Comic Book / The Human Target (2021)

"I'm the Human Target. All I do is die to find out who killed me."

Christopher Chance: Someone tried to kill you and got me. Simple as that. Question is, who wants to kill you?
Lex Luthor: Everyone.
Christopher Chance: Well, that helps. You just write down all their numbers and addresses and I'll get started.

The Human Target is a 12-issue superhero detective noir miniseries by writer Tom King and artist Greg Smallwood, based on the DC Comics character of the same title, made as part of the DC Black Label imprint.

Christopher Chance is a private investigator and bodyguard who has made a living out of inviting death, specializing in disguising himself as his employers to bait would-be assassins and thwarting their murder. However, while on the job of disguising himself as his latest client, Lex Luthor, Chance finds himself being poisoned and told he has only twelve days to live. Evidence points to the poisoner being one of the members of the Justice League International, leading Chance on the path to solve his own murder before he dies.

The series began in September 2021, went on hiatus following issue #6 in March 2022, then resumed in September 2022, concluding in February 2023, with the series being compiled in two trades, The Human Target Volume 1 and Volume 2. During the hiatus, a prequel one-shot titled Tales of the Human Target was released, written by King, with art split between Smallwood, Rafael Albuquerque, Kevin Maguire, and Mikel Janín.

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Tropes include:

• Adaptational Jerkass: Guy Gardner has always been known to be quite abrasive, but this incarnation lacks the gentle camaraderie he has with his friends — in fact, he and Ice have long broken up, and is still more than a little bit possessive of her.
• The Alcoholic: Chance is rather fond of his booze, frequenting a Quick Nip whenever his Incurable Cough of Death kicks up. Issue #4 shows him going out for drinks with Ted Kord, and Chance remains perfectly lucid even as Kord gets royally plastered.
• An Ice Person: Tora Olafsdotter, aka "Ice", as per usual. Given that this is largely a down-to-earth detective story, she doesn't use her powers frequently (at least in the ways she would against supervillains), but Chance makes repeated mentions in his monologues that he feels literally cold around her, and that her icy aura tends to passively and unconsciously fluctuate depending on her mood — a necessary reminder that as charming as she is, she has incredibly deadly potential and is not to be fully trusted.
• Anti-Hero: Chance declines to call himself a hero (and especially not a superhero); he's just "a guy that dies for money." He's a Private Detective who spends his time doubling for people who are hated enough to be targeted for assassinations, and he has no problem killing those people first. Despite being in the good graces of the Justice League, he remains emotionally distant from them, and due to his profession, he often spends his time in jail cells before breaking out and finding new clientele.
• Arc Number: 12. Chance has 12 days to live and the photo of the JLI members with radiation from the Ringbak system (i.e. the suspects of who poisoned him) are 12 overall.
• Asshole Victim:
  • Chance's poisoning was intended for Lex Luthor. When Chance asks who would want him dead, Luthor simply responds "Everyone." When the list of suspects narrow down to the JLI, it's noted a possible motive might be Lex's secret role in convincing the Overmaster to attack Earth which led to Ice temporarily dying.
  • Guy Gardner is a real piece of work in this story, repeatedly antagonizing Chance for getting close to Ice despite Ice having broken up with him and insisting he leave the both of them alone, so it ends up coming across as karmic justice when Chance and Ice seemingly shatter him to pieces in issue #6, and it's especially vindicated where by Fire's confession in issue #7, she implicates him as being the one who attempted to kill Lex Luthor. This unfortunately gets swerved away in issue #8 when Rocket Red kidnaps Chance and Ice and subjects the former to brutal interrogations to find out what happened to him — as much of an ass Gardner was, he was still family to the Justice League, and there was no way his disappearance was going to be ignored. It ends up being all for naught when it's discovered that Gardner is in fact still alive.
• At Least I Admit It: Chance notes to the reader he finds Booster somewhat more of a hero than most, despite his constant mistakes, because Booster doesn't try to hide his mistakes.
