the rolling Final Crisis thread

Should I resist or kowtow to the impulse to buy the FC spinoff minis -- I should've learned my lesson 10 times over (w/ House of M & the pre-Infinite Crisis armada & Civil War), but the fact that they actually have NAMES attached to these things now (even if one of them is, ungh, Johns) makes me wonder.

Then again I think I'm on the hook for all the Secret Invasion minis, so I shd just stfu and swallow the pill.

Nice art, but a bit decompressed, innit?

That's some good-looking stuff. Oddly Marvel-ish, too.

how can you complain about Johns and then buy into a Bendis event

Nice touch with, uh, Officer Jack Kirby. And "Super Muk Muk".

how can you complain about Johns and then buy into a Bendis event

If Bendis had a crippling continuity boner (instead of a crippling Sorkin boner), then you'd have a point.

Bendis has a crippling shitty writing boner

How dare a writer give a shit about continuity, give me recurring characters with no cohesive characterization any day

Interesting that Jones draws Montoya without her mask--that can't possibly be an artist's error

Although Morrison's script specifically mentions that she has no face. Miscommunication, artistic license, or maybe a last-second change that isn't reflected in the script?

and oh yeah - this looks awesome. this is the first time I've been genuinely excited for a huge cross-over thing since like Operation Galactic Storm or something.

I couldn't find the script pages - are they an active control under the pages, maybe? My work has that kind of fancy internettin' disabled.

AJ: if this BENDIS SUCKS / JOHNS SUCKS thing blows up, it should go on another thread, so my last piece about JvB on this thread:

1) Continuity doesn't equal characterization (which you seem to be inferring), and it sure isn't a SUBSTITUTE for characterization (which is possibly my biggest beef wrt GJ)
2) One man's "giving a shit about continuity" is another man's "beat readers over the head with useless trivia"

above each preview page there's a line that reads "to see this page in detailed script-form (courtesy of Grant Morrison!), click here". clicking superimposes a page of script over the art. it's some crazy HTML shenanigans and probably easily blockable by work-folks.

yeah, I don't see that. I'll have to check the script pages out elsewhere.

Well, given that Jones drew all the 52 covers and was working from a full script here, I think miscommunication is unlikely...

I don't even see the art!

At least from the outside, I don't think the Final Crisis mini-series are directly tied to the actual plot of the Morrison series. They seem more like stand alone big DC Universe stories.

I think Final Crisis seems like it will have some ties back to some threads that were in 52 and Infinite Crisis. That whole thing with Libra in the DC Universe Zero seems to be maybe tied into the whole Crime Bible and Intergang thing.

Outside of Final Crisis, I know I am game for the Legion of Three Worlds story. The others maybe not so much.

There's no way to qualify this without sounding like a dick, but from what I've been told by a person who has actually read the first issue, Final Crisis has kind of a slow, moody start, and that it's very Morrison-y, but not exactly what people might expect from something called a "Crisis."

Good lord, I am sooooooo excited for Legion of Three Worlds. It's kinda ridiculous.

not exactly what people might expect from something called a "Crisis."

Sounds good to me after the last two somethings called a "Crisis".

I too am jazzed for Legion of Three Worlds. I have been reading one or two Showcase Legion stories before bed every morning and am full of good Legion thoughts and ideas and I have a FAN-FUCKING-TASTIC idea for a 30th (or 31st) Century mini-series or sub-series that would fucking culminate my entire lifelong love affair with the DCU and Ultra Boy.

Ultra Orgy On Infinite Legions?

man this better not be like Seven Soldiers

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/1/1b/Darkseid_7s.gif/150px-Darkseid_7s.gif

Do you mean "an awesome and deeply rewarding read" or "delayed beyond ridiculousity"?

"Pissing all over everything Morrison didn't personally create"

Um...what? Did you read the same 7S as me, AJ? I mean, it's not like he had Zatanna raping and eating Vigilante or anything.

the whole New Gods thing, hence the image up thar

Well but the 7S version of the New Gods was just meant to be the facet/incarnation that Mister Miracle was interfacing with. Like, Morrison probably isn't going to be using DarkSuge in Final Crisis. Also, see the New Gods in Morrison's JLA.

I'm just saying, Morrison has had some really dumb ideas in the past

http://www.filmpeek.net/userimages/user3203_1176840940.jpg

http://captain.custard.org/league/graphics/characters/zauriel.jpg

Name me a writer that hasn't had bad ideas, and I'll bet that writer's either dead or retired (or you're a rose-colored fanboy).

Seriously. And let's be honest: Morrison has had way more (admittedly mostly underdeveloped) good ideas than 95% of people working in comics.

Also: I'd argue that Morrison's take on the Joker is one of the least dumb things about his Batman run.

that Joker issue was AIDS in comic book form

if I recall it was so bad that DC offered refunds for it

Morrison's love affair with REIMAGINATION is fucking tedious at this point...I am all for new ideas but there's plenty of room to plant new seeds with out clear cutting the forest on the adjoining lot

or something

If re-imagination isn't your thing, AJ, I'd recommend reading stories set outside of an established universe.

P.S. Your argument is kinda leaky because:

http://captain.custard.org/league/graphics/characters/zauriel.jpg = new seed.

he wanted Zauriel to be the new Hawkman, actually

someone thankfully pulled him aside and was like "what no"

Ha - yes, that would've been criminal, epsecially given the lofty heights that Hawkman has realized since then.

the St. Roch Hawkman stuff was good

I dig Hawkman's current incarnation

but no let's make Hakwman an MAGIC ANGEL who can do ANYTHING

much cooler

also I'm sorry this happens to me all the time I forget that everyone else likes the Britishing of American comics

I like the whole color coded corps thing, moving along

I like the whole color coded corps thing, moving along

Yeah, we're definitely on "agree-to-disagree" turf now.

one day I will make a big ranty post about how the British have ruined hero books

today is not that day

also I was almost-but-not-really bummed that the Reach has nothing to do with the Color Corps thing

See, I thought the Fourth World stuff in 7S was <i>incredibly</i> respectful of Kirby--using Shilo Norman was a brilliant move. That's one of the things I love about Morrison's DCU work: he takes <i>everything</i> that's previously been published as canon, both story and characterization. It's like the basic rule of improv: you never ever contradict something somebody else has said, you just figure out an interesting way to build on it.

Other comics people with a notorious love affair with reimagination: Julie Schwartz (fuck a Silver Age), Stan Lee (why'd he have to go and do that to the Human Torch?), Alan Moore (Swamp Thing was so much cooler when he could turn back into Alec Holland), etc.

sorry about the badly formatted itals there...

See, I thought the Fourth World stuff in 7S was incrediblyrespectful of Kirby

Right? I think AJ's argument was a pretty simplistic "they didn't look like the New Gods, therefore Morrison is pee-peeing on Kirby" thing. The only real outright change I can think of in 7S was with Klarion, but it's not like Klarion had an intricately-woven tapestry of backstory to begin with.

yeah no Darkseid as the Kingpin that wasn't a change

but I was trying to move on

HEY GUYS -- CRISIS!

List of one-shots & minis (according to the Wiki page):

Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds (5 issues)
Final Crisis: Rage of the Red Lanterns (One-Shot)
Final Crisis: Requiem (One-Shot)
Final Crisis: Resist (One-Shot)
Final Crisis: Revelations (5 issues)
Final Crisis: Rogue's Revenge (3 issues)
Final Crisis: Submit (One-Shot)
Final Crisis: Superman Beyond (One-Shot)

MUCH cleaner than Countdown (thankfully). Only 2 announced in-stream x-overs so far -- 1 issue of JLA to coincide w/ FC #1, and 2 issues of Batman following the whole thing.

I once saw AJ Styles wrestle at a redneck bar in Georgia in 2000. He was pretty awesome.

And you could easily make an argument about British writers not quite respecting traditional American superheroics, but Morrison is pretty much the last guy you'd ever want to mention in such an argument.

Dude, AJ:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/109/284904726_42e39562c4.jpg?v=0

Hamburglar costume = Kingpin Darkseid, dude in Hamburglar costume = 4-REALZ Darkseid. GEDDIT?

MUCH cleaner than Countdown (thankfully).

Yeah, but wasn't Countdown originally intended to be much less unwieldy until DC figured out they could make lots of money crossovering the shit out of it? I don't think all of those minis and specials and ongoing series tie-ins were intended when it all first started, if I remember correctly.

so it's going to be like that

also I thought Countdown Arena was a great idea, and then I actually read it

so who can know how this will turn out (answer: not as shitty as Secret Invasion)

Zauriel was a bad idea? I missed the memo. He might not have been sterling, but awful? Nah.

And yeah, if you want new ideas instead of reimaginations of franchise characters, superhero comics are largely not for you. Me? I can do without a lot of 'em, but when they're done very well, there's nothing that sings like 'em.

Not hugely excited over the idea of FINAL CRISIS, but I'll give it a couple of issues should I and they be in a shop at the same time (not a given with my schedule.)

xpost

Aw, I ain't tryin' to pick fights, AJ. You just seem to be the Anti-Me, is all. Which maybe isn't a bad thing at all, depending on who you ask.

Are you British, Deric?

Yeah, but wasn't Countdown originally intended to be much less unwieldy until DC figured out they could make lots of money crossovering the shit out of it?

That'd explain the dodgy quality of most of the x-over shit, tho I can't imagine how DD & company thought books centered around Captain Carrot & obscure villians from the Giffen / DeMatteis run on Justice League EUROPE would actually sell. From what I remember from the Diamond Charts, most (if not all) Countdown minis sold about as well as a high-selling Vertigo title, which I'm guessing was a result they weren't hoping for.

xpost

Nope. I'm not even particularly much of an Anglophile. I think it's fair to say I'm a Morrison-phile, though. And, to be honest, I think his revisionist approach is, as noted above, much more reverential than most of rest of the British Wave.

I thought Extremists did a passable job of parodying Ultimate Marvel's awfulness, but otherwise, yeah, wtf

Yeah--I thought both Countdown and its crossovers were terrible.

Also! That DC Universe reprint special this week includes the first and only previous (Len Wein-written) appearance of Libra, as well as the Martian Manhunter story with the Human Flame.

I think Morrison also noted that as far as he was concerned, the first Kirby Klarion story could take place when Klarion, now master of the Kosmik Kubes or whatever those dice were, traveled to the past immediately after Seven Soldiers #1.

Also! Opening four-page scene of Legion of Three Worlds is here: http://www.wizarduniverse.com/050708legionprev.html .

Why are you giving this xenophobic moron the time of day (aside from his 'theory' abt the 'Britishing of American comics' being utter horsehit, "that Joker issue was AIDS in comic book form" = a new low for ILC)

I love all people of all nations

except for Great Britain

also I was almost-but-not-really bummed that the Reach has nothing to do with the Color Corps thing

Yeah, me too. It kinda looked like the GLC was gonna play a bigger role in the Reach's background/future, but I think Jaime dodged a ROY G. BIV bullet by not getting (deeply) wrangled into a GL x-over.

Also, yay difference of opinions!?!

Now that I think of it, yeah, Jaime is much cooler as a semi-unique character as opposed to one among many. My mind = changed.

yay difference of opinions!?!

yeah, but I've not seen anyone I know spend 18 months physically withering and turning blotchy before they die because their internal organs were unable to work with each other from reading a comic book before

AJ Styles is hilarious!

BTW the rainbow of Lantern Corps is definitely awesome. At least he's right about that.

on this Legion Of Three Worlds thingo - what are the three versions in this Perez image? http://images.wizarduniverse.com/WizardUniverse/Previews/legion1.jpg

I can't pick any of them as being consistently pre-Crisis/post-Crisis-pre-reboot...

Middle one = pre-Crisis (they're all older, Blok is present, Night Girl has beehive, Tyroc has white streak in his Afro)

Left one = post-Zero Hour reboot (Ferro is alive, Gates and XS are present)

Right one = Waid/Kitson reboot (Chameleon has dot eyes, Star Boy is black)

I tried reading 7S in prep for Final Crisis, but I got confused midway through Shining Knight. Is there an essay/review/article something out there that could shed some light on 7S for me?

Middle one = pre-Crisis (they're all older

uh, older, right - the long hair on Lightning Lad and Ultra Boy, and never-seen-before costumes on Wildfire, Polar Boy, Invisible Kid II (Jacques with the streak, not Tyroc), Saturn Girl, Cosmic Boy, Lightning Lad (sleeveless), maybe Vi, I think Dawnstar, and Brainiac 5 (ie ALMOST HALF THE TEAM SHOWN) threw me, along with there not being anywhere in continuity this could possibly fit [and it obviously deleting the Five Year Gap from continuity :( ] were throwing me. And I've got no idea who floating head with ponytail is.

I knew that alien down the bottom left was from post-Zero Hour but half the others in that stripe have pre-Crisis costumes (or closer to the pre-Crisis costumes than the middle stripe)!

Man I would like to read a Perez Legion comic but I don't think this is going to be for me.

I like the dot eyes on Cham! Good one, Mr Kitson.

E.F.G.: yikes, you're right, Invisible Kid II, thanks... the sleeveless Lightning Lad (and redesigned costumes) are As Seen In "Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes" in Action Comics.

(The most recent issue of Action Comics is basically Superman being all nostalgic about how nice it is to be hanging out with his childhood pal Garth again and Batman going "wtf, I've met three different versions of the Legion over the years, and I don't even know if your so-called childhood pal is from one of them or something else entirely.")

Mordy, you'll be wanting to look at http://www.barbelith.com/faq/index.php/Seven_Soldiers_FAQ:_A_Beginner%27s_Guide . Or I'm happy to answer questions about 7S, having spent rather a lot of time chipping away at it. Not that I'm not likely to make dumbass mistakes anyway.

AJ Styles AIDS comment was in regard to Grant M's "Clayface is AIDS in human form" Arkham Asylum notes, right? Cos otherwise fuck. I can prob help w 7S qestions too, if by some weird chance Douglas can't

Dude I know did lots and lots of notes on a. n. other message board while Seven Soldiers was coming out, and R!ch J0hnston nicked some of them

They had an add in the current issue of Detective with the Batman R.I.P. cross over list. It looks to have more issues than Final Crisis.

I went to a shop in Cinci Wednesday and they had two early 70s Batman that seem to tie direct into what Morrison is up to, as one has Batman in front of a tombstone that hat BRUCE WAYNE R.I.P. and another issue has the oddball villain with the fingers on his hands.

"he wanted Zauriel to be the new Hawkman, actually"

To be honest, if you are going to go so far from the original character, they might as well make a new character. Zauriel has wings, that is about all that is really that similar to Hawkman.

For example, I always thought Dr. Fate had some potential to be a really cool character. Back in the 80s, I was so exited that JM DeMatteis and Keith Giffen were actually going to do a miniseries with the character, as I figure you got this mystical guy who is an archaeologist someone could really put this into something cool. What did they do? They killed of the main character and came up with some odd new age version with this man and woman who 'become' Dr. Fate. Criminy, if you are going to do something like that...just create a character that fits that. To me, I don't think anyone ever really did much with the character as it was setup before blowing it away and starting over or building up. The thing is that they have done even worse since then (Hector Hall, who you kidding?), but I did like how the helmet was used in 52.

Another character I thought was cool that DC has really screwed up is the Spectre. I can see maybe wanting to change things around, as John Ostrander had done two series and nearly 100 issues of the character building upon the 70s stories by Fleisher and Aparo with Jim Corrigan. Making Hal Jordan the Spectre, what the heck are you smoking? Then they take it another step and ruin a good cop character in Chrispus Allen.

If I was given the keys to the DC Universe, wiping out a bunch of the crap stories around Dr. Fate and the Spectre would be something I would get done.

