As we're all well aware by now, Identity Crisis is garbage.
It's a bad mystery.
It's a bad DC Universe story.
It's badly written in general.
Case in point: Identity Crisis #5.
There are spoilers below.
Green Arrow is acting as omniscient narrator, a device of which I'm mildly skeptical.
Firestorm is skewered by the Shining Knight's sword, wielded by the Shadow Thief. The strike is high on his chest, slightly left of center and a foot of blade protrudes out his back before he pulls the sword out. (In a human, this type of wound would be most likely instantly fatal.)
First, the dialog:
1. Off-Panel: You okay?2. Firestorm: I-I-I-I-I...
This is surely the dialog of the gods. Firestorm has just been pierced completely through his chest by a sword enchanted by Merlin himself, and incandescent blood is flowing out of the wound. So naturally, his companions would ask, "You okay?"
Plus, I am in awe of choosing five repetitions of "I" to express the shock and terror that Firestorm must surely be feeling.
Second, the caption:
4. Caption (GA): No one there is a physicist.5. Caption (GA): But they still know what happens when you puncture a nuclear reactor.
Well, I am a physicist, and the answer to what happens when you puncture a nuclear reactor is: Pretty much nothing.
A fission reactor is a big pile of solid matter--uranium or plutonium pellets, bricks made of graphite or a similar material in which the pellets are suspended, moveable control rods made of cadmium or similar neutron-absorbing material to moderate the speed of the reaction. (I'm describing Fermi's original 1942 University of Chicago nuclear pile, but the principles remain the same.) There's nothing to puncture.
It's worth a brief digression to note that "puncture" is a telling word in this context. Semantically, the use of the verb "puncture" is that one can only puncture a container--a balloon, a gasoline tank, a submarine hull, a wet suit--and the effect is to let what is contained out or vice versa. An object that's been punctured is no longer useful as a container. You wouldn't normally speak of "puncturing" a human; we don't contain anything. Note that this is restricted to the verb; there are derivative forms with different semantic content. But even if you get a puncture wound, you wouldn't say that you'd been punctured; you'd been stabbed, poked, or skewered, not punctured.
So I will go on to say that commercial fission reactors are immersed in a heat transfer medium, usually water. (Argonne National Lab West had at one time an experimental reactor in which the medium was liquid sodium at something like 800 degrees.) So, in principle, a puncture of the cooling vessel could produce a rapid loss of cooling medium, which could lead to a meltdown if the reactor's damping mechanisms also broke simultaneously.
I will also mention fusion reactors. You can't puncture an implosion-type fusion reactor--same reason as a fission reactor, it's basically a solid-state apparatus--but you can puncture a plasma fusion reactor. The result is an extremely rapid quenching of the reaction. There would probably be some mechanical effects as well, since the puncture would let out some hot dense gas and probably collapse the magnetic field, dropping a pretty fair amount of energy into the local environment, but probably not doing much more than wrecking the plasma vessel and the room it's in.
In no case would you get, as Identity Crisis's narrator seems to think is self-evident, a nuclear explosion. Worst case, you get an explosion of radioactive material (not unlike a "dirty bomb"), but you're not going to get a Fat Man-type explosion.
But, all that tedious discussion of what real-world nuclear reactors aside, the fact is that this sequence depends on an extremely poor analogy between Firestorm and a nuclear reactor. I'm not even sure how you could get started on this analogy. Aside from his fire elemental phase, there's never been any particular indication that Firestorm was anything but a corporeal being. He's not Wildfire, whose vulnerability to punctures is thoroughly established. He's not Captain Atom, whose metal-clad skin has indeed been shown to contain powerful energies. He's seemed far closer to the Human Torch or Sun Boy, a human who can command and wreathe himself in powerful radiant energies.
I would similarly doubt that his ability to rearrange atomic structure makes him much of a nuclear reactor; it's an analogy of limited usefulness, but not really any actual explanatory content. Compare to Element Lad; no one would worry about a nuclear release after stabbing Jan.
But all that's just bad writing. What's worse about the series, for me, is that it's really a bad DC Universe story. It ignores the common threads of suspension of disbelief that hold the universe together, while acting to destroy many of its elements.
Primarily, this is, by ordinary DC Universe standards, a pretty ordinary threat. Most superheroes deal with threats to their loved ones on a regular basis, and it's not like the perp threatens to end life as we know it. Yet it's treated as an all-out crisis. Furthermore, the heroes are essentially hysterical: they're not thinking or acting rationally, as we've seen them act in similar circumstances. Even those not directly affected by the murders are acting desperately. Again, their reaction is entirely out of proportion to the apparent threat--as judged by other threats we've seen in the DC Universe.
The confrontation scenes that result from the heroes' complete mobilization do not bear much resemblence to the typical confrontation scenes seen in DC comics (or, indeed, in superhero comics in general). For example, Green Lantern's encounter with Deadshot in this issue: I don't know about you, but I haven't read too many scenes whose sequence was so apparently random--imprisonment, a bloody neck wound (which may or may not have been deliberate), a muzzle-flash blinding, Superman's hand as a tourniquet around the wounded neck. It just doesn't read like a DC comic.
You see more of that in the Firestorm scene, where three experienced heroes fumble the capture of the Shadow Thief like tyros, resulting in a skewering. That doesn't read like a DC comic. I may have been shocked or saddened by Crisis on Infinite Earths' many deaths, but none of them felt out of place, felt random or pointless.
You can't effectively write the DC universe like it were The Authority or under a different set of rules and assumptions, even if they're internally consistent, because there are twenty-five other authors writing in the same universe all the time, and they have to stick to the basic rules, because their books are going to be published this year and next year and twenty years from now.
On top of the strongly atypical mood, the story is extremely destructive. In the scene I've been discussing, Firestorm blows up, apparently fatally. Sir Justin's sword, enchanted by Merlin and shown in All-Star Squadron to be virtually invulnerable, is apparently melted. What on earth is the point?
Like I said. This is garbage. Meltzer's managed to create something that other writers are going to have to take years to fix.
Posted by Greg at November 1, 2004 9:54 AM