Every comic book hero — TV heroes too, like “Doctor Who” — must inevitably, relentlessly, repeatedly face a dedicated threat to his or her very essence and core. It’s no longer sufficient to commit a weird sort of crime in Gotham City; any given baddie has to gnaw at the very roots of Batman’s being, fuck up the private lives of his friends and relatives, make him doubt his raison d’etre, set his postal district on fire and blow up his cave. Poor old Batman seems to lurch from one apocalyptic life-ruin epic to another these days with barely a pause for breath, making me long for the days when he jumped around at night helping people or solving mysteries that didn’t lead to some aeons-spanning plot by the ultimate villain to do the ultimate Bad Thing. And the Caped Crusader’s not the only perma-victim of the Ebola-like “crisis” epidemic. For a while it was genuinely thrilling to watch our heroes facing such directly focused threats to their meaning and relevance, but now the “crisis” approach, where every day is “The Day Evil Won,” is beginning to feel like another grim, played-out sales strategy with diminishing creative returns.