The thing that is happening is that if you want the Batman RIP or Final Crisis story, all you have to do is read Batman or Final Crisis. The other books deal with themes, but are not the main story. It's not a crossover in the sense of, say, Messiah Complex. DC aren't being dicks about this, but they are being commercially sensible. They could exploit this more than they could, definitely.

The smart thing DC is doing this summer is that they've got Final Crisis going on, but at the same time, they've got their main characters off in major storylines of their own, or at least Batman, Superman, and Green Lantern. I'm honestly quite excited for Final Crisis, Batman RIP, Legion of Three Worlds, and the ongoing Blackest Night thing in GL, definitely much more so than anything happening at Marvel. Things at Marvel happen at such a glacial pace now, DC is much more brisk and exciting these days. I say this as a person with a lifelong bias for Marvel.

Because I am a fool:

http://finalcrisisannotations.blogspot.com/

You're a genius! I need a hand-holder for this thing.

Yeah, really. I'm more a DC guy than a Marvel guy, but all these millions of continuity thingies go over my head.

I'd just like to say that, although the Final Crisis Sketchbook is blatantly just Morrison and Jones get pissed in a pub and scrawl/draw on napkins, it has made me incredibly excited about the whole endeavour.

I'd just like to agree.

Being that I just gave it a read, I'd say Grant Morrison is probably going to reference some stuff in the JLA 'Rock of Ages' storyline. There are a whole lot of things in that story with Darkseid and the New Gods that seem to parallel what might be coming in Final Crisis.

Oddly enough in the next JLA trade 'Strength in Numbers' the concluding issue of one storyline is titled 'Seven Soldiers of Probability', which includes the Justice League trying to fix history as something has changed and Bruce Wayne never becomes Batman.

I've not finished Grant Morrison's run on JLA, so I don't know if the whole thing where "Earth needs to prepare for the big one coming up" was ever resolved. The New Gods are a big part of these two stories with Highfather sending Orion and Barda to join the league because of this preparation.

I think I need to break down and check out those Seven Soldiers series and give them a read.

Yeah, the big one turned up. It was a supermassive planet-destroying anti-sun sort of thing.

Interesting comparison...

http://www.ellroy.com/crimewave.jpg http://i.newsarama.com/dcnew/FinalCrisis/t_FCCv1bnewsarama.jpg

I want to believe.

But my lack of faith is indeed disturbing.

Kidd's done a bunch of Ellroy, but is that one him?

It is--see the bottom left.

http://sitb-images.amazon.com/Qffs+v35leqb0GDX/Qx6GuKWqk329BduykRzMvKvsCTokFDUbobhSM8TpAJKDs6h

Recycling in action!

It's a great design tho, and it works better tweaked a little on FC

Not wanting to spoil anything much but:

- It read a lot better the second time, for me.

- I get the strong impression (and wasn't there an interview with someone basically confirming this?) that Grant M had a list of things he needed to be in place before the series started, and that the versions of those things ACTUALLY in place are either annoyingly or flagrantly different, so it looks like Final Crisis is just ignoring stuff that happened very recently. By the time the series ends people will have stopped caring about this I expect, but it explains some of the slightly dampened reaction and reviews.

- The early reviews seem also to be taking a "not much happens" line, which seems baffling to me until you realise they're (overtly or not) measuring it against Secret Invasion. Which I also like! But there's more than one way to do a crossover, and it's a shame if first issues now have to be slam-bang rather than slow build. Morrison's been pretty open about the structure of Final Crisis being basically a spike - things get worse and worse and worse and then evil wins, and presumably the remainder is evil un-winning again (or not, who knows). So no surprise that the stuff that happens - and LOTS happens - is mostly piece-moving and setting bad stuff in motion.

- That said I think GM's using some of his Seven Soldiers style pacing again - lots of epic shit is going down, but largely off-panel or briefly on while we look at the things which are going to be genuinely important. I think a lot of readers won't be expecting or wanting that from a 'summer event'.

- Lots and lots of great bits though - my favourite being the Alpha Lanterns double-page spread - and in a single sequence he's made the Monitors intriguing, even if it introduces a thing we'd surely have seen mentioned before. He's got the tone right, and the moments right, it's just a case of seeing how well things tie together.

- That said I think GM's using some of his Seven Soldiers style pacing again - lots of epic shit is going down, but largely off-panel or briefly on while we look at the things which are going to be genuinely important. I think a lot of readers won't be expecting or wanting that from a 'summer event'.

Yeah, I find this weird and a little offputting in a lot of GM's work. It keeps me at arm's distance away from being really emotionally engaged with the story.

can someone tell me who's waking up on the last page? i can't tell

also, i very much do not want the martian manhunter to be dead. this makes me feel like i have failed to become an adult in some meaningful way.

I actually liked that in Seven Soldiers, as I got much more emotional engagement by the camera staying with our heroes rather than zooming out to OMG invasion of the space-elves.

I'm pretty certain it's Nix Uotan waking up.

Never mind the Monitors, this is the first even vaguely interesting Guardians panel I've seen!

Jones kind of blew the first shot of the Black Rider, I think - it's not as clear as it should immediately be that he's just standing there in mid air.

I think Jones got the shot of the Black Racer </pedant> just right. I think it was meant to be subtle, and it was.

I read this immediately before the L O S T season finale, so I'll admit that I may have been a little too amped to make a rational judgment, but I kind of loved this a lot. Points:

-I think Morrison managed, in about half a page, to clarify and refine his use of the New Gods in the Mister Miracle mini into a pretty solid concept (although similar to the Outer Church fellows in The Invisibles). I knew what he was going for before, but it was a little muddled.

-Guardians as cosmic detectives is pretty rad.

-I was kinda dubious about the demise of Martian Manhunter until I remembered what he looks like nowadays.

-All the Monitor stuff and the 52nd Earth...that was all referring to Countdown, wasn't it? I don't have to actually read that shit, do I?

Two things not yet mentioned I liked:

- Supervillain protest march!

- "Ha! The first innnocent victims of the blindingly obvious Doctor Light/Mirror Master team!"

Pedantry acknowledged.

-All the Monitor stuff and the 52nd Earth...that was all referring to Countdown, wasn't it? I don't have to actually read that shit, do I?

Oh fuck, no. It had a new Monarch! Do you want to read about a new Monarch? No, you do not. Basically what you need to know is there on the page - 52 Earths, one of them goes boom, the emoest Monitor takes the fall for it. The only shorthand being used is that the different earths are linchpins of different multiverses.

Actually one thing I'm not clear on - is that Solomon(?) the eeeevil Monitor in the last panel of Monitorworld? I thought he'd been blatted (though if Morrison wants to say "no, it was this", then that's fine with me)

I have been wavering on the spandex lately, and this pulled through just when I really needed it. Many things delighted me, and y'know what, fuck a Martian Manhunter. His new costume is entirely shitty, and nobody's done anything fun with him in ages and maybe now that he's every fanboys favourite alltime character (as the newly deceased comic folks tend to become) they'll do a Sandman Presents style series of noir Martian Manhunter stories set in the 50s. All I really wanna know is how come there's no tribute display to him in the Batcave???

I READ ALL OF COUNTDOWN IN ONE DAY.

I understand that this makes me a slave of the Anti-Fun Equation. But I can confirm that Solomon the eeeeevil monitor survived, and in fact is behind the "sabotage" Nix U is protesting about - by sending the plague-infected Karate Kid to Earth-51 rather than "home" to New Earth as promised. In fact - though god knows I can't remember the "intricacies" of CD's plot - he or his stooge Bob The Monitor may have been responsible for Earth-51 getting destroyed the first time too, by Monarch's quantum energy breach. Solomon in Countdown was a rival to Darkseid and enemy of him, so I have no idea who he's talking to when he's talking into his hand at the end of that page.

The Monitors in Countdown were portrayed slightly differently to those in Final Crisis - no mention of the Orrery, enormous interest in what's going on in each Universe. But the backstory SEEMS to be that Solomon wants Nix Uotan off the table for some unrevealed reason. To do this he engineers the destruction - or severe compromise, anyway - of his universe, and then presumably agitates for his punishment.

Speaking as someone with little contact with the DCU, I have to ask: have the Monitors always been so...Arkwright-y?

There is no "always" w/r/t the Monitors. The Monitor appeared in the original Crisis 20 years ago and, as far as I know, never again until just after Final Crisis. The whole plurality of Monitors thing is pretty much all from Countdown, innit?

Annotated now: http://finalcrisisannotations.blogspot.com/2008/05/final-crisis-1.html

So I have now read FC #1. I thought it was the kind of continuity-heavy crossover rubbish that gives superhero comics a bad name, and I can't see myself bothering with #2.

I think you're 100% wrong, Vicar. There's a ton of continuity stuff in there, but it's all easter eggs. The story doesn't depend on knowledge of much more than what's spelled out or at least hinted at within the bounds of the story itself. I think Morrison did an excellent job of giving any potential newbies exactly as much information about the characters and situations as they'd need to make sense of what's going on. Re-read it and tell me that I'm wrong.

Douglas, I enjoyed the annotations, but did you actually like the comic?

There's a ton of continuity stuff in there, but it's all easter eggs.

I remember when I started reading superhero comics, it was actually kind of fun being confused by all the characters, and having to try and find out about them.

Also, Final Crisis wasn't that complex! It's a comic. It's just, you know, superhero biff-baff.

I've read issue one a couple of times, I don't really see anything that one would need to be read beforehand to get the issue. It seems to be set up more as a detective story than an action film. I've got a feeling that it is going to be very self contained for this kind of comic story.

JG Jones artwork is really lush. The panels with the Guardians and Monitors were really great, that guy can really do some cool cosmic comic looking stuff.

I liked it a lot. Actual review to follow, prob., on Savage Critix...

I'll re-read it sometime when I'm sober.

The second time reading through FC #1, everything was clear and awesome and made sense, except for dispatching J'onn J'onzz in such a non-dramatic way, making this insanely powerful guy seem like a chump.

Alright, Douglas. Here's my list. Admittedly, some of my questions are probably because there are unrevealed things in the comic, but I can't distinguish [between the intended secrets and unintended ones] because there are so many unrecognizable things to me. Also, it seems to me that a lot of Morrison's "poetic liberties" are confusing me. So... here's my reading of the comic. (If I didn't mention it, I probably understood it. Or understood it *enough* to not be totally lost.)

Ok. It opens with a caveman. Suddenly he's interrupted from his regularly scheduled events (foraging, hunting, assumedly) by a glowing blue guy in a floating chair. He says that he is Metron. It's not in a word bubble, but a funny-looking bubble. So I assume he's communicating telepathically. Probably in the caveman's language. He then gives the man fire. Next, we see a bunch of cavemen beating the shit out of each other, some guy is dragging some gal away by her hair - standard caveman stuff. Then the guy from before comes and he's wielding fire. He's totally badass, and lights the whole place up. It's unclear why - maybe he's pissed with everyone. Maybe he loathes himself - he's a self-hating caveman. Maybe it's his way of demonstrating power. (Question one: Why is he burning everything?)

Now we've got the slightly overweight guy. Today. He's smoking a cigarette and it's a noirish monologue. He finds a super muk muk in the garbage. I have no idea what a super muk muk is. (Question two: What is a super muk muk?) The muk muk is not dead tho - he jumps up and shouts some vague warning ("He is in all you") and then falls down again.

Stewart lantern is called to the site where the detective found the muk muk. The Detective says that seeing this is like sacrilege. (Question 3+4: What is it that he's seeing that is disturbing him? Why is it sacrilege?) It looked like it was day when we last saw the detective, but now it's night and the sky is full of red lightning. (Question 5+6: Has the detective been standing around doing nothing while it became dark? And what the hell is that weird lightning?)

What does "six" mean? Is it a noir term for a corpse? (I've seen a lot of noir flicks, but I don't recognize it.) Maybe this is the sixth body he's found? Why does the detective thank the Question for helping him, when it seems like Question only asked him a question? What does Dark Side Club signify? (This is questions 7 through 9.)

What does "deep and dreamless" mean? Does it mean Hal Jordan was sleeping? Or is there some greater significance? It sounds like poetry that is supposed to sound good, but doesn't actually mean anything.

I know who Sparx is (from Superboy and the Ravers) but I have no idea what's going on with her here. What are they looking for? Who is this empress? If this was a trap, does that mean the empress's vision was manufactured by some villain?

"waiting 50,000 years for vandal savage to crush..." I get that this probably relates to the opening sequence with the cavemen, but I don't understand it. Who is Vandal Savage? Is this just another piece of poetics?

What does M'YRI'AH mean?

What's the deal with these missing kids? Who is Granny? Am I supposed to recognize this kingpin'esque figure in the club? (I know what the anti-life equation is, so I can guess that maybe this guy is a physical personification of Darkseid, or something. But what does the murder of the muk muk from earlier have to do with these kids he's brainwashed?)

I don't know anything about Earth 51, or who these monitor guys are. What's their job? To save realities? What is the orrery? Obviously something has changed for these guys, but since I don't know who they used to be, I don't really understand what's going on with them now that's special.

Back to the caveman, and suddenly there a statue of liberty behind him (wtf?) and some guy is asking for the weapon Metron gave him. (The fire?)

Some guy wakes up. I have no idea who he is.

A few answers:

Vandal Savage is an immortal supervillain who's kinda badass, especially during the early part of the Wally West Flash series (i think the first 15 issues or so?) where he makes a super-speed steroid called Velocity 9 and fucks shit up. He's seen in the cavemen scene in FC 1.

M'yri'ah was the Martian Manhunter's wife on Mars.

Also, read Seven Soldiers (esp. the Mr Miracle stuff) for an intro to the New Gods avatars theme Moz is working with here.

Bah. I read Shining Knight, Guardian and Zatanna, but couldn't force myself to read the other four. I guess I should probably do that?

You missed Frankenstein!

anyway, they read quite well in the trades, yr local library might have 'em.
and the Muk Muk was Orion, Darkseid's son who was raised on New Genesis by Highfather in a trade for Mr. Miracle--who was raised on Apokalips by Granny Goodness, who raised kids in the service of Darkseid at her orphanage and that answers another of yr questions.

The Detective is "Terrible" Turpin, a cop from Kirby's 70s New Gods comics, who here takes on many qualities of Kirby himself.

I think most of these questions (and more) are answered on Douglas's Final Crisis blog, but I still think it's good to have some discussion here, or else we might else all just meet up over there and try to sort it out.

It is, unless I'm very mistaken, absolutely irrelevant that it may or may not be Vandal Savage in the opening sequence. All you need to know is that he's been around along time, and periodically tries to take over.

The Caveman is burning stuff because he's just been given the knowledge of fire, and is demonstrating it in the most visible way possible, driving away those that have good reason to distrust him (it's not clear whether it's an invasion or just a Friday night, but he's putting a stop to it)

Muk muk is just slang for someone high up, short for muck-a-muck (though I suppose if you didn't know that piece of slang you'd have to take it from context).

It feels like sacrelige because he's looking at a dead god in a dumpster.

Fair point, the red skies are a throwback to external knowledge, in that it also happened in Crisis on Infinite Earths (I don't actually know if there was an explanation for it except that it's a great shorthand for a) something that everyone in the world can see and b) after the continuity was straightened out, all that almost anyone remembered was that the skies turned red, which was creepy).

Turpin's "six" are the six kids that he was looking for when he found Orion. I think you've become confused about whether he's investigating the deicide - he's not.

The Question gave Turpin a lead (it should in fairness be clearer that the dialogue on panel two is from the Question rather than Turpin). We (and Turpin) don't necessarily know what the Dark Side Club is yet.

Deep and dreamless is sleeping, yes.

Empress is the name of the lady in red (did she start in Young Justice?), the object they are searching for is Metron's chair, which is occupied by Libra in the next scene. It's a relic of considerable power, so it makes sense that more than one group would be seeking it.