• Batman Gambit: Chance uses the one thing that spooks Guy Gardner to get the upper hand: Hal Jordan. Chance has his friend Luigi disguise himself as Hal to convince Guy to give up the ring so Chance can deck him without the ring protecting Guy.
• Battle in the Center of the Mind: Issue #5 follows a rather trippy example of this between Chance and J'onn J'onzz. On the surface, the two are simply enjoying a casual dinner along with Ice, but J'onn is using his telepathy to attack Chance's mind in an effort to make him back off, causing him to invoke various traumatic memories, including the death of his father. However, we also learn from those memories that Chance had been previously trained by a mentor (a telepathic woman from Titan named Emra) to resist such attacks, and this ends up backfiring on J'onn as Chance manages to read his memories, including that he gave a loan to Booster Gold (who was involved in supplying the poison used against Lex Luthor) at the behest of Fire, who he was having an affair with, making her the new prime suspect.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Dmitri Pushkin, aka "Rocket Red", has been known to be a particularly chummy guy in the JLI, and while he tries to be as affable as possible about it (including offering him an honest glass of vodka), he ends up giving Chance a hell of a beatdown throughout issue #8 as he tries to force him to confess to what happened to Guy Gardner, who had been missing for two days. Chance never spills the beans, and it's only when Dmitri receives a transmission explaining that he's still alive (actually a doctored recording by Chance presented by Ice) that he backs down and apologizes to Chance.
• Bittersweet Ending: Chance succumbs to his poisoning, with his final days spent learning that the person behind it was Ice, the woman he had fallen in love with. Ice spends Chance's last day alive expressing her sincere remorse at how horribly wrong things went and her regret for both leading to his death and falling in love with him, with her begging him to kill her as penance, only for Chance to forgive her and thank her for her companionship in his final hours, allowing him to pass peacefully. Ice is left to grieve and steadily move past Chance's death, with the final pages showing her in a meeting with Lex Luthor mourning the death of their shared partner, with it strongly implied (but not outright showing) that Ice is about to successfully claim vengeance on Luthor this time.
• Blackmail: In the final issue, J'onn approaches Ice with the news of Chance's death and informs her that she's going to be investigated as a suspicious element surrounding the events leading up to it. Ice gets his involvement in the investigation squashed by threatening him with knowledge of his private affair with Fire.
• Brick Joke:
  • Issue #2 has Chance and Ice taking a swim in the waters around a beach, with Ice repeatedly offering him to create an island out of ice for the both of them to relax on, which he declines. In issue #11, the two return to the same beach for what is seemingly Chance's last day alive, and this time, she properly makes it.
  • A Running Gag in issue #3 is Booster Gold believing that not "pre-toasting" his bagels at his new bagel shop is a worthy selling point despite Skeets pointing out that that's not really a thing. In issue #12, with the news that the bagel shop failed because of bad bread making people sick, Booster laments that he should have gone through with the pre-toasting idea.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • Booster Gold gets interrogated in issue #3 as a potential suspect, but Booster is simply Booster — he's introduced in grandiose fashion holding a grand opening for his bagel shop at a modest plaza, forgetting scissors to cut the ceremonial ribbon and instead using a laser that leads to a window getting broken, and when pressed about where he was three days prior, he and Skeets fumble their way through a story of how they'd been travelling through ancient times to get their bagel recipes and ingredients, getting stuff pelted at them in the process. Chance and Ice quickly rule him out in part for being too ridiculous to have tried to assassinate Luthor. The final issue has Booster reveal less than 3 weeks later that the bagel shop folded as something in the bread kept making everyone sick.
  • Oh, G'nort. Issue #10 features him being approached by Chance to help him reach the Green Lantern Corps' archives on Oa (possessing the ability to create an instant portal to it, given to him by the Guardians after he somehow got lost in space a few years ago), and he complies almost immediately and without hesitation, severely underestimating the potential trouble that comes from it. Chance lets G'nort have some of his flask to distract him, and the poor guy simply can't handle it. When he finally sobers up and accompanies Chance back to Earth, their reunion with a still-alive Guy Gardner involves him getting slapped away and knocked down for the count. Perhaps the only victory he achieves during the encounter is after a Guardian approaches the two in the archives wondering what the hell G'nort was doing allowing Chance inside, G'nort drunkenly kicks him and also knocks him out.
