The first time I read Identity Crisis, I was blown away. I hadn’t read anything this intense in an in-continuity comic book, and without being overly familiar with some of the main characters – The Atom, Elongated Man, and Dr. Light in particular – I fell for Brad Meltzer’s story hook line and sinker.

The second time I read Identity Crisis, it was just after I’d read Infinite Crisis, and the DC Universe was DEEP in the continuity that Meltzer had set up. I was getting sick and tired of the same plot threads being dragged out over and over again, and I started picking apart Identity Crisis ended up thinking it was a piece of crap.

The third time I read Identity Crisis was this weekend. And it was a weird amalgamation of my previous two times. I got sucked in by the emotional beats of the story – the first issue, with Ralph crying at the funeral, still brings me to tears – and I saw that yes, he really had made a respectable murder mystery out of the thing. Plus, there were some GREAT fight scenes. And yet, I didn’t like some of the characterizations and plot points – does anyone REALLY buy into that “you only use 10% of your brain” claptrap any more? – and there were some really awful moments where I thought that Meltzer had gone wildly out of control, using shock value to hurt the audience rather than tell the story.

And art…well, the art ranges wildly in quality. There are some panels (particularly in issues 1-3) where the faces were almost ugly, and then others where he creates the perfect degree of suspense or horror. Part of it may be the pencils, but inks are suspect too (some of the pages of issue 7 look muddy and unflattering).

Overall? It was a good mystery, an emotional roller-coaster, and a decent read. I just wish the powers-that-be at DC had left it to be its own thing, and not used it as the backbone of their universe for the next few years. Then again, I can’t fault the book for that questionable decision. Worth reading, at least once.