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Saturday, January 05, 2019 

The return of Blue Beetle Ted Kord is totally botched

So DC decided to bring Ted Kord, the 2nd Blue Beetle who was wronged in 2005, back to the spotlight in the wrong place: Heroes in Crisis #4:
Heroes in Crisis hasn't been much fun for most of DC's heroes.
What about the audience and fans? Oh, right, they don't count, because both DC and the press alike have long determined they were illegitimate.
In the ongoing storyline, Wally West, Arsenal and a dozen or so other heroes have apparently been killed in an attack on Sanctuary, a secret superhero trauma and recovery center. And while DC's biggest heroes have been busy trying to figure out the true identity of the Sanctuary killer and new revelations about Sanctuary, Heroes in Crisis #4 is notable for another, potentially more uplifting reason; namely, it marks the long-awaited return of Ted Kord as the Blue Beetle.

In this issue, Kord suits up once again in order to break Booster Gold, his best friend, out of a Justice League holding cell where the time traveling hero was being detained for his possible involvement in the massacre. While Kord has been operating in the background for the past few years, this is the first time he's has returned to his fan-favorite role as the Blue Beetle in the main DC Universe in almost a decade.
It couldn't have happened in a worse place, and all at the wrong time, as the note about the murdered superheroes should make clear. And it won't make any difference whether all is reversed by the time this is over, whether by time travel or other means, because they've wasted only so many trees turning this into a company wide event, with references in the Flash and Superman titles, for example, and the miniseries itself is laced with implausible elements in one way or another. Not the least being how Harley Quinn plies her trade.

I also noticed that, while Newsarama's review is fawningly positive, it does admit something that should've been painfully obvious 15 years ago:
Similar to the last issue, I think that while Heroes in Crisis’ actual storyline feels all too similar to Identity Crisis - a series that itself has not aged particularly well since its release - what sets this series apart is the way that King and Mann tell their story.[...]
No, nothing sets this apart at all. Because Heroes in Crisis is just another pointless exercise in failure, trashing every character the editors and writers see fit for the sake of shock and publicity. But isn't that something: they actually admit - nearly 15 years after the fact - that Identity Crisis was bottom of the barrel (though they don't mention anything about the story's belittlement of sexual assault). But why only now? Why couldn't news outlets like these acknowledge the fact years ago when it really mattered? Because chances are that in another decade or so, they'll finally be willing to admit Heroes in Crisis is just as worthless, long after it's too late to prove they recognize what's wrong with the tale, artistically or otherwise. Sugarcoating the story in present time does no favors for anybody, and just makes the reviewers look like hypocrites.

Interestingly enough, Tom King and company have been attacked by their own fellow leftists over how heroines like Batgirl are drawn with their rear ends in view. And King was accused of falsifying his army/intel service records, though he seems to have proven otherwise. Maybe those particular pans and allegations are petty, but it really doesn't make any difference; Heroes in Crisis still remains a worthless piece of garbage, and that's why it's annoying anybody would try to focus on the writer's service records, because it takes away attention from what really matters - his writing "talents", which are none. Or is it possible those allegations were just intended to deliberately make King look like he's a victim of Comicsgate in a bizarre attempt to justify the rancid miniseries? I have no idea, but I do know that DC's continued obsession with these kind of "events" and crossovers is finally taking a toll on their sales receipts, seeing how the 3rd issue only sold about 83,000 copies at store level, and that both Dan DiDio and Bob Harras should be removed from their positions, as they're just as responsible for failure, and likely more so than King himself. When are Time Warner's managers going to be willing to take a good look and see what's gone wrong?

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So now that Kord's back, what kind of personality do you want from him? Like say, when he was in Justice League, his own book, Robin, etc.?

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  • From Jerusalem, Israel
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