• The Cameo: Mister Miracle, Black Canary, and Captain Atom appear in the photo of JLI members that Chance considers suspects in issue #1, but none of them end up appearing in the rest of the comic (Mister Miracle's appearance is more than likely a nod to King's miniseries on the character in 2017).
• Close on Title: The title of each chapter/issue doesn't appear until the final page for issues #1, #2, #11, and #12.
• Comical Coffee Cup: Another Tom King thumbprint that appears in issue #8, where Rocket Red lends Chance a mug that reads "Life's a beach".
• The Confidant: Chance's only consistently reliable ally is Luigi, the owner of an Italian restaurant that Chance lives above. Chance makes a note that Luigi is neither Italian nor really named Luigi, and that he's hired Chance for enough jobs for whatever reason that they trust each other with their secrets.
• Dark and Troubled Past:
  • Chance frequently alludes to his dark past in monologue, and it gets a proper flashback in issue #5: when he was a young boy, he watched his father getting gunned down by a loan shark he was unable to pay off, hearing his final words begging his son to not grow up to be like him, and instead make something of himself that he'd never be able to.
  • This miniseries uses the revised backstory of Ice introduced in Justice League: Generation Lost, where Tora was born to an ordinary rural town in Norway, happening to develop her ice powers by chance. When her grandfather attempted to make use of her abilities for criminal purposes, she ended up retaliating in a way that resulted in her accidentally killing him and her loving father, an event so traumatic that it led to her coming up with her more well-known backstory of being a princess to an isolated tribe of Norsemen, which became largely accepted as truth, even by herself.
• Deadpan Snarker: Almost everyone in the series is quite serious and stern, especially Chance, but not above giving a sly remark towards the goings-ons, especially some of the odder aspects that come with living in a world of superheroes.
  Chance: We got someone behind us, following, trying to get closer.
  Ice: Do you know who?
  Chance: Well, it's a car made of green energy, so I think we can rule out Batman.
• Dirty Cop: Similar to how Ice fills out the Femme Fatale role in this superhero noir story, Guy Gardner fills out this role, being fully willing to use his authority as a Green Lantern of Earth to antagonize Chance for getting too comfy with his ex.
• The Dreaded: Batman becomes this in issue #9, being the first and only character that genuinely intimidates Chance. When pressed under the threat of being hunted down by the Bat for the murder of Guy Gardner, his recourse is to drive as far away as possible, with his keen observation skills only making him more paranoid and panicked as expects him to show up around every corner. The fact that he ends up being a no-show ironically hits home just how frightening Batman is when he isn't around.
• Evolving Credits: The closing shot of Chance's calendar adjusts with each issue to reflect the events each issue portrays: crossed-out dates, blood stains, snowflakes.
• Face Death with Dignity: Zig-zagged as a core theme in the book: Chance is fully aware from day 1 that his days are numbered, and he spends the rest of the series solving his own murder case rather than actually trying to avert it, which he excuses as being because he just doesn't care. This ends up being challenged the further the series goes on and Chance's time runs out, with his burgeoning relationship with Ice and unspoken deadline forcing him to contemplate his own mortality, in particular getting frequent flashbacks to his childhood of watching his father being reduced to a begging, sobbing wreck just before he was gunned down, leaving him questioning what the purpose of his life and what he intends to make of it now that it's almost over. In the end, Chance does confess that he is scared of his impending demise, but only because he doesn't get any more time to be with his loved ones, and that being with Ice is enough of a comfort for him. On the start of day 12, he writes down his message to Ice ("I love you too"), calmly lies down in bed, and dies peacefully.
• Fake Assassination: Lex Luthor hires Chance to stand in for him at a press event where an assassin tries to kill him. Turns out the attempt was at least partially enabled by Luthor himself — riling up a member of an extremist group who already hated him — to get some good PR.
