The Worst DC Event of the 21st Century Didn’t Have to Be So Bad (and It Originally Wasn’t)

DC Comics is having an amazing time in the 2020s, reaching levels of success that didn’t seem possible at the beginning of the decade. The 2010s weren’t exactly a great time to be a DC fan, despite their being some big moments during those ten years. The New 52 started with potential and petered out, an ill-planned shock to the system that destroyed everything the publisher had built over the ’00s. DC Rebirth started like a house on fire, but things would deteriorate for various reasons. Rebirth started in 2016 and had some successes, but in 2018, the publisher released a story that would kneecap DC: Heroes In Crisis, by Tom King, Clay Mann, and Mitch Gerads.

King became one of DC’s biggest writers of the time, but some fans weren’t all-in on him, and many of them in 2026 point to Heroes In Crisis as why. The story introduced the concept of Sanctuary, a place where heroes could go to deal with their mental health issues, and set a murder mystery there, as Booster Gold and Harley Quinn wake up to find everyone dead and them the only suspects. The mystery was pretty blah and the story has its problems, but it would get worse once the killer was revealed: Wally West. This reveal made this one of the most hated DC comics in years, as readers had just got West back and were very happy about it. This nine-issue series is DC’s worst event (yes, worse than the first Amazons Attack!), but the worse part is that it didn’t have to be.

Heroes In Crisis Was Terrible but Sanctuary Wouldn’t Have Been

Heroes In Crisis is one of those events that seems to do everything (but the art, which is fantastic) wrong. Booster and Harley never feel like the right character, King’s interpretation of numerous other characters also doesn’t always work, the pacing is glacial, and the mystery itself isn’t great. The Wally West slander is the part that angers fans the most, though. The third Flash had disappeared in the New 52, so that Barry could be the only Flash, and fans were outraged, constantly asking for him back. DC had listened in 2016, but it felt like they were doing everything they could to marginalize him, leading to “Flash War”, where he ended up fighting Barry in an attempt to get his family back (who didn’t exist anymore).

Making him the killer was just the latest bad idea from former DC head honcho Dan DiDio. DiDio loved Silver Age DC and was responsible for the publisher undoing the changes of Crisis on Infinite Earths, as well as the New 52. DiDio hated the legacy heroes of the Silver Age like Dick Grayson and Wally West as anything but sidekicks, and tried to kill Dick at least twice (in Infinite Crisis and Forever Evil). He didn’t like Wally as the Flash, so we got Barry back then we lost West completely, thanks to DiDio.

Wally’s plot after his return in DC Rebirth #1 was about him finding his friends again and being sad about his family not existing on this Earth. This wasn’t at all what readers wanted, so “Flash War” and Heroes In Crisis making him into a villain and murderer was a huge problem for fans. However, if you go back a little bit, you’ll find that none of this had to happen. It all goes back to the pages of DC Connect, a weekly free magazine DC put out to hype its comics (now it’s basically DC Previews). In one of these, a story by Tom King and Clay Mann was announced, but it wasn’t called Heroes In Crisis. It was called Sanctuary.

King had come to prominence in the later days of the New 52, during the “DCYou” publishing initiative with books like Omega Men and Grayson and The Sheriff of Babylon for Vertigo. King liked to dig into characters, find the trauma, and extract it, showing it to the world all while his characters dealt with the threats of the dangerous world around them. He’d get the nod for Batman (Vol. 3), and began a controversial tenure writing the Dark Knight, building his run around two things – the psychology of Batman and his relationship with Catwoman’s effect on it.

King was a CIA agent in the War on Terror, something his critics never stop bringing up, and he constantly writes about trauma and PTSD. King understands first hand just what the kind of work someone like Batman does can have a person in a way that a lot of writers wouldn’t and he uses that. Sanctuary felt like an example of him taking that proclivity and spinning into something great.

Sanctuary was similar to Heroes In Crisis, in that it revolved around the same facility, but the difference was that King’s original story was going to be about the heroes dealing with their trauma. While they didn’t release too much about the overall plot, the feature concentrated on this idea of heroes in psychotherapy, discussing all the things that have happened to them and trying to find a way to happiness through them. For fans of King, it was the kind of story that he excelled at. The murder mystery and the reveal of Sanctuary’s secret to the world – normal people would be freaked out thinking their world-saving heroes were just like: bundles of neuroses – were still a part of it (as we’d later find out) but one thing we know that there wouldn’t have been was Wally as the murderer.

King has been asked several times about whose idea it was to make Wally murder Arsenal and a bunch of people he’d been fighting alongside for years and has indicated that when he told editorial the story would revolve around in murderer in the facility, DiDio told him that it had to be Wally. Sanctuary wasn’t originally supposed to be a big event book, it was just going to be a Tom King book where he played with a bunch of lower-level heroes a lot, threw in some A-listers for seasoning, and went to town writing about how trauma and PTSD affect people.

The murder was needlessly complicated – with Wally releasing a wave of Speed Force energy because he lost control of his powers, accidentally killing everyone and then ran through time to frame Harley and Booster then kill himself out of guilt – and it went where no one wanted it to go. I re-read the book not too long ago and it’s not horrid. There are some good ideas and issues and King does nail the emotion of the characters, but the ending just drags it to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, all because of Wally West having to be the murderer. It changed the story completely and made it into the obscenity it’s seen as today.

Sanctuary Would Have Been Better but the Failure of Heroes In Crisis Ended a Dark Period in DC History

I don’t want to sit here and launder the reputation of this story too much because it is terrible. It takes a good idea and then focuses on the worst part of the whole story for a bloated mystery that didn’t need to be so complicated and definitely didn’t have to damage one of the most beloved DC characters ever. Sanctuary might have had some of the same problems Heroes In Crisis, but if the murder didn’t have to be some big DCU mystery that pulled in everyone and became an event, it would have been better. However, the failure of Heroes In Crisis ended up being a good thing.

Basically, it was one of the last failures that the company allowed Dan DiDio. Fans were immediately outraged at an insane level and they made sure their voice was heard. DiDio’s fingerprints were all over a lot of DC’s then-recent failures, creating an environment that drove away some of DC’s greatest creators of the time. Sales were falling off a cliff and eventually, his entire regime would be ended, taking Bob Harras and Scott Lobdell with him, which made the women at DC very happy. DiDio created a toxic environment at the company and Heroes In Crisis was the straw that broke the camel’s back. So, sure, I’d rather have Sanctuary than Heroes In Crisis. I want a baseball bat to the head more than that book. But I like Marie Javins and Jim Lee being in charge, so I’m glad Heroes In Crisis happened.

Would you have liked Sanctuary more? Want to yell about how much you don’t like Tom King? Sound off in the comments below.

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