DC's November Solicitations Narrow Heroes in Crisis "Death List" To Three Candidates

Of the six heroes who were teased as potential Heroes in Crisis casualties earlier this month, three of them are safe, according to DC's own solicitations for comics coming out in November.

Heroes in Crisis launches on September 26, and will do so with a literal bang -- and a number of characters will die in the issue. According to the cover of this month's DC Nation previews magazine, the death toll will include one of six characters pictured on the cover: Booster Gold, Harley Quinn, Green Lantern Kyle Rayner, Arsenal (Roy Harper), Cyborg, and Red Robin (Tim Drake).

A cursory look at the solicitations released earlier today reveals that three of those characters are accounted for in November, suggesting that they will not die in a comic released on September 26.

...That's some mind-blowing detective work, we know.

Of course, the candidates who are still alive are the three that nearly everyone had already discounted: Booster Gold, Harley Quinn, and Cyborg.

Cyborg appears in Justice League Odyssey (which, in fairness, had been delayed a few times so theoretically could have been a casualty...but no, there would be a lot of headaches trying to line up those timetables), and Harley Quinn appears in her own ongoing series. Booster comes into conflict with Superman in Heroes in Crisis #3 -- which jives with earlier reports that Booster and Harley would actually be murder suspects, not victims.

The cover also features a bloodied mask -- like the ones worn by patients at Sanctuary, a superhero crisis center at the heart of the tale -- reflecting the faces of Batman and The Flash (Barry Allen), who are investigating the murder mystery that kicks off the story's events.

"You can't have a Crisis without a dead Flash," Heroes in Crisis writer Tom King told a group of reporters at Comic Con, standing on the dock of a yacht while he and everyone in sight was wearing white DC Entertainment-branded bathrobes.

That bit of wisdom, which pretty clearly implies King means to kill off a Flash in the upcoming miniseries, was reportedly imparted to him by DC co-publisher Dan DiDio, something to which DiDio admitted during the event. Apparently, the DC boss had originally said it during Infinite Crisis.

The convention wisdom since then has been that it would be Wally West who would die, since he left Keystone City for Sanctuary at the end of the recent "Flash War" event. Fans might wonder, given the fact that Batman and The Flash are teamed up, whether this will have any connection to "The Button," the Watchmen/Doomsday Clock tie-in co-written by King and The Flash co-writer Joshua Williamson.

The remaining candidates -- Tim Drake, Roy Harper, and Kyle Rayner -- have each been appearing regularly in comics which have recently undergone big changes: Detective Comics ditched the team angle in favor of returning to its usual role as a more Batman-centric title; Red Hood and the Outlaws saw Red Hood get a new costume and ditch the team; and Green Lanterns and Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps are on the cusp of a mini-rebirth with Grant Morrison at the helm. The new series The Green Lantern, will be more of a police procedural that deals with a galactic conspiracy.

More details on Heroes in Crisis and other DC books should be coming in the next few weeks as the company starts gearing up for the series' release on September 26.