  Luthor: Yes, I might have encouraged one of the more visceral young members of this group to take some actions. I possibly could have presented an opportunity to an already disloyal employee. But it was all to better illustrate to the community at large the intentions behind these peoples' hateful words. Frankly, I don't see the problem in it. At the end of the day, everyone is on the same page, and no one gets hurt.
  Chance: You ever taken a bullet to the chest? First thing it does is hurt.
  Luthor: Better you than I.
• Faking the Dead: Chance and Ice seemingly murder Guy Gardner in issue #6, but several days later, Chance deduces based on the fact that the Justice League stopped chasing him that he must actually be still alive somewhere, and by issue #10, with the help of G'nort and the Green Lantern archives on Oa, he finds he's right — what he and Ice shattered was just a projection of his Green Lantern ring, with the arrangement being that he would then lay low until Chance finally expired in a week. The most shocking revelation from this isn't itself the fact that Guy is alive, but rather that Ice was in on the plan all along.
• Femme Fatale:
  • Ice plays the role of one in the typical noir narrative — the confidant with key ties to the suspects who joins Chance on his murder investigation — but while she is dangerous (more than the usual noir example given she has literal superpowers), she lacks the manipulative demeanor of one. In fact, Chance appears to be manipulating her, tricking her into joining him on his investigation by imitating Dr. Mid-Nite on the phone. This ends up coming full circle when it's revealed at issue #10 that she was the one behind the murder attempt, with the revelation that she's responsible for the inevitable death of the man she fell in love with wounding the both of them before the end.
  • Fire, funnily enough, also slots in as one during her major appearance in issue #7, accompanying Chance on a night on the town as he attempts to get a confession out of her as being Lex Luthor's would-be-assassin. Her flirtatious attitude as well as habitual references to her many admirers thanks to her modelling career collides with her conspicuously keeping her secrets in the investigation close, creating a thick vein of erotically-tinged tension.
• Ferris Wheel Date Moment: For a certain value of a "date" — issue #7 sees Chance spending a night with Beatriz da Costa, aka "Fire", which involves taking a ride in a ferris wheel (paid for by Lex Luthor, voiced by Chance himself). The night is rife with sexual tension, but is undercut by the fact that Chance is there with the assumption that Fire is the prime suspect in the case and is trying to get her to confess. When the ferris wheel stops with the two at the top, Chance deduces that she quietly used her powers to short out the power box to leave them stuck during the interrogation. Chance takes the opportunity to jump out, forcing her to save him, in an attempt to get her to fess up, though the most it leads to is her revealing that while she indeed handled the poison used in the attempt to kill Luthor, it was for the one with the actual murderous intent: Guy Gardner.
• Fight Unscene: Issue #4 sees Chance and Ice hitching a ride with Ted Kord to take care of several incidents, but as this is Chance's story, we don't see a ton of the action. Their first stop at a bank robbery features him waiting behind police lines as Kord and Ice take care of things, which is only denoted by the off-screen sound effects and the aftermath, featuring freed hostages and several knocked-out and frozen goons. They end up stopping by other locations and doing the usual superhero things (subduing a bear monster, fighting off Samuroids, stopping a "super kid" from hacking submarine fleet computers, etc.), but as they all blur together for Chance, they get less and less visual representation.
• Film Noir: Of the neo-noir variety. The series oozes the aesthetics of 1960s crime novels like the Parker series. The art especially evokes crime paperback covers of the era. The fact that it takes place within The DCU and involves interaction with several characters with superpowers does surprisingly little to detract from the plot, which is ultimately a mundane murder mystery.
• Glory Days: Both Ice and Booster Gold hold their time in the JLI in high regard as a time of excitement and fun.
• The Ghost: Batman is frequently mentioned, and Chance seems to see him as a rival figure. Chance refuses to even share data with Batman about the mystery. An entire issue is Chance paranoid that Batman is hunting him down, though Batman himself never physically appears.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Guy plays the part of a brutish and jealous ex-boyfriend angry that Ice is spending so much time with Chance.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: Or with cremated remains. After his death and cremation, Ice has to figure how Chance would've wanted his ashes scattered. Ice smashes the container with the ashes against Guy's head, figuring it to be what Chance would've liked, along with enjoying that herself.