The monitors monitor realities, one of them went south, it's monitor mis taking the rap for it. The guy who wakes up on the last page is him as a human.

Questions that are (as far as I can tell) supposed to be unclear at this stage*:
What is Orion talking about?
Why is Metron's Chair empty?
Who is Libra?
Is Martian Manhunter dead?
Was there something special about the six kids, or was Darkseid just looking for the best and brightest?

*I don't mean that they're unanswerable based on the entire knowledge of the DC Universe, but they're not in this issue, and we can have a reasonable expectation that they'll be cleared up in a further issue of Final Crisis.

So when monitors "die" they wake up as human beings? How does that work? And why would a monitor be punished for his Earth going south? If you're a monitor, you're just supposed to monitor it - right? What's your liability?

Also, when Turpin is attacked by the kids, there are eight of them. Does that mean he only knew about six? It seems confusing on Morrison's part to have Turpin searching for six and then throwing in two more without explanation.

So when monitors "die" they wake up as human beings? How does that work? And why would a monitor be punished for his Earth going south?

As noted above, the Monitors have only existed in a plural sense for maybe most of a year, and have only been used in one other series, to my knowledge. There is no pre-existing cosmogony here.

Have you read much Grant Morrison stuff before?

Martian Manhunter is definitely dead.

I've read All Star Superman, Animal Man, Doom Patrol, Batman, we3, Seaguy, New X-Men, JLA v.3, the parts of Seven Soldiers I indicated above, Kill Your Boyfriend, and a bunch of Invisibles.

(I should clarify with the Batman - I'm reading his current series and I've read Arkham Asylum.)

And Animal Man + New X-Men were both of my top 10 runs of all time list.

MARTIAN MANHUNTER IS NOT DEAD

SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP

Honestly, at this point it's more of a mercy killing. Aside from Rucka in Checkmate I can't think of a single writer who's done anything decent with him in ages. This just puts a stop to the terrible stories he's been in lately and gives whoever inevitably revives him a few years down the line a clean slate to work with.

The monitors appear to have become more involved in their worlds (kind of like Marvel's watchers). As noted the penalty for Nix Oatan's failure is exile, being stripped of power and duties, to live out the rest of his life as a human. As also noted, there are divisions within the monitors about whether this is fair, and one in particular appears to have been manipulating the situation to remove him.

I mean, if you want to know how all this happened, you have to read Countdown, but the fact that it happened seems to me to be right there on the page.

I thought the extra kids were there to indicate that Darkside has been using many of them, not just the ones Turpin's looking for, but I'm possibly wrong.

The one thing that I think is both unclear and unexplainedly important: Earth 51 wasn't destroyed at the end of Countdown, but all the humans except a young boy died. This presumably makes it the setting for Jack Kirby's series Kamandi, The Last Boy On Earth. And so what we're seeing on the last two pages is the dude from the start (apparently his name's Anthro) copying the markings from Metron's costume, and catapulting himself through space and time to Kamandi's world, which explains his agitated reception. I might be completely off-base here, of course.

See, one thing I've noticed in rereading Final Crisis is that a lot of things are subtle Morrison tricks that in another comic (esp a non-canon linked one) one would just dismiss as Morrison being poetic, or Morrison doing something off-beat and weird. But here, because it's unclear what are references and what are Morrison-thingies, it's harder to read.

I promised to explain this stuff using ONLY material that actually appeared in Final Crisis #1--no additional DC continuity at all--so:

Ok. It opens with a caveman. Suddenly he's interrupted from his regularly scheduled events (foraging, hunting, assumedly) by a glowing blue guy in a floating chair. He says that he is Metron. It's not in a word bubble, but a funny-looking bubble. So I assume he's communicating telepathically. Probably in the caveman's language.

All right so far, except as we see in the next sequence the caveman doesn't have language.

He then gives the man fire. Next, we see a bunch of cavemen beating the shit out of each other, some guy is dragging some gal away by her hair - standard caveman stuff. Then the guy from before comes and he's wielding fire. He's totally badass, and lights the whole place up. It's unclear why - maybe he's pissed with everyone. Maybe he loathes himself - he's a self-hating caveman. Maybe it's his way of demonstrating power. (Question one: Why is he burning everything?)

What's going on is that the fire-acquirer's tribe is being attacked by another tribe; the guy who got the fire uses it to drive the attackers away. Note the central attacker, with black hair; we'll see him later.

Now we've got the slightly overweight guy. Today. He's smoking a cigarette and it's a noirish monologue. He finds a super muk muk in the garbage. I have no idea what a super muk muk is. (Question two: What is a super muk muk?) The muk muk is not dead tho - he jumps up and shouts some vague warning ("He is in all you") and then falls down again.

Slightly overweight guy is identified later in the issue as Turpin. "Muk muk" is old-fashioned slang for "powerful person": Turpin is an old-school kind of guy, we deduce from this. We can also tell from his monologue that he's a cop and a detective. Also note the sinister figure who looks like he's on skis hovering above the dying guy, and note that as he's dying the sky has turned red very quickly--over the course of a minute or so.

Stewart lantern is called to the site where the detective found the muk muk. The Detective says that seeing this is like sacrilege. (Question 3+4: What is it that he's seeing that is disturbing him? Why is it sacrilege?) It looked like it was day when we last saw the detective, but now it's night and the sky is full of red lightning. (Question 5+6: Has the detective been standing around doing nothing while it became dark? And what the hell is that weird lightning?)

John Stewart (he's called "John" at the beginning of the sequence, and later by Hal), who Turpin accurately identifies as a "space cop," is called in on a "1011"; we learn from later dialogue that that means "deicide." The dead super-guy is a god; the later scene with the Lanterns identifies him as "Orion, the soldier god of New Genesis." That's why Turpin feels like his presence is sacrilege--he's just a guy, and a god has died in front of him. The weird lightning is weird, and the skies more or less instantly turned dark: "the weather's gone nuts," all over, as dialogue points out at the beginning of that scene. Note the guy with the ski-like stuff is still there.

What does "six" mean? Is it a noir term for a corpse? (I've seen a lot of noir flicks, but I don't recognize it.) Maybe this is the sixth body he's found? Why does the detective thank the Question for helping him, when it seems like Question only asked him a question? What does Dark Side Club signify? (This is questions 7 through 9.)

Turpin earlier said "here's me, way past retirement and three weeks out on the trail of six missing kids." That's the six the Question is talking about: missing kids. The help the Question provided was giving Turpin a flyer for the Dark Side Club; her investigations, she implies, have suggested that when kids with "superhuman metagene activity" disappear, the Dark Side Club is somehow involved. As for what it signifis, we'll see when Turpin goes there later this issue.

What does "deep and dreamless" mean? Does it mean Hal Jordan was sleeping? Or is there some greater significance? It sounds like poetry that is supposed to sound good, but doesn't actually mean anything.

The dialogue indicates that John and Hal are close enough to have running jokes: John asks Hal if the call tore him away from some lady friend or other, and Hal replies that he'd just been fast asleep. ("Blonde or redhead?" "Deep and dreamless.")

I know who Sparx is (from Superboy and the Ravers) but I have no idea what's going on with her here. What are they looking for? Who is this empress? If this was a trap, does that mean the empress's vision was manufactured by some villain?

Doesn't even matter who Sparx is. The point of this scene is that there's a brand-new and very green superhero team that's trying to establish itself, one of them has had a vision of the chair Metron was in ealier as an artifact from another world, and in the process of trying to retrieve it they get their asses kicked by a pair of villains who exemplify the banality of evil.

"waiting 50,000 years for vandal savage to crush..." I get that this probably relates to the opening sequence with the cavemen, but I don't understand it. Who is Vandal Savage? Is this just another piece of poetics?

Vandal Savage is the guy Libra is replying to, who spoke in the previous panel; he is the guy with black hair from the cavemen-battle scene, which means we now know that the opening scene happened 50,000 years ago.

What does M'YRI'AH mean?

I think it's safe to infer from context that it's somebody who was very important to J'onn.

What's the deal with these missing kids? Who is Granny? Am I supposed to recognize this kingpin'esque figure in the club? (I know what the anti-life equation is, so I can guess that maybe this guy is a physical personification of Darkseid, or something. But what does the murder of the muk muk from earlier have to do with these kids he's brainwashed?)

I assume we'll meet Granny later; for now, it's just foreboding. The missing kids, we know from Turpin's conversation with the Question, are probably superhuman; Boss "Dark Side" is creepy as all hell, is wearing out his body, hints that he fell from on high ("I was hurt in a fall, you might say"), etc. You don't need to recognize him, you just need to know that he's very bad news and is turning the new generation of potential heroes into "stunted, malformed slaves." The connection with Orion's murder is that Turpin came across the dying Orion while investigating the six missing kids and was pointed here by the Question.

I don't know anything about Earth 51, or who these monitor guys are. What's their job? To save realities? What is the orrery? Obviously something has changed for these guys, but since I don't know who they used to be, I don't really understand what's going on with them now that's special.

What you have to know is mostly explained in dialogue. "New Earth, the foundation stone of all existence" is the world on which the main body of the story takes place (see the shift from Alpha Lanterns "securing the crime scene" to the Monitors pointing at New Earth); the Orrery is the great big thing holding all the Earths. We can gather from this that the "multiversal monitors, ancient and wise" do something huge and metaphysical involving multiple universes, represented by the Orrery, that "universe 51" was lost, and that Nix Uotan, who is being exiled, was the one responsible for it. (Note his hairstyle.) The subsequent conversation reveals that the Monitors are becoming more human--feeling emotions, gaining individual stories--and that that's a new thing for them.

Back to the caveman, and suddenly there a statue of liberty behind him (wtf?) and some guy is asking for the weapon Metron gave him. (The fire?)

The caveman has developed some pretty major technology by his period's standards--image-making, use of fire to cook, bow and arrow--and he's drawing the pattern he saw on Metron's costume in the dirt. (He still doesn't have spoken language, though.) The red sky isn't just a sunset thing, it's the same kind of everything's-awry red sky we saw earlier. The scene behind him is a 21st-century-era calamity--the Statue of Liberty sinking into the ocean, bombed-out buildings and road signs. Something awful has happened, and there's a temporal anomaly--when the caveman turns around, the blond guy has disappeared again, and the pattern from Metron's mask has appeared on his face. What's the weapon? That's a mystery right now.

Some guy wakes up. I have no idea who he is.

Check his hairstyle. He's Nix Uotan, the Monitor who was exiled a few pages ago: his "exile" is from the Monitors' metaphysical domain to the quotidian world and mortal existence.

Does that help some?

Yes, totally. Let me reread it quickly now and see if I have any still unresolved questions.

"They're asking for it in these outfits"

Is he making a perverse sexual comment with this?

Also, what's the deal with Bludhaven? (Is it like South Bronx?)

And why are there 8 children if Turpin was looking for 6?

(Btw, I understand it much better now. This is my 4th or 5th reading, but it's going very smoothly. I'm hoping I won't need remedial explication for each upcoming issue tho.)

i'm enjoying that douglas's explanation's here are serving a rhetorically opposite purpose to the ones in his annotation-blog. good work!

"asking for it" etc.: there was a very, very stupid plot that involved dr. light being a rapist. i'm hoping morrison has the stones to develop this one-liner into a critique of how fucking retarded that really was. (said story led, convolutedly, into 'infinite crisis', which if you read you will really find final crisis incredibly easy to follow and reader-friendly by comparison)

bludhaven is the even worse neighbouring variation of gotham city they created to give one of the ex robins to go and be a vigilante in when he decided he was called 'nightwing'. i believe it was destroyed in infinite crisis when (stupid, stupid) some villain turned someone with a name like 'pyro, the human flame' into a weapon of mass destruction and dropped him on it.

no idea on six/eight kids other than other's, above; 'deep and dreamless' is from 'o little town' ...

...1

"In Infinite Crisis #4, the Secret Society of Super Villains drops Chemo, a gigantic, semi-intelligent pile of chemicals, on the city, causing a devastating explosion and toxic chemical fallout. The city is destroyed. Nightwing, Batgirl and Robin survive, since all were out of the city at the time of the attack, but the fates of other Blüdhaven-based heroes such as Tarantula are unknown. "

Again, addressing it from within the story:

"They're asking for it": yes, he's a perv. (Note that he's trying to hit up Mirror Master for some Viagra later in the scene.) The point of the scene is that both Dr. Light and Mirror Master are really pathetic guys.

Blüdhaven, we can gather from the context of what Rev. Goode is saying, is kind of South Bronx, kind of post-Katrina New Orleans.

There are more than 6 children because, as the Question noted, there are a bunch of metahuman kids going missing lately; Turpin the cop only knew about the ones in his jurisdiction. (We saw in the first scene that he was in Metropolis, but from the Statue of Liberty in the background as he's outside the Dark Side Club, he's gone to NYC to find out more.)

"asking for it" etc.: there was a very, very stupid plot that involved dr. light being a rapist. i'm hoping morrison has the stones to develop this one-liner into a critique of how fucking retarded that really was. (said story led, convolutedly, into 'infinite crisis', which if you read you will really find final crisis incredibly easy to follow and reader-friendly by comparison)

I don't think he's mocking that story at all, but rather taking an established thing and running with it -- his object is, as Douglas says, to show that these villains are pathetic, terrible people. They are evil. Of course some of them are rapists and misogynists. I mean, Identity Crisis may suck, but it's actually not such a bad thing that it opened up the door to acknowledging that supervillains might be up to other sorts of evil behavior.

Was Chemo that giant chemical guy who showed up in an issue of PAD's Supergirl? The one who was dallying with consciousness?

I realised the other day that the whole "it starts with the first boy on Earth and ends with the last boy on earth" claim (made in interview by GM) doesn't specify which Earth - so if that is Kamandi of earth-51 then the story starts with the first boy on the first Earth and ends with the last boy on the last Earth: even more multiverse-spanning than you might have thought :)

I think that if they want to do a story about how "realistically" supervillains might be up to that, then that why we have Vertigo, so go and do a proper psychological study of it, rather than just going "and then Zatanna magicked it away!"

If you had not noticed, Vertigo hasn't done a "mature" version of a DC property in many, many, many moons. It's simply not what Vertigo does anymore.

Then do it else<s>worlds</s>where, all I'm saying is that it's a turd in the swimming pool of mainstream "this actually happened to Superman" continuity.

Well, I don't think the thing both Marvel and DC have been doing in recent years is trying to keep up with an aging audience that wants to see the stakes raised all the time, and so that means the villains must become increasingly disturbed, which includes the notion that they might be fucked up in ways that don't include putting on tights and trying to Take Over The World or Rob A Bank, or what have you. It's not going to be a "proper psychological study" because that is not what the audience wants. The audience wants "oh man, that guy is FUCKED UP."

yes, but pandering to an unhealthy clientele is how the comics industry dived into the shitter in the first place

I'm pretty sure that Mr. Perpetua doesn't agree with said behavior/aims on the part of the Big Two Superhero publishers; just pointing out the obvious in that's what they're by and large doing.

Though I'd also counter argue that ALL-STAR SUPERMAN is every bit a mature book and psychological study that isn't fucking things up just to show how fucked-up they are, if you catch my drift. But it's also the exception that points out the rule.

Haven't read FINAL CRISIS yet. My interest wanes, but I'll probably succumb.

i have a feeling that reading this thread >>> reading final crisis

I'm ambivalent about it! I feel like the writers should have the freedom to make the villains as evil as they want to make them, because I think the stories are better when the villains are more contemptible. It depends on the writer you know? Some of them suck, some of them are terrific.

I think I used to be more like "these are essentially characters for children," but I don't really believe that anymore. Kids don't really care about them unless they're on the screen, and if they do read the comics, they like the darker stuff. When I was 6 years old, I got hooked on X-Men with the Mutant Massacre, you know?

