Trivia / Heroes in Crisis

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• Creator Backlash:
  • Tom King has admitted on his Twitter that the scene of Lagoon Boy's death was not written well on his part. In a much later interview in August 2023, King mentioned the whole series derisively by saying "If you write 50 12-issue series, one's gonna be the 50th best, and I'm haunted by this — we all know it's gonna be Heroes in Crisis!"
  • In the years since Heroes in Crisis was released, it's become clear that DC has since recognized this book as an embarrassment and spent a lot of effort to try and rectify the damage it caused, including a heavy amount of retcons in The Flash (2016) and The Flash (Infinite Frontier). In the former it's revealed that Eobard Thawne hypnotized Wally into covering up the murders, while in the latter, the explosion itself was revealed to be a Speed Force burst due to Savitar's presence, and wasn't Wally's fault at all. Also, Gold Beetle rescued the rest of the heroes at Sanctuary and replaced them with clones, barring Roy (due to how close he was to the explosion and knowing he'd come back) and Poison Ivy (who was set to be revived anyway in the story).
• Executive Meddling: Tom King's tweets and interviews as the story was concluding makes it clear something happened to require big changes to the story. He denied it thoroughly, but with the last two issues, and the growing backlash from both fans and critics, he began to reverse his position. As listed below, he admitted that he wrote the outline to the story without any specific characters in mind, but before that, he very plainly stated on Twitter that everything involving Wally in the story was his idea alone, implying he wrote the story with Wally specifically in mind and editorial allowed it, rather than editorial choosing him for the role. Reading the earlier issues, and the solicitations for later issues, it's not difficult to infer that the plot was intended to go in a different direction than it wound up going, with subplots involving the Trinity, the Sanctuary AI, and Sanctuary itself being totally dropped in the last three issues. The sudden introduction of numerous elements to explain the series big mystery and the resolution of the story itself in the final issue also suggest that plans changed, as opposed to it simply being poorly written. Delays in release and the increase in the number of issues the series had multiple times also suggest this. It's possible this was the result of the backlash that had been steadily building from early on, long before the last two issues, or editorial becoming uncomfortable with the implications of King's original story on important characters (namely the Trinity).
• What Could Have Been: According to an article from Bleeding Cool, originally the series wasn't going to be a murder mystery, but rather a From Hell-like story where we witness the character commit the crime and then follow him and the investigation to catch him. At some point, however, it was decided that it should be a murder mystery a la Identity Crisis (2004).
• Word of God: Tom King confirmed that for the title spread of Issue #7, every flower was individually drawn◊ by Clay Mann.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: King claimed in interviews that he had a general outline of the story with no particular characters really in mind and it was apparently the editors who decided which characters would be featured. What resulted was the series focusing on Booster Gold, Harley Quinn, and Wally West.

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