Heroes in Crisis is one of the most interesting blockbuster comics to come along in a very long time. Plot-wise, it’s almost a bog-standard superhero whodunit. There were a series of impossible murders. Something about the evidence doesn’t make sense. The capes investigate. The superheroes find their attacker. The story is advanced. But if you look even a centimeter deeper than that, it is maybe the most deconstructive superhero comic since Watchmen.

Ever since 1986, superhero books and their associated media have been obsessed with asking “What if superheroes were real!?!?!?!?!?!?” For the most part, the answers those books came up with involved shouting BOOBS at the reader while someone was bloodily murdered in the background (I’m looking at you for probably only the second time, Kick-Ass). Some people were exceptionally successful at using deconstruction to tell better stories – Brian Michael Bendis and Warren Ellis spring to mind – but too often these books just slapped a veneer of what they thought passed as mature content on slowed down versions of the same comics that had been coming out for decades, and the end product was forgettable shelf filler.

Heroes in Crisis, on the other hand, works because it’s not asking “What would happen if superheroes really existed?” It’s asking “What would happen to the superheroes if they were people really living this life?” It’s a comic about how nobility can break you. About the very real psychological cost created by trying to be the best of people by dealing with the worst of them. And about the self-perpetuating pressure that heroing places on a person.

The speech from Superman in issue #5 is probably the key bit of dialogue to understanding the story, but the fact that we spend so much time with z-listers in treatment at Sanctuary is where we really see it. Getting inside the heads of Commander Steel or Solstice or even a joke like Gunfire even for a second opens up the whole world of superheroics and the different ways to respond to them. Commander Steel’s hopelessness when talking about his many resurrections is heartbreaking. Also, what cruel gods are we that we can’t just let him fade into limbo when he’s done being used in a comic, but instead he has to be resurrected and re-killed every time.