X-POST, I GUESS:

When I was 6 years old, I got hooked on X-Men with the Mutant Massacre, you know?

Oy - KRAVEN'S LAST HUNT (what with its cannibalism, suicide, and intense claustrophobia on virtually every panel, from what I can recall) pretty much made me when I was...eleven (?). Ah, how I miss the the floor at Waldenbooks...

When I was 6 years old, I got hooked on X-Men with the Mutant Massacre, you know?

-- Mr. Perpetua, Monday, 9 June 2008 20:05 (Monday, 9 June 2008 20:05) Bookmark Link

You do realise that you've just succeeded in making me feel very old.

Oy - KRAVEN'S LAST HUNT (what with its cannibalism, suicide, and intense claustrophobia on virtually every panel, from what I can recall) pretty much made me when I was...eleven (?). -- R Baez, Monday, 9 June 2008 20:13 (Monday, 9 June 2008 20:13) Bookmark Link

And you too? Stop it.

I was 46 when "The Yellow Kid" hit newspapers.

I'm the one who took Jack Kirby's lunch money.

I knew Bendis before he was bald.

I was there when Rodolphe Töpffer sketched out "M. Vieux Bois."
I told him, "Don't do it that way. You'll never make a sou."
I was there.

I told Joe Schuster his BO was more powerful than a locomotive.

I gave Mark of Zorro 3 out of 4 stars in the Gotham Gazette and concluded, "Bring the kids! Or just the one."

I got into X-Men when they were just launching X-Men 1 with Jim Lee. Great fucking timing.

Ha, I'm pretty sure those Kraven's Last Hunt issues were my first Spider-Man comics. They came bundled in these three-or-four packs that you could buy for cheap at toy stores. I was what, seven?

I remember those! For some reason all those packets seemed to contain Sal Buscema issues of SPECTACULAR SPIDER MAN - KBToys, if I'm correct, seemed the prime purveyor. Excepting the Man-Wolf story I got in "read along with Stan" form and a few other bits, I suspect KRAVEN'S LAST HUNT was my first full blast comics experience - god, those issues fucked me up. For years afterwards, I'd pose as Kraven on the trade cover whenever I wanted to seem creepy/menacing.

I'm guessing that you fulfilled your goal quite admirably, if not quite in the way you intended...

(P.S. I totally remember those packs! And the Sal Buscema Spidey action! I got started on the Vermin storyline, which was sort of the sequel to Kraven's Last Hunt, and which added incest into the Spidey Stew O' Fun.)

I'm guessing that you fulfilled your goal quite admirably, if not quite in the way you intended...

heh

(P.S. I totally remember those packs! And the Sal Buscema Spidey action! I got started on the Vermin storyline, which was sort of the sequel to Kraven's Last Hunt, and which added incest into the Spidey Stew O' Fun.)

It's highly tempting to start a BEST OF DEMATTEIS thread, just because he seems to have doomed a great many of us to our sad exile at the ILC.

Oh, wait.

preview at N'rambla looks AWESOME, but also slow building

I've been on a big Morrison kick with Final Crisis and am really looking forward to #2 tomorrow. I'm almost through with Book 3 of the Seven Soldiers of Victory and I read the three part JLA Classified story that is kind of a lead in. 7 Soldiers is really killer read so far.

DC has really screwed it though, as they did not make anything good off 52 or that 7 Soldiers series and to me, there is ALL SORTS of stuff that could have been done. The only thing that seemed to spin out of that that I ended up reading and it was pretty good was the Crime Bible Question series that Greg Rucka did and sadly it seems to have sold about twelve copies.

they did not make anything good off 52

METAL MEN is Morrisonian Madness! It's probably as dense as any mainstream comic has been in YEARS and it's nearly impossible to follow, but who cares??? It's killer fun and mega-thrill-powered!

wake me up when they un-cancel the Dorkin/Allred version

Okay, fine, hold a grudge. But hold it against Didio and whoever else. Duncan Rouleau did an awesome comic.

ComicMix provides dorks (like us!) with a quick & dirty Countdown rundown, complete with illustrations! Here's Part 1 -- behold!

ME: So here's the scoop, Jimmy. Darkseid had secretly been collecting the celestial energies released by the death of each New God and had stored them all in a "soul-catcher" he'd hidden in your body. The idea was that he would wait until it was full, take it from your body and then use it to become near-omnipotent.

JIMMY: But that doesn't make sense. Why not just put the soul-catcher directly into his own body to begin with?

ME: Hey, Jimmy, it's science. Don't question science.

I don't know how anyone in their right mind could call Final Crisis #2 slow-building when so much crazy stuff happens in the last 15 pages or so. More things happened in the first two issues of Final Crisis than in the past three years of Bendis Avengers comics.

Extratextual annotations up here now: http://finalcrisisannotations.blogspot.com/2008/06/final-crisis-2.html

As before, I'm happy to try to answer questions here using only stuff that's actually in the issue, though...!

Oh, and check it out: Jones initially drew the Question in the first issue with her mask! http://www.fanfare-se.com/GalleryPiece.asp?Piece=13534&ArtistId=132&Details=0&From=TDetail&Mag=Final+Crisis

omg loved #2.

I don't know how anyone in their right mind could call Final Crisis #2 slow-building

was going merely on the five pages in the N'Ambla preview. Mindblowing. Cataclysmic! APOKOLIPTIC!

North American Man-Boy Love Association preview?

I have to say: if the pace and quality continue, this may ultimately rate very highly in the "Best Morrison Evah!" pantheon. It's like everything I love about him with none of the filler.

Loved the second issue, glad that it seems to be better received out in the less Morrisonoid regions of the comicosphere too. Now I'm used to the storytelling style he's using I had zero problems with flow.

I don't believe I have pimped my last Pitchfork column, which talked about Final Crisis, Secret Invasion, Marvel, DC, "what's going on" vs "what happens next", the interweb as fourth-wall breaking, etc etc. (with a tiny smidgen of music related context to assuage my guilt at soapboxing about comics on a nindie site). So here it is:

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/51361-column-poptimist-16

Great article!

Fans of "Final Crisis" have been quick to claim that its detractors are too stupid to "get it," but there's a cost-benefit analysis in play: how much time should you expect to give to a comic about superheroes fighting gods?

So, it's kind of pop vs. prog thing, isn't it?

Yeah I guess so! I am a lot more prog-friendly than once I was. Anyway obviously for me the answer is "I WILL GIVE IT ALL THE TIME I HAVE" judging by how much of yesterday evening I spent scouring for a. a p1r4t3d issue and b. discussion threads. But I don't think "this is too dense for my taste" is a de facto dumb response to FC.

Bizarrely, I wasn't feeling issue 2 quite so much - I think it's possibly the sight of Turpin having an extended Greg Feely-like breakdown in Bludhaven that didn't sit well with me, from the point of view of "what is Joe Four-Colors going to make of this?". Also the first panel of that sequence included the Atomic Knights, and made me remember the Gray/Palmiotti serieses :(

here is a review that amused me…

http://www.comicon.com/panels/

I reckon that I'm in the minority on ILC that I don't much care for FC. But I'm surprised that there has been no discussion (that I have seen here) re: the massive contradictions between Countdown/Death of New Gods and FC and how Morrison shrugged his shoulders and suggested it was DC editorial's fuckup (newsarama interview, I think). This all contributed to the io9 report that beat the drum for a Didio exit…

Oops… that didn't work… go to "comic books" and then "lawson reviews reviews FC 2 etc etc"

I haven't read this yet (I'm still in Rome) but I predict numerous questions for Douglas come Monday.

But I'm surprised that there has been no discussion (that I have seen here) re: the massive contradictions between Countdown/Death of New Gods and FC and how Morrison shrugged his shoulders and suggested it was DC editorial's fuckup (newsarama interview, I think).

That's possibly because:

1) not many folks here (if any) have read Countdown or Death of the New Gods
2) complaining about DC editorial during Didio's reign is old hat (folks have been banging a drum for his exit for a while now, haven't they? -- making Palmiotti the heir apparent is just a variation on a well-worn theme)
3) we just want a good story, maaaaaaaan

I had lots of stuff to say about the things not tying up which I ended up not bothering to say - it's blatantly a huge editorial and marketing fuck-up and it's certainly hurt sales of the series, BUT it hasn't hurt my enjoyment of the actual comic. I'm shamefully fascinated by all the behind-the-scenes speculation.

As far as editorial cock-ups go:

Death of the New Gods editor = Mike Marts
Countdown editor (from #51-28) = Mike Marts (replaced w/ Mike Carlin)

I think Marts was the editor during GM's New X-Men run as well, & is also currently editing the Batbooks (as far as I know). I want to say there were issues wrt continuity during his Marvel tenure, but I can't find anything online about that.

I'm also not sure there's that big a contradiction anyway, other than the general mystique-killing of having the New Gods running all over the shop in a bunch of shite comics directly before FC.

As I remember it - and yes, I did read Countdown (ALL IN ONE DAY) and skimmed DOTNG - the Orion who shows up in Countdown 2 and kills Darkseid is a kind of spirit apparition or ghost, and the real Orion gets whacked in DOTNG 6, which Morrison has said in interview he'll refer to next issue.

This doesn't explain why the previous incarnation of Darkseid was spending his last days doing such completely stupid shit, but that's not really Morrison's look-out.

yeah hi i'm the one ilxor that read more than one issue of countdown and to the extent i give a fuck morrison is ignoring it (and pretty much anything and everything else going on in dcu right now that he feels like) i would have to describe that feeling as 'relief'. i do like that it contradicts countdown w/out even meaning to, that it doesn't seem too wrapped up in infinite crisis, and (esp) that it assumes some familiarity w/ seven soldiers and 52. i like that (this issue at least) it's able to have alot of action w/out the action just being 'ok FITE' like say trinity. loved that mm's death last issue and funeral this issue were covered in passing instead of being 80% of the issue like they surely wouldn't been otherwise. loved that his death has an effect/reason beyond a memo from management. LOVED the 'resurrection' remark.

The Dark Side Yogawear Club!

But I'm surprised that there has been no discussion (that I have seen here) re: the massive contradictions between Countdown/Death of New Gods and FC and how Morrison shrugged his shoulders and suggested it was DC editorial's fuckup (newsarama interview, I think).

Yeah, I'm sort of amused by the fact people seem to care about this, apart from in an "everyone loves behind the scenes gossip" kind of way. (Morisson's "they passed the New Gods around like Hep B" quote on Comic Foundry was particularly amusing to me).

Douglas, could you do a summation of Secret Invasion without referring to other comics? I'd wager not. I'm fairly hip to what's going on oguzat Marvel (I guess), but I genuinely don't have a clue what's going on there most of the time. Cluenessness is fine, but the story just isn't compelling enough for me to want to find out.

oguzat = typo of "at", but also fine name for future science fiction novel

could you do a summation of Secret Invasion without referring to other comics?

Dear Christ no. Secret Invasion is just about the opposite of self-contained. Its coherence dependent on 5+ years of Marvel continuity and dozens of x-overs.

Yeah, I really can't imagine how to even DESCRIBE what Secret Invasion is about without relying on Marvel continuity--the new Mighty/New Avengers issues are basically slightly expanded clip-shows from previous issues that get their dramatic power from "omigod so THAT'S what..." moments.

I've been reading all the Bendis 616 comics for at least five or six years, and I'm still in the dark about a bunch of stuff!

http://www.dialbforblog.com/archives/436/

I hear what you're saying Robby and it sounds like "ANTI LIFE ANTI LIFE ANTI LIFE" repeated over and over in a monotone voice

Re: Robby... We are increasingly moving towards a world wherein reading comprehension is a rare gift bestowed upon the few to the befuddled chagrin of the many, aren't we?

I'm getting more and more set in my belief that, if you generally know how to parse the syntax of comics as they have been laid out for at least the past 50+ years and English is your first language, any deep confusion derived from reading FC 1 (haven't read the second issue closely enough to comment yet) is a direct comment on your reading comprehension. There, I said it.

Infinite Crisis was a bloody mess that appalled fandom. We were told, wait, it will get better. DC's weekly series 52 started off OK but quickly became horrible, and we were told, wait, it will get better. Countdown to Final Crisis turned out to be even more horrible, and we were told, wait, it will get better. Now, Final Crisis is here, it is horrible, and again we are being told, wait, it will get better.

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me 111 times...

While I agree with you completely, what you said just translates to these people as "YOU ARE STUPID STUPID FOOOOLS LOLOLOLOLOL" and they just can't deal with that - you're an 'elitist'. (Also, to be fair, Grant Morrison is not the easiest writer in the world. He makes you work, and a lot of people read comics as light relief.)

I did follow up my Final Crisis this week with a Marvel Essentials, which had big captions saying things like 'MEANWHILE CAPTAIN MARVEL TALKS TO CAROL DANVERS' when they're right there, talking, on the page, and you don't really need a caption. Or Captain M blasting something and at the same time thinking "Must BLAST this creature - with ALL the POWER of my UNI-BEAM!" and the creature is thinking "UNNNH!! His UNI-BEAM -- BLASTING ME!! GOT -- TO -- WITHSTAND IT!!!"

It's two polar opposites, but I think a lot of readers actively miss this kind of hand-holding and equate the lack of it with a presumed 'arrogance' on the part of the writer - "How DARE he assume I'm a functioning, thinking being? THE BASTARD!"

Sorry, xpost to Deric there.

Or as Stan Lee would put it, "Meanwhile, Doc Superman writes his own confoundin' commentary -- little realising that Valiant Vic Fluro is aiming a mysterious missive at the very heart of the previous post! To be continued in the tale we just HADDA call -- 'WHEN POSTS COLLIDE!!'"

:D

While I agree with you completely, what you said just translates to these people as "YOU ARE STUPID STUPID FOOOOLS LOLOLOLOLOL"

Oh, a much more detailed response is forthcoming. Just you wait and see!

btw, I think this is where Robby officially went from being amusingly obsessed Silver Age to cringe-inducing Pollyanna with likely borderline personality.

I haven't read this Final Crisis thing, like I said on the Moore thread, but I do think Morrison's comics are sometimes quite hard to decipher even for a seasoned reader well versed in the language of comics. Just think of the last story arc in New X-Men, for example. And I don't think it's just a question of "intelligence" or the lack thereof on the part of reader, but the fact that Morrison sometimes seems to ignore the basic rules of pacing and plotting a comic, and puts his story elements out in fast, compressed rushes. The plus side to this is that his comics tend to get better (and easier to understand) on the second reading, but it can still be quite irritating and lazy.

"but like I said in the Moore thread"

a) Tuomas pleeeease stop opining on (peoples' opinions of) comics you haven't read
b) compressing all this information into off-panel inferences is not lazy, it's really complex and thought-out. it's much more in the mode of Xaime Hernandez than someone forgetting to include something.

*it just knocks the actual discussion off-track, and it's not like you're short of interesting or idiosyncratic readings of material you have seen

Also stop correcting yourself when you were right the first time :)

Well, there is a point there, in that - not so much in the final arc of X-Men but the one that preceded it - I was expecting one of those montages where it would explain exactly how SPOILER A turned out to be SPOILER B in disguise and how his whole evil plan had progressed - not so much because it would have made the unfolding story any better, but just as a little treat in its own right. (Also because as I read over everything leading up to that twist, I felt like I was spotting errors, explaining them, and then awarding no-prizes to myself, which felt almost like cheating for some reason.) In comparison with that, Final Crisis is the easiest thing in the world to keep up with, even on one reading.

That was probably the first time I'd read that kind of inference-heavy work - JLA had one issue that felt like the second part of a two-issue story, with issue one entirely inferred, but that seems almost like a testing of the waters now. Since then I've learned to enjoy my own inferences of Morrison's material rather than expecting the author to hold my hand and tell me exactly how to interpret it, but I still like the visceral thrill of a 'let me explain the plot to you, foolish mortal' scene - it's very old school and always feels like the end of an episode of Poirot in the drawing room.

