In his introduction to The Human Target: The Deluxe Edition, writer Tom King calls it “the book I always dreamed of making … the comic that is as perfect as I can possibly make it.”

This level of hype, before the book even gets started, may not have been entirely helpful.

I am a Tom King fan, a true believer, more perhaps than many I’ve encountered. These claims did not on their face seem unachievable. Already Human Target’s got two Eisner wins and a nomination, and a premise as sharp as anything I’ve encountered.

On one side, you’ve got Christopher Chance, the Human Target, a man whose superpower, so to speak, is to let himself be killed so that other people can live, except now he’s the one who’s been killed (or, the reader must immediately ask themselves, has he?). On the other side, you’ve got the Justice League International, that bumbling bunch of goofballs with an indelible place in the hearts of DC fans, now being played in a noir-style mystery. Twelve Leaguers (we’re presented with in the first chapter), 12 issues, 12 days until Christopher Chance dies … can he catch the killer in time? Genius.

There is, to be certain, a worthwhile character point being made in Human Target, something that’s been suggested but not perhaps said explicitly, that deserves to be said explicitly. There is also a smart mediation on life and death here, on living and dying and on that bizarre superheroic trope of dying and then coming back to life, and what that does to a fictional character and how any of us handle it, really, when we’ve changed but everyone around us stays the same.

But given all that Human Target’s working with, plus King’s own claims to its prowess, I was expecting Agatha Christie-level theatrics, a Knives Out and Only Murders in the Building and Watchmen (book and TV series) and Batman: The Long Halloween-level whodunit. Human Target is not that. Rather I barely considered what turns out to be the solution because it seemed far too obvious, verily the first solution one might consider in a noir mystery such as this. I kept waiting until the last page for King to spring something on me, somehow or another expertly turn it all on its head, but that moment never came.

[Review contains spoilers]

I will tell you, I had some wild theories. I did not by any means believe Chance was going to die, because, come on, that’s the guy’s whole schtick, he’s the hero who seems like he’s dying long enough for the bad guy to reveal themselves, and then Chance is triumphant. We see it nearly three times in the Tales of the Human Target special at the end, including an instance where Chance is buried alive but still digs his way out from six feet under, triumphant.

And surely the running gag where Chance is always drinking, including drinking to stem his fatal coughs, must be a put-on; I thought maybe he was drinking Gingold, and then of course if he was, what with Chance’s whole “master of disguise” bit and a shape-shifter, Martian Manhunter, among the suspects, was this even Chance at all or was this Ralph Dibny (and what would Sue say about his canoodling with Ice!)?

Was that even Ice, or was it Icemaiden Sigrid Nansen (called Glacier now, I understand)? With Booster Gold around, was there some sort of time travel involved, giving Chance foreknowledge of the events? Issues, even panels are split into “days,” some of which — from the quick hits of the first chapter to their seemingly corresponding issues — didn’t actually match up; in the midst of the story, were we sometimes seeing “pre-death” days and sometimes seeing “post-death” days? Among the suspects originally pictured, when would Captain Atom or Black Canary or Mister Miracle show up? Did they all do it, speaking of Agatha Christie? Was Chance himself the killer? Or Lex Luthor, the supposed intended victim? Or Dr. Mid-Nite, who delivered the death sentence and put Chance on the trail of the League?

But no, nothing so lofty. Ice, the book’s femme fatale, who saunters into Chance’s office and ingratiates herself in the case, turns out to be the culprit; it is verily the solution to one of the best-known hardboiled mysteries around. And Chance is not running any schemes, as it turns out; he susses out the killer through some cleverness but not any real Human Target-type shenanigans, and then in the end the hero who cheats death on the regular lays down in a hotel bed … and dies; the last chapter is almost purely Ice’s.

Judgment Day

This is all predicated on the events of “Judgment Day,” a six-part 1990s Justice League-titles crossover where, among other things, sweet, shy Ice comes into her power and confidence under the control of the alien Overmaster, and then just as she begins to fight back, the Overmaster kills her unceremoniously.

That happened just a month or so before Alex DeWitt was infamously “fridged” in the pages of Green Lantern; no pun intended, but Ice was effectively “fridged,” too. It would be more than a decade later when Gail Simone resurrected Ice in Birds of Prey: Dead of Winter, and the character has bobbed around making guest appearances since then. I read “Judgment Day” off the spinner racks and I recall even back then thinking her death felt like punching down; I also thrilled to Ice’s return in Birds of Prey and then her immediate jump to Greg Rucka’s Checkmate during one of my favorite DC eras.

