I believe I’m in danger right now. How do I get you to come?
Don’t wait. Our contact form on this site is linked directly to our Crisis Alert. You’ll be connected to our main server, or to the emergency service of your choosing. You’ll also be given the option to download our pre-programmed, emergency-use Atom Rider app, which can instantly deliver you to the closest viable hospital from any location on the planet.
Who are you? You appeared out of nowhere, working together with little seemingly in common beyond planet-shaking power. In spite of sharing your names most word on your background comes from guessed-at commonalities or connections with past heroes and what’s known of their own origins, or flavors of conspiracy theories.
First and foremost, we’re here to help. Some of us, like Frontier, keep few secrets about their lives. Others like Prizefighter live 100% of the time in their public persona. For the rest of us, the answer is somewhere in between. The secrets we keep, we keep to protect ourselves, and also to protect you. We know you’d like to know more, and we’d like to tell you. Hopefully it’ll be safe to do so eventually. But in the meantime, we hope our actions speak loudest as to who we are: people who want to help.
What exactly do you do? You’re on the news dealing with mind-muggers and the Social Callers to save civilization, but what about ‘smaller’ crimes? Are you only there for the big stuff? Is getting cats out of trees not a crisis worth your time?
You’re all worth our time. You’re all important. What we do, above all, is help those in danger. However, the unfortunate fact about this world, our world, is that there is nearly always a crisis with more life at risk than something a platonic and pure as a cat in a tree. That doesn’t mean it’s unimportant. But five people, even with our abilities, can’t be everywhere at once. Dealing with danger on a global scale almost always means making triage decisions, which is why we’ve learned to trust those we protect to stand for themselves, knowing we have their back if they get in too deep over their head.
Whose side are you on? You’re called “the super-team of America”, but you operate outside the country, you don’t make any secrets of your politics, and you’ve been taped arguing with law enforcement in Portland. What makes you say you stand for us?
Well, we’ve never called ourselves that. What we’ve always said is that we’re on the side of those in danger. We don’t answer to any flag, we answer to people in harm’s way, and the need to pull them out of it. Sadly, we’re not naïve. We knew from the start that those actions would be politicized, since it’s an unfortunate fact that safety and comfort for some is sometimes seen as an affront to others. We’ve made no secret of putting the wellbeing of people, and the world, above all. It’s those who stand in the way of that that inject politics. There’s no ceremony we’ll stand on if it means someone in pain longer than we can help, and that’s what was seen in Portland. We were best suited to save the lives of people with emergency medical issues, and acted.
What’s your stance on use of lethal force? Frontier carries a gun, and Sawbones is covered in deadly weapons.
If the Crisis Command answers to those in pain, those in danger, then violence always needs to be a last resort. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t occur, and it unfortunately doesn’t mean that saving the lives of many may mean ending a life. But that’s something to be avoided at all costs. Even with the public attack of the Mind-Muggers, the attackers were contained and delivered to the World Court for trial. Frontier carries a gun of her own design, with functionality often used to deliver lifesaving medicine or scientific remedies. Sawbones carries many deadly weapons, but part of his wielding them with the precision of a surgeon is ensuring there are no surprises. By being precise and decisive, he has no need to use deadly force.
On a related note, what do you say to rumors Sawbones spends his time away from the team going to hospitals to stab patients?
This seems like a misrepresentation. Sawbones does spend time away from the team in a variety of hospitals, learning all he can about medicine and lifesaving procedures. However he is not a doctor, and limits himself to the use of his Bio-Spectral vision when in a hospital setting, aiding those qualified to administer emergency medicine by seeing what they can’t. What Sawbones learns as an observer, he applies in the field until first responders arrive at the scene.
What are the Command referring to when you say you’re clocking in or out? Are you on a set workweek/rotation? Do you have to abide by mandatory minimums or maximums? Do you take vacations from saving us?
We’ll take a vacation as soon as danger, or catastrophe, decides to sit one out. At the same time, we’re still limited by our bodies. We can’t go without sleep, we do get worn down. Even the strongest among us, Seer, gets worn down the fastest when using her amazing godlike abilities. We have no mandates, and also no vacations. But we do rotate through who is on the job watching the Crisis Alert, so that the others can recharge and be ready to deploy in the cases of a problem that requires we all activate. To better protect you when we’re on, we all need time off.
Who else do you work with? The world only sees the five of you, but between maintaining the Think Tank, funding your equipment, and any legal challenges you face, surely you receive some kind of support, with their own roles – and agendas? – we’d want to know about.
The Crisis Command regularly works alongside the world’s other heroes, whether it’s Thunder Woman or Brick Bat, or anyone else who can do the work and aid everyday folks. While we appreciate questions about our funding, as we’ve said above there are secrets we keep in order to better protect this world. That said, funding for the Crisis Command does come from within our five team members.
I believe I or someone I know may have been affected by the Originator’s warping of reality, in a way that cannot be brushed aside for the duration of the effect.
Please use the contact form above, download the Emergency Atom Rider app for treatment.
For anything else you have to say: how can we trust you to be honest with us, especially when the powers of one of your team members literally depends on us liking you?
We’ll start with the obvious – trust in of itself is always a risk. All we can provide is the evidence of our actions, just like anyone else on this world. We can say whatever we want, we can even tell you whatever you want to hear, but actions are what matter. And we hope that as our backlog of aid continues to grow, trust will come. And more to the point, someone like Prizefighter is all the more reason to feel your agency. If you started to doubt him, for whatever reason, his powers would begin to wither. His needing your belief puts the power in your hands, not his.
Is there anything I can do to help?
You can do your best, just as we always try to do. We’re here to make life easier than it is, not harder. We hope you don’t have to think about us, or anyone else in the superhuman community, on a daily basis. Show compassion, listen to those around you, and remember you’re not an island but one of billions just trying to get by. That’s how you help. Don’t worry about helping us, help those in your community. Radical compassion might just mean, in time, that there’s less and less for us to do. And we wouldn’t mind that at all.
Commanders In Crisis #5 by Steve Orlando and Davide Tinto comes out February 10th from Image Comics.
David Mann
A lifelong fan of superheroes as a genre and comics as a medium, David's been writing about 'em one way or another since 2014 and doesn't plan on stopping any time soon.