I'm extremely fond of the notion of some dude reading the entire dictionary, particularly within the context of a clusterfuck soopah event - judging by that page (which I mentally refer to as the "Wally Sage" page), there's more Moore bashing to come in SUPERMAN BEYOND.

really tired, so I'm sure once I've slept I'll have a bunch of questions, but just to start off:

Do we understand what happened with Turpin this issue? (Why he's searching for the kids AFTER he's already found them?) There seems to be something time-travel related... did we skip a bunch of time in the issue?

Turpin is confused at his own behaviour - he doesn't understand why he's so aggressive and his thoughts are not entirely his own. The shot of him in the bathroom mirror suggests that his head is cracked, somehow (this is also another visual clue as to what exactly has happened to him if you know the DC character he met in issue 1). When he meets Reverend Good, Good addresses him as though he is someone else, indicating that another character is possessing his body: last time we saw him, a sinister figure was lamenting how these Earth bodies wear out so quickly. You can deduce that the same presence has now transferred from that body to Turpin's.

Time hasn't been skipped: the presence of the post-apocalyptic boy in cut-offs is unexplained as yet but meant to be curious - it's probably before his issue 1 appearance in his own timeline, though.

...And, actually, the fact that Turpin's searching for the kids after he's already found them is a big cue that something is horribly wrong with him right now.

Basically, what we're seeing is the evil New Gods manifesting as MULTIPLE avatars. When a person behaves as one of their archetypes, they are acting as proxies. So Turpin is acting as Darkseid, and so is the guy at the Dark Side Club. We see people acting as Desaad, Kalibak, Granny Goodness, etc.

They make this explicit in the new issue of Teen Titans -- the Teen Titans are proxies for the Forever People.

That's not explaining to Mordy with reference only to what's in the issue, though!

It's certainly not clear, though possible, that they're occupying multiple avatars: we haven't seen Boss Dark Side since Turpin has been infected with Darkseid (and if he still was in the Boss, couldn't Good have just found him there?). Kraken may just be a Fury rather than Granny Goodness, too. Are there other multiples I've missed?

I have to read this again, I assumed from the cracked mirror that Turpin is becoming Orion!

It's possible both are true! Or that one's a red herring: Good makes it clear who *he* thinks is in Turpin, at least, later on, but the aggro especially and the crackle from Turpin touching Orion's corpse in #1 could also be significant...

I thought Sonny Sumo might be becoming Orion :)

poor Sonny Sumo's just lost his patience with all the meta revivalism.

Don't be ridiculous, he can't be the god of war if he kills people! :)

Just a small thought - loved #2 after reading it I went back and reread #1; which now makes a whole lot more sense. I was talking about this to my local comic shop guy over the weekend and he made a good point in that, unlike most of these mega-crossovers, Final Crisis appears to be actually telling a story rather than merely serving as connective tissue for what's going on in a whole load of other titles (Amazons Attack I'm looking at you here.) In any good story there's always a point at the beginning where the reader should really have no idea what's going on - but still be interested enough to continue reading so she (or, most likely in this case, he) can find out.

Also, those portrait covers are things of beauty. I'm definitely getting that variant for the rest of them.

If Turpin is possessed, how come he seems to be conflicted and confused? Are the possessions not full investments (ie: Turpin still has some agency)?

Also, I should comment; I really loved Final Crisis #2, and much more than I enjoyed FC #1. There was a lot more I understood, and except for the final 6 pages or so, I had no problem following the sequence of events.

"Becoming" is the key here, I think.

The people who are "possessed" have not had their own consciousnesses fully displaced: note the scene in JLA headquarters where Kraken tips her hand, shouting "warn them! our weapons are useless!" or some such. Her "occupier" is on edge from Batman's questioning, and the body's true consciousness breaks through for a second; Turpin is at an earlier stage in his possession/occupation, and his own identity has not yet been fully subsumed.

Ha, so Final Crisis is really just like Secret Invasion after all.

I think the point is rather that humanity is being destroyed by these archetypes that were already there -- always the subtext of the Kirby stuff, after all -- and that the evil New Gods are simply giving this horrible plot form and structure. We all tap into these archetypes, and this is what happens when we are overtaken by the villainous gods of Apokalips rather than those from New Genesis.

Not too hard to grasp!

They have multiple proxies because they are forces beyond the corporeal. The limitations of the New Gods concept was always that we understood them as these superhero/supervillain characters with defined appearances, but the idea is stronger if they are beyond all that, and exist as archetypes.

britishes and anglophiles: i watched this week's doctor who and spent the whole time thinking 'god if only they could have gotten grant morrison to write this'

Grant's first two Who stories are two of my favourite Who stories ever.

They have multiple proxies because they are forces beyond the corporeal.

Are there actually any scenes of them having multiple proxies, though, or is it just you speculating?

Not too hard to grasp!

So why do you think Turpin is out looking for the kids again? And why does he not start acting like a New God until after he encounters New Gods?

Turpin's out looking for the kids again because, after his encounter with Señor Dark Side, he doesn't remember having found them; the implication is that that's when Dark Side, after "wearing out" the body he was in, started moving into Turpin. (He also keeps blacking out during the scene when he's beating the crap out of the Mad Hatter; his mind's really on the fritz.) What's left of Turpin knows only that it's supposed to be looking for the kids; the Darkseid in him is not just making him more brutal, it's making him enjoy the brutality.

I already said all that myself! I'm wondering why Matt thinks he is, since he doesn't think that Darkseid has moved into Turpin.

"But I'm surprised that there has been no discussion (that I have seen here) re: the massive contradictions between Countdown/Death of New Gods and FC and how Morrison shrugged his shoulders and suggested it was DC editorial's fuckup (newsarama interview, I think)."

My way of looking at is who cares...they are dead and being reborn. They are freakin' godz, stuff gets weird whenever you deal with them, which is what Morrison is playing up.

I feel for people that bought 60 issues of something they didn't like, but there is no reason to screw up a good story because of one that isn't that good.

It is just like some of the Batfans not getting why Dini and Morrison are are not following up on the stories from before 'One Year Later'. Why are they not following up on alot of that stuff, because it sucked. I freaking hope that Dini doesn't even acknowledge any of that cruddy Gotham Knight's Joker/Hush storyline at all in his upcoming story.

"METAL MEN is Morrisonian Madness!"

I will check that one out.

"RUN!" The last page of FC #2 is genius. Actually both of the last pages of the first two issues have been great, as they make you really want to see what is coming up next.

I've got a feeling Final Crisis is going to be like that JLA "Rock of Ages" story in that everyone is screwed up and how they are going to pull out of this one won't become apparent until the end. I don't think you need to have read that storyline or 7 Soldiers to get what is going on in Final Crisis, but I do think that having read both of those stories do add some interesting angles.

it does feel a bit odd that something that's not all that different from the stories he did month in month out on his jla run is now a MAJOR MAJOR EVENT type comic, or am i missing something

p.s. perpetua's line on the multiply valent versions of the gods is, to be fair, the one morrison's been trying to sell in interviews; it's just, you know, not actually in the comic, as of yet

"Love & Monsters" from Doctor Who's second season is as-close-as-dammit to a Morrison-written episode, which is all the more impressive considering that it's from the main series writer.

it does feel a bit odd that something that's not all that different from the stories he did month in month out on his jla run is now a MAJOR MAJOR EVENT type comic, or am i missing something

Morrison's flow is much better now than it was on JLA, and he's working with an artist who can draw. So I don't think it's really comparable.

i can actually see love & monsters with philip bond art and dialogue boxes, i guess.

tbh final crisis's art, for me, isn't going beyond "does the job" — tho i think that might be the colouring more than the art.

not great for reading comprehension tho — w/r/t just one scene, the hooded figure that looks headless when john's being attacked, "say goodbye to your eyes!" when it's not clear that anything's heading towards his eyes, john's ring not being shown remanifesting, then when batman recognises the indentation in thingamajig's palm it doesn't actually look like an indentation — i thought she just had the GL logo on her hand and didn't link it to "a hell of a right hook" until i looked again

Huh? I assumed that she simply had an in-built ring for some reason.

I like that Batman catches something at a glance that leaves the average reader completely puzzled but which can easily be inferred by close reading/looking. As it should be.

Somebody pointed out in the comments over at the annotations site that, after the hooded figure's fight with John, Kraken's entire right arm is suddenly glowing green. Which I had completely failed to notice, too.

Why does the hooded figure's arm have standard human anatomy and GL uniform, though? John's ring disappearing really cocks that scene up for the close reading/looking.

further to Rock of Ages (any Moz JLA storyline) vs Final Crisis: DC wasn't really doing the GIANT crossover thing back then, so if someone (say, Grant Morrison) wanted to do an epic story featuring a bunch of superheroes saving the world/universe, a monthly comic (say, JLA) was the place to do it.

what I'm saying: the only real difference is the marketing

I don't think it's as easy as "Turpin is possessed by Darkseid!" I think it's more like, Turpin is tapping into Darkseid, and a lot of other people can as well. Maybe they tap into Desaad, or Granny Goodness, or Godfrey.

Like I said, this is hinted at in the book, and made explicit in Teen Titans. I imagine they will make it more explicit in Final Crisis as the story progresses to act two. Morrison doesn't have to lay all the cards out on the table in the first two issues, and I don't see why so many people insists that every answer appear right away, even with five more issues to go. I like the way they are handling the crossover elements of Final Crisis -- they are not necessary for the enjoyment of what Grant is doing, but they do clarify aspects of the story, i.e. the motives/nature of the Dark Side Club, or the backstory of the Human Flame.

what about the giant massive crossover DC ONE MILLION right in the middle of his run tho

was it that morrison's run on jla was just unusual in deciding to run with a series of massive cosmic-level type threats?

http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2007/07/05/top-five-things-in-grant-morrisons-jla-run-that-annoyed-me/

"1. Only Superman attending Metamorpho�s funeral

I get it - Morrison was making a point about how ephemeral superhero �death� is - but he could have done so without having NOone but Superman (who barely KNEW Metamorpho) show up at his funeral!!

The worst part for me is that while you may try to write it off and say �Nah, they were busy on a mission� etc, Morrison decries that by actually SHOWING what Flash (former teammate and friend of Metamorpho�s) and Green Lantern (who just had his bacon saved by Metamorpho earlier in the series) were doing during the funeral - and it was just hanging out at the Watchtower!!

SO lame!"

tbh final crisis's art, for me, isn't going beyond "does the job"

Yeah, have to agree--was expecting more after the League of Batmen stuff.

Emmm, "League Of Batmen" is J.H. Williams III, "Final Crisis" is J.G. Jones... I usually make the same mistake too! :D

Ahh... That explains it. Whoops. (Hides face in shame.)

I came across the October previews for DC issues. Some of this stuff looks pretty awesome to me. Grant Morrison is writing a couple of the crossovers including one this month and the Superman one, which I think comes out in the off month. Final Crisis #5 is the one that comes out after the month break.

FINAL CRISIS #5
Written by Grant Morrison
Art and covers by J.G. Jones, Carlos Pacheco & Jesus Merino
Humanity enslaved! Time shattered and bleeding! Anti-Life triumphant! Can Earth's demoralized, beaten heroes rally their scattered forces for the ultimate super-battle against the nightmare armies of Apokolips when the forces of good meet the forces of evil on the bridge to Bluedhaven? As Darkseid's presence causes reality itself to sicken and the lights to go out across the universe, as even the Guardians fall, the true power of the evil gods finally reveals itself, and a major character returns for a shocking conclusion.
Does the secret of humankind's salvation lie in a mysterious cave painting and a bolt of lightning? Or has the Last Day come for us all?
Retailers please note: This issue will ship with two covers - one by J.G. Jones and one by Carlos Pacheco - that will ship in approximately 50/50 ratio. Please see the Previews Order Form for more information.
On sale October 29 * 5 of 7 * 40 pg, FC, $3.99 US

FINAL CRISIS: SUBMIT #1
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Matthew Clark & Norm Rapmund
Covers by Matthew Clark and Rodolfo Migilari
In a world overrun by Darkseid's Anti-Life Equation and his relentless storm troopers, do you choose to SUBMIT? As the lines between Super Hero and Super-Villain become blurred, the ultimate odd couple of Black Lightning and Tattoo Man, in what could be their final adventure, battle against the odds to save a family from the great darkness.
Retailers please note: This issue will ship with two covers - one by Matthew Clark and one by Rodolfo Migliari - that will ship in approximately 50/50 ratio. Please see the Previews Order Form for more information.
On sale October 1 * 40 pg, FC, $3.99 US

FINAL CRISIS: RESIST #1
Written by Greg Rucka & Eric Trautmann
Art by Ryan Sook
Covers by Ryan Sook and Rodolfo Migliari
In a world overrun by Darkseid's Anti-Life Equation and his relentless storm troopers, do you choose to RESIST? The world's only hope for survival depends on one-time JLA mascot Snapper Carr, Mr. Terrific, and Checkmate. With the aid of the villainous Cheetah, Snapper must rally the various factions of Checkmate and awaken an evil from a Crisis past. Could this actually be the end?
Retailers please note: This issue will ship with two covers - one by Ryan Sook and one by Rodolfo Migliari - that will ship in approximately 50/50 ratio. Please see the Previews Order Form for more information.
On sale October 22 * 40 pg, FC, $3.99 US

FINAL CRISIS: RAGE OF THE RED LANTERNS #1
Written by Geoff Johns
Art and covers by Shane Davis & Sandra Hope
The prelude to "The Blackest Night" begins here!
They come from a place of great anger and hatred. They are
the Red Lanterns and they will have their revenge against the greatest Green Lantern - Sinestro. That is, unless the Guardians have theirs first.
Retailers please note: This issue will ship with two covers by Shane Davis & Sandra Hope that will ship in approximately 50/50 ratio. Please see the Previews Order Form for more information.
On sale October 15 * 40 pg, FC, $3.99 US

FINAL CRISIS: LEGION OF THREE WORLDS #3
Written by Geoff Johns
Art by George Perez & Scott Koblish
Covers by George Perez
The Legion of Super-Heroes call in the reinforcements against Superboy Prime and the Legion of Super-Villains
as the Crisis of the 31st Century continues. While Superboy Prime comes face-to-face with the last of the Green Lanterns, Brainiac 5 and XS attempt to ignite an electrical storm using the lightning rod, which is destined to turn the tide of the war. And what are Polar Boy, Dawnstar and Wildfire up to in the 20th Century?
Retailers please note: This issue will ship with two covers by George Perez that will ship in approximately 50/50 ratio. Please see the Previews Order Form for more information.
On sale October 22 * 3 of 5 * 40 pg, FC, $3.99 US

FINAL CRISIS: REVELATIONS #3
Written by Greg Rucka
Art by Philip Tan, Jeff de los Santos & Jonathan Glapion
Covers by Philip Tan
The Anti-Life Equation has infected Gotham City, turning friend, foe and family into mindless slaves of Darkseid, and the might of the Spear of Destiny has left The Spectre powerless. Can The Question find the answer to restoring hope inside the one being capable of saving the world?
Retailers please note: This issue will ship with two covers by Philip Tan that will ship in approximately 50/50 ratio. Please see the Previews Order Form for more information.
On sale October 8 * 3 of 5 * 40 pg, FC, $3.99 US

Moz talks FC2 at some comics website that thinks comics fans need to look at an ad for a Batman movie before getting their nerd news.

By which Doc Supes means http://www.newsarama.com/comics/080721-MorrisonFC02.html .

The month break was s'posed to be between 3 and 4, but, uh, 3 got pushed back a week... so since EVEREHTING will be POIFEKLY on schedule from now on, July is unofficially the skip month, I guess. But the story break is supposedly between 3 and 4.