So this is right up my nostalgia alley and I don’t begrudge at all, especially in the “Elseworlds” DC Black Label zone, Ice discovering that Lex Luthor had a hand in the Overmaster’s scheme and deciding to take him out. Ice’s complaints, and King’s meta-commentary behind it, are spot-on; we had a female character presented as the consummate good girl, and as soon as she began to show some nuance she was killed off, largely for the benefit of other characters' stories. It’s wholly believable Ice wouldn’t be the same retiring character upon her resurrection, just as it’s believable that her friends, and the writers who took on the character subsequently, would expect her to be.

Targets in Crisis

This won’t be a popular comparison in some circles, but to me Tom King’s doing the same service to Ice in Human Target as he did, intentionally or not, for Flash Wally West in Heroes in Crisis. That is, DC did a disservice to Wally in resurrecting him in DC Rebirth as a paragon of hope for the elder heroes, never mind that Wally had to mourn his children who never existed and his wife who didn’t recognize him. Yes, there’s the whole thing with Wally electrocuting a bunch of heroes and releasing others' therapy tapes to the world, but in the main I see King’s Human Target and Heroes in Crisis of a piece, the stories of people being valued for who they are to others instead of who they are themselves, and what happens when you just can’t take that any more.

The difficulty is that it’s the Human Target’s name on the masthead, and even if that’s metaphorical, this is largely billed as Christopher Chance’s book. When the final chapter gives way for instance to Ice blackmailing Martian Manhunter(!) to keep his silence about the scheme, and there is no last-minute “the Human Target never dies!” twist, I rather felt King was telling a very good story but not the story promised on the tin. King does well in sewing Chance’s historic origins, watching his father beg for his life and be murdered in front of him, into the complicated feelings Chance has on the occasion of his own death, but in the end that’s a very straightforward story — Chance is going to die and he does — whereas Ice is really the one who feels like she has the arc when it’s not her series.

Who Watches the JLI?

I’m also an avowed fan of DC’s Black Label, and far from put off when Black Label sees DC characters behaving in complicated ways, I’m rather proud of DC for finally loosening the reins on their characters a bit. That said, this is not a book that deals particularly nicely with the Justice League International; not that it has to be, but we’ve seen other such pseudo-celebrations of the JLI (Rucka’s use of Fire, for instance) that treat the characters seriously and the JLI as a comedic product of its time but still find some charm in the middle. But Human Target’s got Ice both trying to murder Lex Luthor and then arguably giving her body to Chance to atone for her mistake; a Guy Gardner as creepy and sexist as the character’s ever been played; Blue Beetle and Booster Gold at peak ineffectiveness; and Martian Manhunter in a masochistic affair with Fire that might be interpreted as predatory. “Bwahaha” isn’t spoken so fondly here.

Compounding the hyperbole, King’s pitch reprinted at the end of Human Target calls the book “Watchmen meets All-Star Superman.” I don’t know about the Superman bit (maybe in the dying), but the Watchmen connection is instructive. Complicated sexuality, heroes with toxic personalities — there’s a lens through which we might view Human Target as Watchmen-esque, if the Charlton characters were ever actually team and if they hadn’t been replaced in the story by analogues. Part of my discomfort at times with Human Target is that it’s a book that jumps straight from the 1980s to now, ignoring growth especially for Guy Gardner and Booster Gold through various writers in the ensuing years; but if your goal is to tell a Watchmen kind of story — if you think people are loony to dress up in costumes, then guess what? — then this presentation of the JLI’s antics as not so cute makes more sense. Maybe that also helps mitigate the fact that, even as King touts the “the old-comic-referencing of it all,” this is mostly built on 1973’s Action Comics #422 and 1993’s Justice League Task Force #14 and that’s it, with nary a Max Lord or Oberon or Kooey Kooey Kooey in sight.

Unquestionably, artist Greg Smallwood deserves his Eisner Award for The Human Target — if I may steal some parlance from Tom King, the noir of it all, the geometric shapes of it all, the Ice of it all, not to mention the covers (letterer Clayton Cowles, too, and doubly so if he did all the cover logos). It wouldn’t be for me to weigh in on Human Target and its limited series Eisner win overall, except that to know a series that deals with Ice’s 1990s death at the hands of the Overmaster won an Eisner tickles me to no end. I tell myself I’ll read this one again some day, now knowing what I know, expectations set firmly where they should be, no Gingold to be found. Curious to see if I like it more the second time around.

[Includes original and variant covers, pitch and script, art process feature, cover drafts]