306 IDENTITY CRISIS
quickly subdued Dr. Light. Afterwards, a core group of the JLA— Green Arrow ,
Green Lantern (Hal Jordan), the Flash (Barry Allen), Black Canary, the Atom (Ray
Palmer), Hawkman, and Zatanna—decided to have Zatanna use her magical powers
to erase the memory of the incident from Dr. Light’s mind. However, on a suggestion
from Hawkman, the majority of the group eventually voted to take the mind wipe a
step further and have Zatanna magically alter Dr. Light’s personality, eff ectively loboto-
mizing him. Th e fl ashback ends with two more revelations: Dr. Light was not the only
criminal whose mind they magically tampered with, as the group even agreed to erase
some of Batman’s memories when he accidentally discovered the scheme.
After an unsuccessful attempt to apprehend Dr. Light, during which several mem-
bers of the JLA are taken down a peg by the mercenary Deathstroke, an autopsy reveals
that the burns covering Sue’s body were not the cause of her death, which ostensibly
exonerates Dr. Light of the crime. Shortly thereafter, Sue’s killer seems to attack again
when the Atom’s ex-wife, Jean Loring, is hanged in her home. Jean survives, but this new
attack brings the heroes and their loved ones even closer together, as it is now clear that
someone is targeting the families of super-powered heroes. Further investigations into
the attacks ensue, while letters containing death threats are received by Superman’s
wife, Lois Lane, and Robin’s father, Jack Drake. Meanwhile, brain scans performed dur-
ing Sue’s autopsy fi nally reveal her true cause of death: an aneurism precipitated by
microscopic footprints on her brain. All signs now point to a killer with the power to
shrink, and Ray Palmer (the Atom) seems the most likely suspect. However, before
the Justice League can contact Palmer to question him about who else might have
had access to his shrinking technology, his ex-wife Jean accidentally reveals to him a
crime scene detail that only the investigators and the killer would have known, thereby
incriminating herself in the crime. Jean professes that she never meant to kill Sue, that
her intent was only “to knock her out... just to scare everyone a bit,” all the while hoping
that the fear engendered by the attack would bring the hero community closer together,
perhaps even reuniting her and Ray. Th e series closes with a montage showing that the
events actually have brought the crime-fi ghting community closer together, though Jean
is committed to Arkham Asylum and Palmer disappears due to his grief.
Th e title of the series, Identity Crisis , has several signifi cant meanings depending on
the context to which it is applied. On one level, the title could refer to the loss of identity
that some super villains experience as a result of the JLA magically altering their minds,
but of equal thematic importance is the loss of identity some of the protagonists in
the book experience as a result of their own actions. Most of the main characters in the
work identify themselves as heroes, but when these same characters are shown to have
crossed serious moral and ethical lines by tampering with the memories of criminals,
their identity as heroes is called into question. Finally and perhaps most meaningfully,
the miniseries also presents a crisis in the identity of Silver Age comics as a whole, sug-
gesting that the notion that the era consisted of clear-cut good guys and bad guys might
be overly simplistic. Indeed, Meltzer all but states as much when, in an entirely black
panel in the fi nal issue of the series, he quotes a line from Arthur Miller: “An era can be