• Guile Hero: Chance's Master of Disguise abilities extend into some major league manipulation abilities that he uses on multiple people through the series including Ice and Guy Gardner.
• Hardboiled Detective: Despite taking place in the DC universe with superheroics abound, Chance is very thoroughly a Film Noir detective in look and spirit: weary yet tough, cynical but sharp-witted, not quite a hero but also not quite a bad guy, very heavy on the booze and internal monologues, and most importantly, a very skilled and observant detective who insists he figure out his own murder case before the inevitable claims him.
• The Hero Dies: For a given value of "hero," anyway. Chance does indeed die when his twelve days are up.
• High-Altitude Interrogation: Throughout issue #8, Chance is subject to this by Rocket Red as part of his intense interrogations to find out what happened to Guy Gardner.
• How We Got Here: The story opens at the end of Chance's 12 days. The series goes back to the beginning and carries through with what happened in those 12 days.
• Husky Russkie: Dmitri Pushkin (Rocket Red) gets played up with this traits in his appearance in issue #8, being rather affable, but also mean in a fight in trying to beat the truth of what happened to Guy Gardner out of Chance. When he gets (false) word back that Guy is actually still alive, he sincerely apologizes to Chance with the classic Russian peace offering: a fine bottle of vodka.
• Implied Death Threat: Ice threatens to have Fire attack Martian Manhunter if he doesn't back off from investigating Chance's poisoning.
• In-Joke: When Ice and Booster catch up on old times, Chance notes they reference so many in-jokes that they might as well be speaking in code.
• In Vino Veritas: Issue #4 is spent with Chance attempting to extract information from Ted Kord on who tried to kill Luthor, and it's not until the very end as the two are out for drinks that he gets a useful clue: as Kord gets royally shitfaced, he lets slip that he declined giving Booster Gold a loan to start up his bagel shop, and shortly afterwards, he was approached by J'onn J'onzz for a loan of the exact same amount to pay off "a friend" he helped out.
• Incurable Cough of Death: Chance regularly feels the effects of the deadly poison throughout the story and coughs on the regular.
• It Was with You All Along: The true culprit behind the assassination attempt on Lex Luthor's life, and consequently the one responsible for Chance's fatal poisoning, was Chance's first suspect and partner throughout the investigation: Ice. During her summation, she confesses that she was aware that she was fully responsible for Chance's inevitable doom and secretly conspired with those involved in the hit to keep her protected until he died, conflicting massively with the fact that she sincerely fell in love with him over the last several days. Chance doesn't hold it against her, with his last message before dying in his sleep being "I love you too."
• Karma Houdini: Ice, who manages to get the case behind Chance's poisoning buried. She might even have killed Lex like she intended at the end of the comic.
• Killed Off for Real: Guy is frozen solid by Ice and Chance, furious by everything, shatters his head with one punch. Ice finishes it off by tipping his body over, shattering it completely. Except not really. Instead, the only person who's absolutely, definitely dead by the end of the book is Christopher Chance himself.
• Latex Perfection: Crops up in this series, but Chance doesn't actually use it. Instead, his friend Luigi disguises himself as Hal Jordan, and does a good enough job to fool his longtime comrade Guy Gardner.
• Lethally Stupid: Booster cuts the ribbon for the opening of his bagel shop with a laser, over Skeets' objections. When said laser breaks a window, Booster notes that using scissors instead would have led to the same result. Skeets begrudgingly agrees.
