DC's Heroes In Crisis Kills More Superheroes and Villains

SPOILER WARNING: This article contains spoilers for Heroes in Crisis #3, by Tom King, Clay Mann, Lee Weeks, Tomeu Morey and Clayton Cowles, on sale now.

As Heroes in Crisis marches on, the body count in the DC Comics crossover is only growing larger.

In the wake of a devastating attack at a superhero trauma center called Sanctuary, a Flash, the fan-favorite Wally West, and Arsenal, Green Arrow's ex-sidekick Roy Harper, were found dead, along with several more obscure heroes like Commander Steel and the Teen Titans' Hot Spot.

Until now, the crossover has primarily centered around the attack's two prime suspects, Booster Gold and Harley Quinn. Heroes in Crisis #3 turns to focus on the tragic final days of the aquatic teen hero Lagoon Boy. Along the way, the issue also confirms a few more Sanctuary superhero casualties and identifies several more previously unmentioned characters who were Sanctuary patients at the time of the attack.

Moments before his own death, Lagoon Boy discovers the dead bodies of Hot Spot and two previously-unmentioned DC heroes, Red Devil and Gunfire. Before he changed his name to Red Devil, Kid Devil was a minor teen hero who had stints on teams like the Teen Titans and Young Justice in the 2000s. After Gunfire was attacked by aliens and thus received his powers in 1993's "Bloodlines" crossover, he used his ability to turn anything into an explosive weapon as a hero in his own short-lived 1990s series.

At the end of this issue, Booster Gold tells Harley Quinn, "Everyone's dead," just after she apparently kills Wally West. in addition to seemingly implicating Harley as the series' main murderer, the issue's final page gives us a better idea of who was at Sanctuary at the time of the attack. In addition to showing five confirmed patients, it establishes four more characters -- Gnarrk, Protector, Solstice and Nemesis -- as Sanctuary residents for the first time. Given Booster's comment, those heroes could very well be Sanctuary casualties, too.

While Nemesis is a spy and master of disguise who's been bouncing around the DC Universe since the 1980s, the other three Sanctuary patients revealed on this page all share connections to the Teen Titans.

Thanks to a comet fragment in his chest, Gnarrk, a super-strong, very old and smarter-than-average caveman, joined the Titans briefly in the 1970s and was reinserted into the team's history during 2015's Titans Hunt. The light-generating Solstice debuted shortly before DC's New 52 reboot in 2011, and she was a core member of the Teen Titans in the first few years of the New 52. The Protector was createdto replace Robin in a 1980s anti-drug campaign that featured the Teen Titans before he found his way into the far edges of the DC Universe.

NEXT PAGE: Heroes in Crisis: Even More Dead Teen Titans, and Harley Quinn's Best Friend

Heroes In Crisis has already confirmed the deaths of five other current or former Teen Titans: Wally West, Roy Harper, Hot Spot, Lagoon Boy and Red Devil. If Gnarrk, Solstice and Protector join the list of the fallen, this series could end up being the deadliest event in the Titans' 54-year history.

In addition the late Commander Steel, Red Devil and Gunfire, this page also features the Tattooed Man, a Sanctuary patient who hadn't appeared in the series until now. What makes his inclusion particularly interesting is that earlier this year, Geoff Johns and Gary Frank's Doomsday Clock #6 strongly suggested that the Green Lantern villain was another Sanctuary casualty. In that issue, the second Tattooed Man described whatever happened to the first Tattooed Man as "screwed up," but didn't elaborate on what happened to his predecessor.

While her fate still hasn't been explicitly confirmed, Poison Ivy is mentioned as a Sanctuary patient once again. The series has gone out of its way to avoid revealing whether or not Ivy survived the massacre. Still, the odds of her surviving an attack like this look grim, especially considering the story's focus on her partner-in-crime, Harley Quinn.

If Ivy and the rest of the aforementioned Sanctuary residents are dead, that would bring Heroes in Crisis' total body count to 14. When Superman first arrived at the scene of the attack in Heroes in Crisis #1, only 13 bodies could be seen on Sanctuary's front lawn. And that total doesn't include the still-unidentified Green Lantern we saw among the fallen. Unless a few of the heroes at Sanctuary survived against the odds, there's no way to estimate how many characters died until Heroes in Crisis is over.

Even if Poison Ivy or another Sanctuary resident got lucky and survived, Heroes in Crisis is still well on its way to becoming DC's most tragic crossovers in recent years. While entire universes have crumbled in other DC events, Heroes in Crisis has offered deeply human takes on obscure, mostly forgotten heroes before mercilessly killing them off. Since the series isn't even to its halfway point yet, there's no telling what dark surprises it could still have in store.

The investigation into the Sanctuary attack will continue in Heroes in Crisis #4, which is set to be released on Jan 2., 2019