The Flash: How Wally West Became the Killer in Heroes in Crisis

In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, discover the surprising reason why Wally West was the killer in Heroes in Crisis.

Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and eleventh installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false. As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends.

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COMIC LEGEND:

Wally West being the killer in Heroes in Crisis was part of Tom King's original plot for the series.

STATUS:

False

Heroes in Crisis #1 (by Tom King, Clay Mann and Tomeu Morey) opens with the Justice League rushing to Sanctuary, a special site in Nebraska that was built to help superheroes deal with trauma. It was built with Kryptonian technology and uses virtual reality and artificial intelligence robots that each have the will of Batman, compassion of Wonder Woman and honor of Superman to help the patients there.

Well, in the first issue, a number of heroes are found seemingly murdered, including Wally West and Roy Harper...

There were various clues at the seeming murder site that suggested that it was either Harley Quinn or Booster Gold, and both Booster and Harley believed that the other one was the one who committed the murders.

Finally, in Heroes in Crisis #8 (by King and Mitch Gerads), we discovered that the killer was actually Wally West. He had lost control of his powers after stealing the files on the various heroes and being overwhelmed with emotion and the explosion had killed the heroes near him, including his good friend, Roy Harper...

But then Wally made the decision to trick Booster and Harley into thinking that the other had committed the murders and then Wally positioned the bodies just so (and brought his own body back from the future) to frame them to give him time to at least expose Sanctuary before he would then kill himself to close the loop, as it were.

In the final issue of the series (with Mann and Morey back on art duties), Booster, Blue Beetle, Batgirl and Harley figure out the truth and go to confront Wally before he kills, well, himself. They overhear Wally, in effect, talk to himself and they realize that it was an accident...

Still, involuntary manslaughter is still a crime, ya know? Plus the whole framing Harley and Booster thing, which Harley gives him a piece of her mind over (and her foot)...

Beetle and Booster close the loop with a cloned body of Wally and Wally is then takin to, like, super jail, I guess?

The series was certainly a controversial one, which Tom King reflected on at Comic-Con International in San Diego in 2019, , "People f*cking hated [Heroes in Crisis] so much. I've never written something someone hated so much. But I love it. I think I got the message I wanted to get across. I think, killing Wally [West], it was a tough hill for people to climb."

He added, "Wally was my Flash growing up. He was the Peter Parker of the DCU. It was tough on him because it was like the symbol of Rebirth killing people. First of all, Wally doesn't murder anyone, that doesn't happen. There's heroism in being vulnerable. To always say I'm strong is not to be strong, it's to be arrogant."

The fascinating thing, though, is that when King envisioned Heroes in Crisis, Wally West WASN'T the killer. One of the interesting things about writing these legends is that I often come across stuff that I thought was widely known, and then I realize that my interpretation of what is widely known is MUCH different than other people, and when I wrote about Heroes in Crisis a while back, my friend Bill Walko (the excellent writer/artist on The Hero Business and an overall very well-informed guy on DC comics history, in particular) mentioned to me that he thought that Heroes in Crisis HAD been written with Wally West in mind.

In actuality, as King explained to ComicBook.com, "As I've said many times before, I don't pick the characters for my story; I give my plot to the editors and then the editors pick the characters for me. So I told them in the beginning, 'this is what it's going to be -- it's going to be about one hero who's made a mistake and it's going to be about the two heroes that get framed for that mistake.' And they said, 'okay, it's Booster, Harley, and Wally, those are the three characters.' I mean they're a joy to write, I love writing them."

So yes, the controversy over Wally West being the killer in the series came about due to DC editorial telling King that Wally was the killer, not King deciding that Wally was the killer himself. This is not an all together unusual way of doing things, of course, as Brad Meltzer also planned on Identity Crisis being a superhero murder mystery before he knew specifically WHO would be killed in the series (it turned out, of course, to be Sue Dibny as the initial murder victim that kicked the story off).

Thanks to Tom King for the information and thanks to my pal, Bill, for reminding me that there were likely plenty of people who didn't know this rather notable fact about Heroes in Crisis.