• Love Hurts: A subtle thread throughout the series is Chance's lack of family or loved ones to take care of him even with his fatal poisoning, which he perceives as being what allows him to do his job — his lack of ties to anyone means he has no real reason to fear death. However, as the days go by and he forms an increasingly intimate relationship with Ice, Chance has to reconcile with his mortality and the assumption that, if he's not going to make it, what is he really accomplishing other than making himself finally afraid of the end? It isn't much better on the other end, as Ice is revealed to be the one who attempted to murder Lex Luthor, in turn being responsible for Chance's poisoning. She was aware of her complicity in his fate, and yet despite manipulating her way around the investigation, she still ended up sincerely bonding with him, becoming furious at herself by falling for the man that she knows will die because of her actions. Even though Chance ultimately forgives her before he dies and she ends up being able to get off scot-free, she's the furthest from happy that anyone could ask to be.
• Master Actor: While Chance doesn't don many disguises throughout the series (he only appears as Luthor in issue #1), he does periodically demonstrate his ability to mimic others to throw them off. He manages to goad Ice into working with him by impersonating Dr. Mid-Nite on a phone call to let him know of his situation, and while going out with Fire in issue #7, he makes a call pretending to be Lex Luthor again and arranges an employee a rendezvous on a ferris wheel.
• Mythology Gag: While summarizing Ice's background, Chance mentions her original superhero backstory of being a princess from an isolated tribe of magic-wielding Norsemen, but identifies it as something she made up with to suppress memories of her actual, more troubled backstory, which is based off the retcon introduced in Justice League: Generation Lost where Ice was born with a metahuman gene in a normal Norwegian town, having accidentally killed her father and grandfather with her ice powers as a child. The fact that Ice died and came back to life also gets brought up as part of her backstory.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Guy might act rash and violent, but his mastery over his ring is deep enough that he can create a fake dead version of himself with it.
• The Paranoiac: Chance ends up devolving into this mindset in issue #9, where — having barely skirted his way out of death over the murder of Guy Gardner by forging a transmission to Rocket Red that he was perfectly fine — he drives with Ice out to a desert in the middle of nowhere out of fears that Batman is on his tail. It gets so bad that when the two stop by at a roadside diner, he beats up an innocent man who he believes is Batman in disguise, and once he ends up unresponsive while behind the wheel, Ice can only stop him by forcing them into a crash. Bats never shows up, which leads Chance to deduce that Guy really is still alive.
• Pillow Pistol: Issue #3 reveals that Chance sleeps with a revolver under his pillow, which he whips out when Guy Gardner makes an unpleasant visit in his room. Being a Green Lantern and all, he shrugs off Chance's shot with no effort. Issue #8 ramps it up by showing him getting a shotgun from underneath his bed.
• Poison and Cure Gambit: Upon realizing that Guy Gardner was still alive, Chance confronts him, catching him off-guard by slamming peanuts into his mouth and — knowing that he's allergic to them — coming prepared with an EpiPen, only giving it to him if he explains everything first.
• Real Men Love Jesus: Dr. Mid-Nite's idea of comforting Chance once he hears Chance has no family to help him through his terminal diagnosis is to invite Chance to church with him. Chance declines.
• Red Herring:
  • Of the twelve members of the Justice League International photo revealed in issue #1 that Chance considers suspects, only six of them are ever actually treated as such (Ice, Fire, Guy Gardner, Martian Manhunter, Blue Beetle II, and Booster Gold). G'nort is only encountered as a brief ally for Chance in issue #10, Rocket Red's appearance in issue #8 consists of him giving Chance the run-around over Guy's disappearance, and Batman — while his presence looms over Chance in issue #9 — never shows up at all in the rest of the series. Mister Miracle, Black Canary, and Captain Atom are also never addressed, nor do they have any reason to be.
  • Guy Gardner is a character with plenty to hate about him, so it seems like it would be a natural conclusion to have Fire reveal in chapter #7 that he was the ultimate one behind the attempt on Lex Luthor's life, especially since he was seemingly killed in the previous issue. Alas, it turns out his greatest involvement in the attempt was to act as a Fall Guy in a cover-up for the real perpetrator: Ice.
• Retraux: Much of the comic is in the style of classic detective noir fiction from the 50's-60's, with the artwork also being evocative of artwork of pulp noir novels from the day. Issue #4 also features a lot of aesthetic homages to The Silver Age of Comic Books as Chance follows Blue Beetle and Ice's superhero shenanigans across America, complete with a retro-style chapter title and sound effects.