I find it odd that Superman Beyond #2 has not yet appeared on the schedule, but maybe that's just me.

WHO the WHAT WHAT??

http://www.newsarama.com/comics/080818-dc-november-solicitations.html

(spoilers for FC, and other stuffs)

You know. Like Epop, the Anti-Pope.

Re: that Batman cover...if Alex Ross has that kinda juice in him, why does he waste his time on so much hyper-reverent photorealist bullshit? Oh right the money.

Anyway, his R.I.P. covers are easily the best things I've ever seen him do.

It's kinda weird that Two-Face is on that cover though, since he was never on the Adam West series.

No more spoilers for me for RIP and Final Crisis! I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I'm gonna try.

DON'T SPOIL IN THIS THREAD

Yeah, I think the last issue was ruined for me by reading too much about the series. No more! It'd nice to be surprised by a comic for a change. I spend too much time on nerdy comic sites anyway

Don't know if this is news (probably not), but on the "story" covers for FC & related books, it looks like they're darkening the red and degrading the cover text (like a photocopy of a photocopy) -- shit is getting serious!

FWIW, I didn't mind Requiem, but that's 99% because I am putty in Mahnke's hands / lips.

Chip Kidd on his design for Final Crisis here: http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=156907

So, thoughts on how it's going so far, anyone? This issue was a bit of a drop-off for me -- Pachecho's art is obviously a bit of a let down, but also some rather generic dialogue in the script -- albeit redeemed by that great last page.

I liked it a lot, but less than previous issues. Pacheco's art wasn't so much of a problem for me, as was the slight "spinning wheels" feeling.
Anyway, GA & BC + The Flashes being immune to anti-life (of course they would! they are the spirit of the silver age, vital, fast and fun!) + the final page + anything Darkseid's entourage says + gorilla justifier = still very good comic.
And immensely better than "Badly Choreographed Bendis Fight Scene Number Seven"

Yeah, the Green Arrow/Black Canary scenes win this one. I'm continuing to love the whole project, I just wish the scheduling weren't so hiccupy.

By the way (with the possibility of being patronizing), do you understand the "You Have Been Reading" gag at the end? (It's a lift from the end credits of British sitcoms -- I'm never sure if people notice that).

(I meant, apologies if this sounds patronising. Anyway, carry on...)

Are all future DC storylines destined to be Apocalypse du jour?

what is with no one talking about this comic anymore :(

Whatcha want? I'm keeping up the annotations at http://finalcrisisannotations.blogspot.com/ , and I thought #5 was totally amazing... really enjoying the Batman tie-ins, too.

Cripes.

no spoilers!

:/

This may be the wrong place to ask this, but is it even possible to casually read this stuff? I ask cuz I find myself struggling mightily to comprehend Final Crisis in any but the most general sense. And cuz I just read Morrison's entire Batman run as prep work, only to find that that, too, tied into tons of other crap I don't wanna bother tracking down. FC storytelling seems so dependent on the reader's familiarity with a million other things, with histories and characters onging events that are barely alluded to in the book at hand. For hardcore fans, I'm sure this makes sense, allowing for very efficient storytelling. But for less heavily invested readers (like me!), it threatens to reduce everything to fast-paced, colorful gibberish. Isn't there a way to strike a balance between awkward, repetitive exposition and assuming that everybody's up to speed on all the latest Flash/GL/New Gods permutations?

Contenderizer, I'll make the same offer I made for the first issue: tell me what you don't understand, and I will attempt to explain it exclusively with reference to things that are actually on the page in Final Crisis itself.

(And yeah, that new issue... WOW.)

It seems to me that, taken on its own, Final Crisis is much more intelligible than Crisis on Infinite Earths. Heck, it is more coherent than Secret Invasion, where all the plot is off in other series so there can be more punching. What happens to the Wasp in that wasn't explained at all in the series except on the recap page of the last issue. That is poor storytelling.

(And yeah Douglas - WOW. WOW (it deserved a double take).)

I think possibly it's not been mentioned that Darkseid killing Orion is filicide, but yeah the rest is all there.

Also holy shit.

Douglas: thanks for the offer, but I don't really have anything to point at. I get the gist and even the details, but at the same time, many of the events and interactions seem to play off one's awareness of DCU history & present outside FC itself. So what I lose isn't so much the core story, but its resonances and emotional relevance. I mean, cop & Question pit-stop: what was up with that? How did it contribute to the story? Is the Question really a girl these days, or was that just something Morrison threw in? And wasn't one or the other of those Flashes dead? And who are all those peripheral Green Lanterns? Were they invented just for this series, or are they part of some larger story? And what's a "psycho-merge"? And WHERE THE HELL IS ALL THIS GOING?!?

It's kind of a Morrison style thing -- I had the same objection to Seven Soldiers and the Batman stuff. He likes to pile weird details on top of one another, jump-cutting from one to the other and moving very quickly through space/time, forcing you to sort out on the fly what's happening and why it's relevant. And he seems to loathe exposition, so you have to make intuitive & logical leaps to get the whole picture. Not a bad approach, really puts you in the action, but diametrically opposed to the narrative hand-holding of traditional comix.

cop & Question pit-stop: what was up with that? How did it contribute to the story?

You mean the scene with Turpin and the Question on the bridge in the first issue? That's what gets the plot rolling--it points Turpin, who's looking for the missing kids, in the direction of the Dark Side Club, where the bad thing you'll see in subsequent issues happens to him, and it establishes Montoya/the Question as somebody who's got ties to both the police and the super-type community, which becomes important by #6.

Is the Question really a girl these days?

Addressed directly in that scene: "Didn't the Question used to be a guy?" "Lung cancer. From smoking."

(That's actually a scene that signifies different things depending on what you know of those characters. If you've never seen either of them before, it reads as "You're not the person I expected; where is he?" "Yeah, fuck you too." If you know the Question as a man, it explains the situation. (And if you know who Turpin and Montoya are, it fleshes out Turpin's character as an old-school type, and shows the attitude Renee picked up from her time with Charlie.)

And wasn't one or the other of those Flashes dead?

Yes. Addressed in the oh-my-God-Barry's-alive scene in #3.

And who are all those peripheral Green Lanterns?

It's established on panel that the Alpha Lanterns are the internal-affairs investigation team of an interstellar police force. That's the only important part. If you recognize some of them from other appearances, that's gravy.

And what's a "psycho-merge"?

Something nasty involving Batman's mind that Simyan and Mokkari are trying to do. Covered more thoroughly in Batman 682, which you read, and which has a Final Crisis logo on the cover: they're trying to "mass-produce... perfect copies, driven by a concentrated dose of his intense emotions, his fury, his pain, his drive."

And WHERE THE HELL IS ALL THIS GOING?

Well, that's why I read stories: to find out!

(WOW & BOOM!)

xpost.

(please let us know when we can start using spoilers!!)

sorry, that was a joke.

OKAY THEN!

a) I can't believe they did that.
b) That's definitely how you do that.
c) Dude, Darkseid bleeds pure Kirby dots!
d) I love love love that it will be impossible to get coverage of this.
"They just killed Batman!"
"Yeah, we know, we ran a story on it a few months ago"
"No, they really actually did it"
"Yeah, we know!" etc
e) Actually my favourite part of the whole thing is Superman on the two pages before.
f) I kind of hate myself for pointing this out, but Superman has just come from being handed the keys to the ultimate thing that can do anything...

"I am so rich I can do anything."

So, now there's not just a bat-trustfund, there's a Superbat-trustfund!

I think my favourite part is the Tawky Tawny / Kalibak fight, it's just a pairing so batshit yet it feels so right, and the way it plays out leads to something even more fantastic.

But it's an amazing issue and I just love the way it keeps getting FASTER AND FASTER.

Did Nix Uotan even show up this time?

Yeh, wow. Telegraphed well in advance, but still...

Re Dougles: See, I'd assumed/deduced all that. But you have to assume/deduce it, cuz characters are reduced to telling snippets of dialogue, events to beginnings and ends with the middle bits cut out. Often reads like a story with 2 out of every three sentences arbitrarily cut out. Really obvious example in #6 w/ Supes on the 1st 3 and last 3 pages of the issue. I'm not objecting to this at all, but it's an odd and destablizing approach. Maybe ideal, then, as instability seems to be the point. (And yeah, I got the lowdown on the "psycho-merge" from the Batman crossover issues, and had worked out what was probably going on prior to that anyway, but come on... The way it's presented in FC5 is almost comically cryptic.)

Agree also w Amadeo that the Kalibak/Tawky cat fight sequence was a high point. Love the more explicitly comic/absurdist stuff, like the romances brewing amongst Mr. Miracle's Japanese allies/fanclub/whatever. ("Oh, this is terrible. I can't seem to tell Sonic Lightning Flash how I feel about him. I'm still too shy!")

I feel like the drastic crosscutting across space and time is similar to some of Xaime's work, where a standard six panel layout can have six different places and dates.

an odd and destablizing approach

I read one GM interview where he said that's exactly the effect he's shooting for.

xpost: Good call, though Jamie's doing it to different effect.

Also, Andrew's point f) = OTM. Does kinda take the BIG DEAL-ness down a substantial notch.

nix uotan's rubik's-cube transformation appears to only really work on the same level as zatanna's spell at the end of seven soldiers, though less explicitly metafictional ...

also, i find myself feeling automatically disconnected whenever a story hinges on superheroes dying

i mean, this was still awesome, but still.

Oilyrags: yes, that's Nix Uotan taking it all in in the middle of pp. 30-31--this issue mostly happens in the span of a few minutes. Note that the panel arrangement around him is very much like the multiple-small-m-monitors-showing-panels setup we saw him with on the final page of #5.

Contenderizer: I'm seeing that "2 out of 3 sentences arbitrarily omitted" argument about Morrison's writing a lot--but I'd say that they're not arbitrarily omitted. Everything important is actually there if you're willing to dig for it a little. The question is whether you find that digging pleasurable (as I do) or irritating (which is a totally valid response). [And this next sentence is xposted with Oilyrags:] Similar, in a way, to some of the Hernandez Bros.' storytelling techniques--!

As for the "how did Superman get from point A to point B" thing--I assume we're going to find out in the course of #7 or Superman Beyond #2. I just liked seeing Superman's entrance in the last few pages...

I'm seeing that "2 out of 3 sentences arbitrarily omitted" argument about Morrison's writing a lot--but I'd say that they're not arbitrarily omitted. Everything important is actually there if you're willing to dig for it a little. The question is whether you find that digging pleasurable (as I do) or irritating (which is a totally valid response).

― Douglas

I've been a big GM fan for a long time, and this has always been present in his approach (though much moreso lately), so yeah: I do enjoy the digging. But in 7 Soldiers, I got the feeling that the chopped & channelled style was occasionally covering up some seriously rushed storytelling. The "Undying Don" subplot, for instance, just seemed incoherent, cool as it was. That isn't a problem here: FC seems pretty tightly constructed. But where a "hints & suggestions" style can make a fantasy world seem bigger than it is, allowing a reader's curiosity to fill in the details, here it leaves me feeling slightly unsatisfied. Like a meal where the plates are cleared as soon as they hit the table. I want to see a bit more of what's going on, to spend a bit more time with the characters and ideas before they're whisked off in favor of something else.

Again, this isn't really a criticism, cuz I understand what GM is going for and how the kaleidoscopic fragmentation and lightning pace contribute to the overall effect (which is awesome) -- I suppose it's just the voicing of my sense of having been effectively destabilized.

Ha, I better read it again without the Tiger Tea. It may confer the strength of ten, but it also confers the long term memory of a ten year old.

When do Captain America and Batman go out of copyright in Europe?

Just asking...

Notably absent in "Who Will Be Batman?" ads (and LOLAlfred in fatigues)

Most Excellent Superbat!

It seems like that Revelations 5 and Superman Beyond 2 and whatever is going down with the Legion book should have maybe shipped before FC 6, I feel like I have missed an issue. I still don't get the whole thing with Montoya/The Question and how these two stories kind of link up.

They are going to have to put all of the tie-ins that Morrison wrote, including the Batman Last Rites into the trade or at least they should.

I don't think anyone is really taking the dead body of Batman to mean anything, as everybody knows this is like halftime of whatever Morrison has cooked up, as 'it is a fate worse than death'. I've got a feeling the Morrison/Quitely story is going to end up being a mad series where Batman keeps having to fight through different versions of himself to escape the Omega Sanction.

http://www.wizarduniverse.com/011409batmandead.html

Like you said, the story becomes, "What happens next?" [DC's] doing a lot of stories following up on this, from Battle for the Cowl to Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?. But when are you coming back to Batman?
MORRISON: The plan is for me to come back sometime around the summer. We got big plans. The story is not by any means over.

This doesn't sound dead to me.

Yes, but no-one's suggesting that Batman's dead, just Bruce Wayne.

No-one's suggesting Bruce Wayne's dead, just Batman.

Batman 700 is just around the corner, if Bruce Wayne is not Batman in that issue, I'll be surprised.

I hate to ask this but do we know for a fact that the dead Batman in FC is Bruce Wayne and not whoever won Battle for the Cowl?

we don't know anything and everything we know is wrong!

Mordy: Pretty much. Batman 682/683 lead directly out of R.I.P. (i.e. the chronological sequence starts 20 minutes later) and directly into Final Crisis. See http://finalcrisisannotations.blogspot.com/2008/09/attempt-at-final-crisis-timeline.html ...

Im feeling the theory that both the flashes grab batman and drag him through time, having looked at the beams that hit batman and the way the beams from Darkseid are coloured.

I also think that if the Black Racer has his S==t together at all, he might have shown up in a room where both Darkseid and Batman die simultaneously.

So both of them are not dead. Which means the ending kind of loses its sting.

and Bruce Wayne actually dead just makes me hear the words "new coke" debacle.

After reading Superman Beyond #2, I'm seriously worried about the ending of Final Crisis. Superman Beyond #2 was so good it simply left no room for improvements; I can't see how Final Crisis #7 will manage to be better.

Holy shit, the amount of thrill power in Superman Beyond... Wow. Final Crisis would have been worth it for just this issue.

Yeah, no kidding. Got some notes up at http://finalcrisisannotations.blogspot.com/2009/01/final-crisis-superman-beyond-2.html .

I would like to note that nobody from DC has claimed that Bruce Wayne is actually dead for keeps.

Douglas, you missed on page 14, in the last panel. Those splotches are more Watchmen resonances, the blood splashes from that book. Making, of course, the panel dialogue that much more meaningful, "And I see now," especially since Superman Beyond is, essentially, a book about seeing (seeing a comic in 4D, seeing comics as readers, seeing comics from inside the comic book, and, here, seeing comics in dialogues with other comics).

Also, I wish you had spoken more about the relationship between Limbo here and Limbo in Animal Man. (Speaking of which, I didn't catch the Dr. Manhattan reference -- I thought he looked a bit like Morrison!)

Haha this is exactly the amount of detail revealed and withheld to make me excited like a kid, well done everyone!

I can't help matching the final page here with the one in All-Star Superman. Same purpose ("neverending battle"), though I think I the gravestone was an even better idea.

For about three seconds I wanted a tattoo of the gravestone and epitaph.

Awesome issue -- I could've done without some of the 4-D, if I wanted to nitpick -- but who wants to nitpick? I wish the main series had been a bit more like this, to be honest...

fc 7 almost can't help be anticlimactic - what's left to resolve?

you know, except for dead batman and all and the annihilation of almost everything and all...

I dunno, there's the Nix Uotan/Monitors/multiverse arc, the who-shot-Orion question, the how-did-Darkseid-fall question, the Flashes arc, the Checkmate endgame, the Miracle Machine/Metron sigil business, Luthor and Sivana's plan, the Green Arrow/Black Canary/Tattooed Man/Black Lightning fight, and what the hell is up with Kamandi anyway?

