees sensationalized mayhem as more valuble than real character drama, something he's really weak on.

And surely this doesn't harm George Harkness as a character too? After all, he was never into the supervillain business for killing people, and even if he's being controlled by the main enemies in this monstrosity of a crossover, this is still going way overboard.

Besides being spawned from a lowly book like Identity Crisis, Owen Mercer wasn't much different from the resurrected Jason Todd: just a character introduced without knowing what else to do with him. But if they had to kill him off, it could've all been done without the gratuitous violence, and the slaughter of unnamed kiddies was something we could definitely do without.

Labels: crossoverloading, dc comics, dreadful writers, Flash, violence