'Doomsday Clock' #6 May Reveal a 'Heroes in Crisis' Death

Today's issue of The Flash is not the only place you can go to get a tease of what is to come in Tom King and Clay Mann's Heroes in Crisis miniseries. A similar, albeit somewhat less shocking, tease appears in Doomsday Clock #6 from Geoff Johns, Gary Frank, and Brad Anderson.

Spoilers ahead for Doomsday Clock #6, on sale today.

In the issue, a group of supervillains is meeting and one -- a D-lister named Typhoon -- is being singled out as a potential traitor to the group. Along the way, there is discussion of how rumors about "The Superman Theory" have made life harder for heroes and villains alike.

"You all heard what happened to the first Tattooed Man at that Sanctuary Place?" Tattooed Man asks the assembled villains. "It's screwed up."

The speaker is young and African-American, so is likely Mark Richards, the Tattooed Man introduced by Geoff Johns and Ethan Van Sciver, and so it is likely that he is referring to Abel Tarrant. Tarrant died in Checkmate back in 2007 but may have been quitely revived by Rebirth only to die here. It is equally plausible that the "first" Tattooed Man in this instance is Richards and that this young African-American character is a new Tattooed Man who picks up after Richards's death. That seems like a stretch, but it is worth at least mentioning since this version has the snake tattoo over the middle of his forehead, which Tarrant generally had while Richards generally (not always) had it off to one side.

In any event, the implication seems to be that something bad -- likely death -- happened to the previous Tattooed Man at Sanctuary.

Sanctuary is a mental health facility, built for the heroes and villains of the DC Universe. It uses Kryptonian technology, modified by Batman and embracing Amazonian philosophies, so that its AI nurses can provide therapy for the super-beings who find themselves embroiled in violent conflicts on a daily basis.

And the premise for Heroes in Crisis is that there is a "slaughter" at Sanctuary, leaving a number of heroes and villains dead, and two heroes who were on site getting help (Harley Quinn and Booster Gold) are the prime suspects.

Writers and editors have been teasing a number of casualties at the attack on Sanctuary, and it now seems that -- along with that tease from The Flash #51 -- we have at least one and probably two names to put down on that list.

Sanctuary #1 will be in stores in late September, around the same time Doomsday Clock #7 is out.