Spoilers, so I’ll use the extended entry.

Condolences have been pouring in from so many people who know what a big Elongated Man fan I am. I will be posting a review in MD’s Reviews section sometime soon, but for now I want to address this on a personal level.

I’m not just an EM fan…I’m an aspiring comic book writer who has spent the last 20 years dreaming up Ralph and Sue stories. Sue’s death in Identity Crisis effectively means that a great many stories I’ve been saving up are now moot.

My whole goal in life was to become a comic book writer and someday work up to working at DC and maybe, just maybe, convincing some editor to take a risk on an Elongated Man book. A crazy dream, sure, but it’s not like I was trying to run for president, either. With Sue gone, and all of the other characters I might have revived being written by other people, I honestly have no purpose in trying to write for DC. I doubt they’d want to revive Captain Carrot.

With CrossGen most likely not an option either, my life’s in quite a turmoil. I have no place to go but self-publishing, I guess. Until now, I had seen my four or five potential projects as the means to an end. Get famous writing Metro Med and use it as leverage for getting into DC. Now I need to ask myself if I can be happy if my self-publishing is all I ever do. (Not that I don’t like my own projects, but it’s a lot harder than getting a paycheck from someone else’s company.)

Don’t worry about me, folks. Fortunately I have my own Sue Dibny living in my house, so even if I don’t have a job and now my lifelong dream is dead, at least I won’t be slitting my wrists.

I just wish Identity Crisis wasn’t the best book since Kingdom Come. If it was a poorly written con job I could just hate Meltzer for what he’s done and call him a hack. I wish this was “Emerald Twilight’, but it’s not.

By the way, everyone has been telling me “They can just bring Sue back. This is comics.” I don’t want to “bring Sue back.” Look at how Ollie Queen and Superman are always referring to their deaths. If Sue came back from the dead, she’d still always be “the wife brought back from the dead” instead of just his sweetheart. Besides, there really isn’t any logical explanation for how a normal human being without any magical or superhuman element could be brought back without it being contrived.

That said, within two hours I had, without wanting to come up with one, worked out a way to deal with Sue’s death and bring her back. Given that I spent the better part of a decade figuring out how to revitalize the Metal Men after their disastrous mini-series, two hours without trying is awfully fast!

Just as I was about to hit the “Post” button, Greg Gick e-mailed me to point out that GOLD of the Metal Men is in Identity Crisis, alive and well! I hadn’t even noticed that! I guess Dan DiDio is really pushing the “pretend it never happened” retcons. This means that, unless it was unintentional, Identity Crisis serves as the first sign that Evan Dorkin’s Metal Men will be either a relaunch or a retcon. Cripes, and I wasted a decade trying to fix them in-continuity!