• Riddle for the Ages: How the poison was put in Luthor's coffee is left unrevealed, though who put it is answered.
• Secretly Dying: Chance hides the fact that he's dying from Ice. She knows he was poisoned and almost died. She doesn't know that, despite most of the poison being extracted when he vomited, it did enough damage to kill him in 12 days. After growing suspicion over a week of his increasingly worsening coughs, culminating in him being clinically dead at the start of day 9 and requiring CPR and medical revival by the Justice League, Chance finally tells her the truth.
• Shout-Out: Issue #10 features a bar named "Kevin and Keith's", named after writer Keith Giffen and artist Kevin Maguire of the original Justice League International books.
• Slipping a Mickey: At the start of day 10, Chance does this to Ice at to ensure that she'll be out of the way as he investigates how Guy Gardner is still alive, something that he knows she was complicit in.
• The Summation: Chance properly has the mystery solved with the correct culprit by the end of issue #10, and the following issue is said culprit, Ice, explaining it from her POV.
• Symbol Swearing: As per usual with Tom King, almost all profanity throughout the series is censored with grawlixes. The sole uncensored swear is in issue #8, with Chance uttering "говно" (Russian for "shit").
• Taking the Bullet: Played with considering the nature of Chance's job, demonstrated in the first issue: he disguises himself as his employer (in this case, Lex Luthor) and becomes a human target ready to take whatever offense they'll be on the receiving end of, and retaliating when necessary. Chance ends up taking a literal bullet by an extremist attempting to gun Luthor down at a Lexcorp press event before getting up and clocking the man to the ground.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: A recurring point that makes the investigation on who attempted to kill Lex Luthor even more difficult is the fact that most of the suspects — who are superheroes within the Justice League — opt to this principle. Many of them are fully aware that Luthor is a bad man, and virtually all of them have been slighted by him in ways that would lead to an easy potential motive, but most would simply prefer he be behind bars or otherwise punished by justice systems, not kill him.
  Ted Kord: I'd kill him, if it was the right thing to do. I'd do it in half a second. Like slapping a bug on your arm. Just like, bam, I'd do it. But sadly, I think for the better — it's not the right thing. It's really wrong. You can't kill people. That's the rule. So I don't.
• Uncertain Doom: The final few pages of the series shows Lex Luthor sharing a drink with Ice in remembrance of Chance. It's strongly implied that Ice has taken this opportunity to properly poison Lex this time, but we don't get full confirmation of it — all we see is Lex put his empty glass down, with the final panel of the series being a close-up on Ice's smiling face.
• Vomit Discretion Shot: The bullet Chance takes for Luthor in issue #1 causes him to vomit up the poisoned coffee (meaning he'll die in 12 days instead of immediately). He describes it, but we never see it.
• Weaksauce Weakness: When Chance confronts Guy Gardner for the third and final time, Chance manages to get the upper hand by invoking a weakness that he could only find hidden in the Green Lantern archives: a peanut allergy. Chance ultimately gets him to cooperate by slamming peanuts into Gardner's mouth and sending him into anaphylactic shock, offering in an EpiPen only if he talks.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Chance beats up Rocket Red at the end of issue #8 for having wasted one of his last remaining days alive over a pointless interrogation, and the latter is never seen or mentioned again. The following issue sees Chance on the run out of fears that Batman and the Justice League at large are after him, but only for the "murder" of Guy Gardner. They don't end up following him in part because Gardner is, in fact, still alive, but it appears nobody followed up on Chance having legitimately beaten up another superhero in their ranks.
• Who Murdered the Asshole: Played with. Chance was the one who was poisoned, but Lex was the target, and the list of who might want him dead is a long one.
• Whodunnit to Me?: Chance is investigating who tried to murder Lex Luthor, and got him instead.
• Your Days Are Numbered: Chance has 12 days to find out who poisoned him before he dies from said poisoning.

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