I don't really recommend this comic, but if you do give it a shot, read it and put it away for a couple of years. When you come back panels like this will jump out at you.
Panels like this show that there is a level of thought put into this story, even if there is a lot of things that don't add up. I don't act like I care if mysteries need to be completely air tight to be interesting, but this one has so many undercooked elements. The crime scene is investigated by all sorts of heroes using their various powers, but the mystery isn't solved until Batman comes to the same conclusion as the heroes doing the autopsy. The house where the murder happened also had layers and layers of advanced superhero surveillance technology, but I guess didn't have any security cameras.
What happens to these two D-list characters does make things more tragic. Maybe because we never paid any attention to Elongated Man and his wife, Sue, it adds a feeling of neglecting decent people just because they weren't flashy and backed by hundreds of millions of dollars worth of merchandising. DC kills and kills and kills its main heroes, but the senselessness of this one does hit home because it happened to someone powerless and it was done for the most petty of reasons and someone we find out Sue had also been raped.
The mind wipe storyline isn't that compelling. They mind wipe the rapist and then mind wipe Batman.
A lot of the story is heroes running around in a frantic panic. They are dumb and reckless. This story uses Elongated Man and Sue Dibny's tragedy to push them out of the story's way to focus mostly on Green Arrow. Side characters pop up, mostly to be blatantly set up to be killed in Jean Loring's murderous plot to get back with her super hero, super tiny husband. Elongated Man really does sit out most of the story. I don't think any of the heroes ever really mention that Sue was pregnant. People just forget stuff, no mind wipe needed.
The art isn't great. I don't think the artist is bad at drawing, just there is very little flair. This is supposed to be a dark edgy story, but the art is mostly static. There are copy and pasted panels. Very little use of tilted camera angles to make us feel disturbed. When it's shown our team of heroes is coming apart, the art just can't be bothered to show the end of an era.
What's more interesting about this story is thinking about why it was made. Did DC see sales from another book that proved to them that rape was a big seller? They did that for a time when they found a book with a gorilla was a big hit, so every cover had a gorilla. What was DC's mid-2000s rape ape?
Was it just for sales? There was some good stuff in here, just it never all fully clicked. Why even have it be a mystery with a solution? Because it's a comic. You can't let every panel be haunted.
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