I know, there's plenty of things to wrap and I hope the Flashes will play a huge part in that ending, but this ending, "To be continued" and all that stuff, was an Optimus Prime made of thrillpower. It's so good it has to go down. Otherwise, we might die from the adrenaline rush.

yeah, i know, it's just that after S3D#2, it IS a question of wrapping things up -- the "what the hell is going ON?" factor has decreased considerably. for me, at least. not a bad thing, just an observation

Has it been explained yet what the relationship is between any of this Darkseid stuff and the monitor stuff? is libra going to have a secret identity after all, or does that not matter any more? also, were zillo vallo and mandrakk already existing characters or are these two issues their first appearance? I guess she is apparently the lover of mandrakk? why was she bringing all the supermen to fight him then? are all the monitors vampires? awesome art though! wish it had been a little less compressed (i.e. if mandrakk is the main bad guy, i wish he had something analogous to the long buildup that darkseid has had in final crisis, but I haven't read any of the other tie-ins so maybe I just missed it all!)

Libra's secret identity was disclosed in FC: Secret Files (answer: he's just some dude).

David Uzumeri, bless him, has a long meditation on Mandrakk at http://www.funnybookbabylon.com/2009/01/24/final-crisis-superman-beyond-annotations-epilogue-mandrakk-a-brief-history/ .

Zillo Valla first appeared midway through Countdown, which I have not read. I am considering following the end of FC proper by liveblogging a read-through of the entirety of Countdown. Because I love the Internet enough that I am willing to subject myself to Countdown for it.

Mandrakk appears to bear some conceptual relation to Starbreaker--see http://www.comics.org/graphics/covers/1449/400/1449_4_096.jpg --but I don't think his name had been mentioned before FC:SB3D #1. HIs name, though! "Man/Dracula" plus "Mandrake the Magician," the first superhero in some sense...

Doug, I am torn between being really excited to read your thoughts on Countdown, to "For God's sakes man, don't do it!"

And what about all those spin-offs? OY.

Put down the internet and step away from Countdown.

Sir, I have a tazer in my hand an am licensed by the country of ILC to use it.

I've been a big GM fan for a long time, and this has always been present in his approach (though much moreso lately), so yeah: I do enjoy the digging. But in 7 Soldiers, I got the feeling that the chopped & channelled style was occasionally covering up some seriously rushed storytelling.

I totally concur with this. I got way more out of reading Douglas's chapter about 7 Soldiers in his book than I did while actually reading the series itself. Liked the book a lot, BTW.

Hey, new blood!

Pleased to meet you, tbatc! Now, don't let this hood panic you, and before we get started, do you have any allergies we should know about?

Preview of the final issue is up: http://www.newsarama.com/php/multimedia/album.php?aid=25503 Um... wow.

Ha. Excellent. "I enjoy swearing when I feel the situation demands it."

Nice art, too -- faces are a little lantern-jawed, but more fun than Jones, perhaps?

Ha ha, glad to see Sunshine Superman back!

I thought that was him!

Mandrakk may or may not tie in to Marduk of Babylonian myth. Just a thought.

I found myself really loving the Superman special, but have been lukewarm on the first three chapters of FINAL CRISIS itself (and have sworn off all the tie-ins). I'm willing to give the whole thing a shot, but not until all seven chapters are out.

I have to confess that I'm posting on the Final Crisis thread without having done any more than skim a couple issues in the racks. Is this shaping up to be a really worthwhile read or is it more like DC One Million was, i.e. not really must read GM superhero reading? I'm kind of skeptical about it from the little I've seen.

DUDE! BUY IT ALL YESTERDAY!

Of course, I kinda disagree with you about the pacing of ASS - I thought it was totally deliberate and appropriate for the story to slow and finally reach an almost elegaic tempo as it approached the Big Guy's ultimate sacrifice and proof of heroism. But FC is maintaining that crazy breakneck thing all the way through, so maybe it's more your deal anyway.

Definitely better than 1,000,000. I think in some ways it'll read better as a whole--the constant acceleration (I actually didn't think the first couple of issues were all that crazy-breakneck, but by #6 it's definitely zooming) will be more evident, it won't be six months between appearances of significant characters, etc. But I also kind of love what it's getting out of serialization: Morrison writes really good cliffhangers ("RUN!"), and it's doing interesting things with the parallel stories running alongside the main one.

Incidentally, for anyone coming to this thread and wondering which the significant tie-ins are, here's my most-to-least-essential rundown, pending the five issues still to be released:

SUPERMAN BEYOND is essential to the story (and happens in the middle of #3)
SUBMIT sets up a few plot points in #4-6 (read it immediately before #4)
BATMAN #682/683 explains some stuff in #5 and #6 (best to read them between #4 and #5)

LEGION OF 3 WORLDS is only 2/5 done, and mighty good so far, but seems to mostly just be where Superman is between #3 and #6; maybe more will be revealed, but who knows
ROGUES' REVENGE is a lot of fun, and spins out of Final Crisis proper, but doesn't feed back in

REVELATIONS takes a bunch of cues from Final Crisis, but doesn't really inform it (it's referred to glancingly in #6)
REQUIEM and SECRET FILES both "flesh out" bits of the story that didn't particularly need to be fleshed out
RAGE OF THE RED LANTERNS is set between #1 and #2, but doesn't appear to have anything much to do with Final Crisis at all
RESIST, pending FC #7, not only doesn't feed into the actual series but seems to contradict it

Double crack-smoking WOW at FC#7. I need to digest it; the wonder of it all overwhelms.

omg, time to strap in the baby! we're going for a walk!

"Where is the baby?"

"Somewhere on...Earth-51."

I'm gonna need to wait for Douglas' annotation notes for a lot of this, I think.

They're up now: http://finalcrisisannotations.blogspot.com/2009/01/final-crisis-7.html

Aside from the nested/traded-off narrators, this one seemed relatively straightforward, actually.

Okay, I'm lying.

Douglas, do you think Darkseid shot the bullet because he had to - because it had already happened - even tho it ended up killing him? Or do you think he committed suicide with intention to die?

I really liked it, but I'm not sure the pay off was worthy of the build-up. There's something underwhelming in 4 issues of pure dread being solved in a couple of panels, and it's a shame the main battle's not happening in the main series but in a crossover (though I know I shouldn't complain a lot about that, considering that Superman Beyond has to be one of the greatest Superman stories ever). With all of its shortcomings, I think DC One Million had a more satisfying ending, but maybe I should re-read both of them back to back and reevaluate my opinion. For the moment, I really liked it, but I'm not as floored as I was with Superman Beyond.

Read it, loved it, read all the Grant stuff as a 12-issue miniseries rather than as a 7 issue one, REALLY loved it.

Scattered thoughts here: http://tomewing.tumblr.com/post/74022211/third-fourth-and-fifth-thoughts-on-final-crisis

Read it yesterday, been thinking about it since (I think I even dreamt about it) and been loving even more ever since. It's just the ultimate and most utterly wonderful iteration of the imagination-and-hope-saves-the-universe Morrison trope + the most condensed issue I've ever read, the ending is anticlimatic, I agree, but it just works! Of course the story would end okay! Superman wished it so!.

I do wish the art in the main series had been a little more consistent -- I'd rather have had Mahnke and his army of inkers for seven issues than the tag-team effort we ended up with -- but apart from that, yeah, loved it, and I can't wait to re-read it. Who couldn't?

The Batman ending was totally Armageddon 2001, though. Minus the triceratops.

Superman wishing a happy ending is a great idea didn't feel so satisfyingly executed to me. It felt like a flashback from what should have been the real ending. Anyway I like the implications and how it links to his older stuff; the penultimate page is really similar to the last page in Invisibles, and the idea that happy endings are something worth wishing and, in comic books, should come true, is more or less the same thing Morrison did in Animal Man #26.

buying comics w/ baby is easy. reading 'em is trickier. took me four hours to get through FC: REV, and then about two hrs for FC. Hubba 2x!

So was there any relation between the Darkseid stuff and the Mandrakk stuff? also, after Darkseid falls (but before the mandrakk stuff), why are things still in danger? - i suppose that's why they're building the miracle machine? (and shooting the stuff in the rocket and freezing everyone?)

fun stuff, but i think this issue and sb were a little too metafictiony for me

But you kinda have to expect that with Morrison.

fair enough - still much better than zero hour, the multiverse epic of my youth... btw, after seeing the guy who designed the andre the giant obey posters on tv, it'd be great if someone made some darkseid anti-life versions

Moz a N'rama: Surely part of the fun of comics includes following stories across titles? If you like comics, what’s so awful about buying another one to see what happens next? And if you don’t want to buy it, don’t bother. Do something else. Buy cigarettes or booze or bananas. I don’t know!

Every time I read about the agonizing pains of ‘event fatigue’ or how ‘3-D hurts my head...’ or how something’s ‘incomprehensible’ when most people are ‘comprehending’ it just fine, it’s like visiting a nursing home. ‘Events’ in superhero comic books FATIGUE you? I’m speechless. Admittedly they do tend to be a little more exciting than the instruction leaflets that come with angina pills but... ‘fatigue’?

Superhero comics should have an ‘event’ in every panel! We all know this instinctively. Who cares ‘how?’ as long as it feels right and looks brilliant ?

The Mandrakk/Darkseid link is that Darkseid's fall breaks the orrery which somehow leads to Mandrakk waking up....? I dunno really!

Mordy, I think he was already dying when he fell--he just wanted to turn everything into him before he expired, so that everything could die when he did; he killed Orion to take the fight out of the world. Debatable, though.

Why would killing Orion take the fight out of the world?

Killing Orion would take the fight out of me.

but that's just me, you'd have to ask everyone else.

QUESTION: Does this mean the DC Uni/Multiverse has just been recreated/reimagined by Superman???

You mean, "Is Superman God?"?

precisely.
Whereas the post-COIE DCU was largely shaped by the paradigms of Watchmen and DKR, can we now have 20 yrs of comics derivative to ASS? PLEASE

Mordy: Orion's the god of war, so after he dies, all the heroes spend the next three issues getting clobbered--the best they can do is run.

Dr. Superman: Yes--as Iman notes (in Spanish), Superman reboots/jumpstarts time. Crises end with a reboot...

I guess the fact that Metron is the one who resurrects Nix is one connection between the Darkseid/Mandrakk plotlines...

Yes, obviously Superman rebooted the uni/multiverse, but what I'm more interested in is whether or not it's been recast in his image, so to speak...

Yeah, I imagine when Bruce Wayne finally comes back from way back whenever, he's going to have a lot fewer aches, pains, old gunshot wounds, broken backs, rheumatiz, Joker-inflicted knife scars, etc

Yes, obviously Superman rebooted the uni/multiverse, but what I'm more interested in is whether or not it's been recast in his image, so to speak...

― Oh Why, Sports Coat? (Dr. Superman), Friday, January 30, 2009 12:35 PM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I'm thinking yes. Also hoping, at least a little. And looking forward to the inevitable G-Mo interview where he opines that probably Superman recreated the whole multiverse, including our own and is therefore the being some may think of as YHWH.

In ASS, Morrison made the link between Neitzche's ubermensch, and Superman, so it wouldn't be hard to see him using Superman as some kind of platonic perfect human. Theologically, this would fall into the Voltairian "If God Didn't Exist..." statement, by which man - which is to say, the perfect man, the ubermensch - creates the Universe/God out of language. So literalized, a man - men, to be exact; Siegel + Shuster - created this perfect man, who then replicated their own genesis by recreating his own universe.

Or something.

(Comix as Existentialism moreorless.)

Actually, the more I think about it, the more I feel like ASS + Final Crisis need to be read against/with each other.

In ASS Superman is Jesus, not Jesus' Dad. Looking forward to the Superman as Holy Spirit miniseries.

Maybe he can be a being of pure energy, and they can make him blue or something! Oh, wait...

um...

Mentioned this elsewhere, but Superman-as-creator? Look at the panel where he's activating the Miracle Machine: the giant hand in the foreground with the spiral-nebula shape in front of it is what Krona saw at the beginning of time in GREEN LANTERN #40, the origin-of-the-DCU image that's been referred to many times over the last 40 years!

okay, this is a stretch here, and a little cyclical, I'm just brainstorming..but mightn't Superman, in all his midwestern modesty and deepseated affection for humanity, recreate the world in such a way that although, yes, he's the creator, he is not the creator? That he would create, within his creation, a Creator even greater than He?

OMG, the Spectre is now Superman's FIST (or whatever Rucka called it)!

Siegel as Christ figure, discuss.

Why have all the Marvel titles disappeared from my comics shop?

He Loves You.

I can' help thinking it would have been better if Superman had panicked at the miracle machine and wished for the Stay-Puft marshmallow man.

Nix " what did you wish for supes?"
supes "I couldn't help it, It just popped in there"
Nix " What Did You Wish For Superman??"
Supes " I tried to think of the one most harmless thing, something I loved from my childhood. something that could never destroy us."
Nix " what did you wish for???"

Stay Puft man appears and stands on the Miracle machine, crushes mandrake and dooms the world to the void.
Morrison hands that draft to Dan Didio, then exits the building whistling a merry tune.

the end.

I think that, much as I love the final issue, I love even more that I live in a world where that is the final issue of Final Crisis, if you see what I mean.

I wonder how much of Grant Morrison's artistic and political capital at DC, for lack of better terms, he spent in the creation of FC. It might be zero, I dunno, just wondering.

I'd guess not a lot: it sold over 100,000 copies an issue, and pretty much all the spinoffs sold in the 50-100K range too. If vocal Internet reaction were the same thing as sales... well, "Blue Beetle" would be DC's biggest title.

(Same goes for R.I.P., which for all the online carping about it--to quote Marc-Oliver Frisch's commentary over on The Beat, "For the last four issues, it seems like somebody nailed it to 103,000 copies and went away for an extended vacation. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a blockbuster storyline hold on to its audience as consistently well as this one.")

another way to look at it is that GM invested a massive amount of political captial in FC and Batman RIP and the gambles paid off. if the series had tanked or infuriated fans, morrison would have lost the ability to do similar stuff in the future. as it stands, i imagine he can do pretty much whatever he wants to/with the DCU. you know, within reason...

just read it. kinda like i expected: satisfactory and even poignant, if not entirely satisfying. heavy-duty action and constant revelation of FC6 and beyond 3D2 replaced by narrative puzzle-piecing and a reflective, retrospective tone. the process of settling gently back down to earth(s)

superman as god concept echoes all-star superman, where kal created a pocket universe for experimental evaluation - in this universe "superman" exists only as a philosophical ideal and as a comic book character...

reading back, i guess that second point got hashed out last week. oops.

ilx0r-in-absentia skidmo has read it

still a little confused as to what might have precipitated darkseid's "fall" (not having read death of the new gods or countdown).

did like the bullet's loop (from darkseid to orion, then back to darkseid via batman, perhaps dug out and fired back once more through time? or maybe it's a different same bullet? i dunno). but why would darkseid go ahead and fire the bullet after discovering that it would be his ultimate undoing? and why was he still so concerned about orion there at the end, when it had become clear that killing orion wouldn't actually accomplish much? i mean, when the bullet is fired, orion's been dead for some time, and darkseid is nonetheless clearly on his way out.

Maybe, in some way, it was worth it for Darkseid in his evil divinity to BE everything for even a brief period of time, since, y'know, time collapsed in on itself, so, in effect, he did get to be everything forever.

Plus, we all know he'll be back in time for the 25 yr old SPOILER ALERT great darkness saga.

so, hey, do the flasheses in this collapsing/collapsed universe also loop enternally, leading death to darkseid, and than pursuing his bullet back to orion, and then leading death to darkseid, etc?

tom spurgeon's crit of this series is the first piece i've read that isn't all 'duh this comic is confusing and complicated' or 'duh this comic is a masterpiece of comic bk art' - i particularly like his final paragraph:

http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/midnight_snack_yawn/

The jump cuts bounce back and forth from suggestions of adventures and slivers of story moments that are meant, I think, to indicate entire scenes. They do so in unconvincing fashion. They don't feel like stolen moments from a rich and diverse universe of remarkable events. They feel like snippets created for snippets' sake, fake trailers to non-existent movies. Their inauthenticity makes seeing them strung together feel like watching the One Shining Moment montage of a sporting event without having watched any of the games.

otm, but overstated. i said something similar upthread: that the fragments don't effectively hint at a larger world, because everything's equally fragmented and therefore there isn't a coherent core story for the reader to hold onto and spin out from.

also agree with the compaints about the uneven, rushed, sometimes-just-plain-bad inking. don't know why this was such a problem, and for a big prestige job like this, it just shouldn't have been. parts of 6 & 7 are just amateurish.

overall, though, i'm much more satisfied with the story than spurgeon seems to have been. as with morrison from day 1, i'm more interested in and charmed by the details than the large-scale plotting. i like the way he writes and the way he thinks enough to overlook the fact that he often lets the marginalia overwhelm the story he's trying to tell. and in this case, i like where he's left the DCU. it seems a promising place from which to explore.

okay, not quite from day 1. from mid-doom patrol on.

How many issues do you think it would have taken to decompress out all that was hinted at on screen?

Now after reading the second half of Secret Invasion, it is interesting that it fell short in almost the opposite way of Final Crisis. There are pages of splash fight scenes that go on and on, coming out over months but actually being like a couple of days. It was almost in slow motion. Final Crisis on the other hand was for many overly most compressed and dense with lots of the action just inferred or shown in hindsight.

It would not be a bad thing if BMB were required to let someone else plot the last issue or two of all his story arcs.

Final Crisis 7 was the final comic I am ever going to buy.

It ended so perfectly I thought I would rather leave the ensuing stories to my imagination and not DCs writers.

Have I made the right decision???

There are other comics than those published by DC, you know?

Lots of them. Lots and lots.

I bought the hardcover collection and read all of FC (plus Batman 682-683) again, and I think many things made a lot more sense on the second reading, but there's still a few things that I felt were left totally unexplained. Maybe they're explained in all the additional FC books, but I'm not gonna read all of those just to find out... So I thought I'd ask about them here, if some of you could give some answers or educated guesses.

In an issue-by-issue order:

Final Crisis #1
What's the deal with the caveman here? Why does he suddenly transport into the future of an alternate Earth? Reading this thread I found out that the blonde guys in the alternate Earth is Kamandi, the last boy on Earth (I take it it's the same Kamandi who appeared in Crisis on Infinite Earths)... But how does Kamandi know about Metron's weapon, and that the cavemen has it, and that it is needed on a parallel Earth? It looks like Kamandi doesn't have the time to get the painted pattern, so how does Black Lightning get it by Submit #1? I take it Metron's weapon is not simply a pattern to paint over one's face, because that would seem kinda banal, and if that's the case, why would Metron give to a caveman 40 000 years ago? Wouldn't it have seen easier to give it to JLA two years ago? I assume to weapon is some sort of meme/idea that allows humankind to fight oppression (like the caveman fights against the evil cavemen with fire), and it was necessary to give it to caveman so the meme would spread from generation to generation, and 40 000 years later it would be in the collective sunbconscious of all/most human beings. (This would also explain why the pattern keeps showing up in different places, as someone mentions in some later issue.) I take it the painted pattern is merely a way to activate this meme, right?

Final Crisis #2
Are the Japanese superheroes and Sonny Sumo supposed to be Earthly incarnations of New Gods? I think at some point Sonny Sumo tells Mr. Miracle that he's not from this plane of existence or something, which might hint that he is a New God in human form. My knowledge of the New Gods is not very good, so I can't really match Sonny or any of the other Japanese heroes with them.

In the final page we see Barry Allen resurrected, but we're never explained how or why it happened. He just makes some vague mention that "something" pulled him out of death, but what was that something? Is this supposed to be a meta joke on Morrison's part: is that "something" actually DC editors, who wanted to bring Barry back to life?

Also, Metron's chair seemed to be kinda important to Libra in the previous issue, so why would he abandon it for Wally and Jay to find? Is it because he couldn't find Element X in it the way Superman did in FC #7?

Final Crisis #3
What's the deal with the magical hand writing a message ("know evil") on page 3? Who is writing that message and who is supposed to get it?

Is Mary Marvel possessed by one of Darkseid's henchmen here? Looks like she's "gone evil" before any of the other heroes did, and she seems to have much more personality thant the other heroes controlled by Darkseid in the later issues.

Tuomas -

Most of your questions were covered in Douglas' excellent annotations here:

http://finalcrisisannotations.blogspot.com/

Instead of my rehashing his info, take a look and then see what questions remain.

Superman Beyond #1
How does the society of Monitors relate to the Monitor we saw in Crisis on Infinite Earths? Was there always more than one Monitor, and the Monitor in CoIE simply never mentioned the other Monitors? Or did this society of Monitors only come into being after CoIE? The way I interpreted this issue is that the Monitor in CoIE was the probe the Over-Monitor/God sent to investigate a flaw in itself (i.e. the multiverse)... And it was only after the probe came into contact with the multiverse that Over-Monitor/God became "infected with stories", creating this story/history of a society of Monitors, which became reality because any story the Monitor(s) believe(s) in does come true. If this is correct, is Dax Novu/Mandrakk the Monitor of CoIE? In this issue he is said to be "the first son of Monitor", which could mean he was the probe mentioned earlier.

(x-post)

Okay, thanks! I'll look into that, and see if there are still some questions left unsanswered.

I read Douglas's annotations and they did answer some of my questions: now I know who Sonny Sumo is, what happened to Mary Marvel, and (maybe) what the hand writing "know evil" is about. I have to say, though, that I immediately connected the hand to The Hand of Glory in The Invisibles; I think it was mentioned there that The Hand of Glory is "cursor that can move through time" (or something like that), and here we have a cursor hand. So maybe it is Jack Frost's hand reaching from another series, saying that you should know evil, i.e. embrace your dark side and think beyond simple binaries. (Which is kinda what happens when Superman and Ultraman merge in Superman Beyond.) Or alternately, it's saying that you should know evil is never an external, unknowable force, rather than something that was always in you - note that both of the big bad guys in FC are born out of good guys. I also noticed that the Wikipedia page for Hand of Glory has this interesting bit of information:

The legend is traceable to about 1440, but the name only dates from 1707. It was originally a name for the mandrake root (via French "mandragore" and thus, "maindegloire"[2] - "hand of glory") that became conflated with the earlier legend. The confusion may have occurred because mandrakes are said to grow beneath the bodies of hanged criminals.

So, Hand of Glory = Mandrake = Mandrakk? Is this Dax Novu/Mandrakk trying to inform Frankenstein about the nature of evil?

Other than those above, I didn't find answers to my questions in the Douglas's annotations, so I'd like to hear what you think about them?

Okay, here's a few more questions:

Superman Beyond #2

I get that throughout this issue there's a meta-commentary going on towards Alan Moore in general and Watchmen in particular, kinda like what Morrison did in Zatanna #1 and Manhattan Guardian #1-2. But in those issues it felt pretty obvious Morrison was doing a good-natured cricitism/satire of Moore, whereas this one seems a bit more ambiguous in it's commentary. We have the doomsday clock, the bloodstain, and Allen Adam as Dr. Manhattan, but I'm not sure what Morrison is trying to say with them? Is Allen Adam a commentary on how far up his own arse Moore can go, or does he signal admiration for the sort of concepts Moore managed to bring into superhero comics? Maybe both?

Also, I can't quite figure out what's going on with Zillo Walla? She was the lover of Mandrakk, does that mean she was actually in league with his? If that is so, why did she gather those Supermen to fight him? Did she change sides when, as she put it, she "found a better story" than Mandrakk's, i.e. the story of Superman?

If Mandrakk was, like Zillo Walla says, fed by the Monitors' belief in him, that would explain why they didn't simply erase/kill him when he first turned evil. The Monitors were infected with stories, and most stories require a proper antagonist, so Mandrakk was kept alive in his tomb so he could come back for the conclusion of the Monitors' story, their Final Crisis.

Tuomas, I think your readings (questions) about these are ones that won't ever have a right answer; ie: require interpretation. I don't think anyone is going to have a definitive response to Morrison's use of Moore imagery in Superman Beyond, and as long as you've located the basic imagery, I don't know whether someone on this thread (Douglas included) can give you the correct answer. I would suggest, also, that one of Morrison's favorite tropes is the interpretation/symbolism of comic books and comic book iconography, and if you're struggling to understand his stuff, that's the correct place to be in. (I know it's kinda a cop-out answer, especially in a medium where obfuscation is a weakness, but it's kinda like reading Adorno like poetry; sometimes the form is apart of the text.)

Well yeah, I didn't think there would be any "correct" answers to any of these questions, but I was wondering if at least some of them were addressed in all the related FC material I didn't read. And even if they weren't, I'd like to hear what other ILCors thought about this stuff - surely I'm not the only one asking these sort of questions?

(I'll write more about the latter issues of FC when I have more time, because I feel I need to get this stuff out of my head, but maybe I'll try to formulate it into theories about FC rather than just asking potentially unanswerable questions.)

the more answers you get from final Crisis, the more questions you have. I am being kind to Morrison that sometimes you really have to fill in the blanks. most of the Libra stuff seems just to disappear and the monitor stuff gets confusing but keep asking the questions as if anything it means I'm not the only one stumped on these things.

Okay, as promised here's some more ponderings on FC...

Submit #1

This is a pretty straightforward issue, so not much problems here. Except that... In issue #3, when Wonder Woman was corrupted, we learned that Darkseid spreads the Anti-Life equation via some sort of virus or bacteria. So why does he also use the weird helmets seen in this issue? Wouldn't the virus be more effective? (Indeed, in issue #7 we see that control of the helmets is easily overriden by Dr. Sivana and Luthor.) And in next issue we also learn that simply seeing the Anti-Life equation on a computer or TV screen is enough to make people servants of Darkseid. So why are the helmets needed?

In this issue Black Lightning says that the sign of Metron began to "appear all over the world before all this started". So maybe I was right when talking about issue #1, that Metron's weapon is really some sort of anti-oppression meme buried in the subconscious of humankind, and the sign is merely a conduit for it. But how did Black Lightning learn that sign is so important? Maybe he got the information from Kamandi, who, as we saw in issue #2, had moved from his alternate Earth to Earth-1 (or whatever Earth this story is taking place in)? Except that we never find out how Kamandi learned about the meaning of the sign, or how he might've given the information to BL, or even how he got out of the jail cell he was in in issue #2. Maybe paying so much attention to this is nitpicking, but since Morrison devoted two whole pages of issue #1 to Kamandi's search of the sign, you'd think he bother to resolve that subplot in some way.

Final Crisis #4
In this issue we see Superbia and Warmaker of the Ultramarine Corps, but I thought Superbia was destroyed and Ultramarine Corps injected inside Qwewq/Neh-Buh-Loh in the JLA/Ultramarine Corps special? I guess the UC got out of Qwewq before he died, and rebuilt Superbia.

The way Barry saves Iris from the Anti-Life Equation is sweet, but on the other hand Morrison has introduced so many different ways to break off the Equation it kinda starts to lose its scariness. It should be like the mother of all brainwashes, not something you can just shake off. Anyway, I like how Morrison tries to depict how the Anti-Life Equation works instead of just making it into some mysterious magical force that takes over people. That said, I wish there'd been more scenes that depict how the ALE works on ordinary people, that would've made Darkseid's threat feel more tangible. I think Morrison did a better job of examining the ALE in the Mister Miracle part of Seven Soldiers.

Final Crisis #5
The bits about Checkmate, OMAC, Brother Eye, and what have you totally confuse me because I know almost nothing about their background. I think most of that stuff could've been left out without the story suffering at all.

The Question's seems like a cool character, but basically her only contribution to the story seems to be the gathering of the army of Supermen. Speaking of which, why is it an army of men only? Don't any of the parallel Earths have a Superwoman instead of Superman? I'd say this is one of Morrison's most male-centric stories ever... Wonder Woman spents most of the series under Darkseid's control, and Supergirl's star moment falls under that time-honored cliche, the fight between female protagonists. The most memorable female character in the series is probably Mary Marvel, and that's only because she's turned into an S/M bitch. That's a rather heavy-handed and stereotypical way of depicting someone's corruption - whatever happened to pro-queer Morrison? Anyway, I guess one big reason for the male-centrism is that this is the most "official" DC Universe story Morrison's ever written, and official DC Universe is pretty male-centric (moreso than Marvel, I think). Still, I was expecting more of him.

The wheelchair-bound dude with the Rubik's Cube is obviously Metron's human incarnation from Mister Miracle. Does this mean other New Gods appear in this story in human form too? I haven't been able to spot any of them, but my knowledge of New Gods is limited. Is the ape-like dude who's in the same cell with Metron and Nix Uotan a New God too? What he says to Nix makes him sound like yet another Morrison surrogate, and it also reminded me of Zatanna from Seven Soldiers. He doesn't say the word "magic", but Morrisonian ideas about imagination and magic are clearly repeated once again there. That's not a criticism though; this is what Morrison does best, and the whole jail cell scene with the cube and the picture of Weeja Dell is one of the most memorable bits in FC.

Speaking of memorable moments, I wish Batman's escape from Simyan and Mokkari would've been included here instead of Batman's own title, at least in a condensed form. I can see why Morrison wanted to put it there, since it's such a perfect obituary for the Bruce Wayne Batman, but I think it's also an awesome, dramatic moment in the FC storyline. Now Batman's escape and confrontation with Darkseid comes with also zero explanation in story proper, and that's a bit of shame.

"comes with almost zero explanation"

Haha, I love these questions - I enjoyed Final Crisis but I had to read it like a tone poem or something without trying to follow what was happening too closely. about the anti-life mechanism, I assumed it operates like metron's symbol - a banal physical act (helment, e-mail, whatever) that triggers something internal... like a metaphor with fangs

About Alan Moore, how is Zatanna and Manhattan Guardian commentary on his work??

"The Question's seems like a cool character, but basically her only contribution to the story seems to be the gathering of the army of Supermen. Speaking of which, why is it an army of men only? Don't any of the parallel Earths have a Superwoman instead of Superman? I'd say this is one of Morrison's most male-centric stories ever... Wonder Woman spents most of the series under Darkseid's control, and Supergirl's star moment falls under that time-honored cliche, the fight between female protagonists. The most memorable female character in the series is probably Mary Marvel, and that's only because she's turned into an S/M bitch. That's a rather heavy-handed and stereotypical way of depicting someone's corruption - whatever happened to pro-queer Morrison? Anyway, I guess one big reason for the male-centrism is that this is the most "official" DC Universe story Morrison's ever written, and official DC Universe is pretty male-centric (moreso than Marvel, I think). Still, I was expecting more of him."

^^ cosign

sorry i probably didn't need to copy paste the whole thing there.

no one has yet explained to me in what sense batman RIP was actually RIP, is bruce wayne still alive? what?

oh yeah, he died in final crisis, didn't he

i remember going "schyeah right". i didn't realise he'd been replaced with grayson.

About Alan Moore, how is Zatanna and Manhattan Guardian commentary on his work??

In MG #1-2 it's mostly just a throwaway joke about the battle between No-Beard (the bald fellow) and All-Beard (the one with the huge beard), who are both crazy in their own way: which two comic writers might they resemble? But Zatanna #1 is quite obviously a parody/homage to Promethea: Zatanna & co's trip through the "spheres of magic" is quite similar to the trip Promethea takes, except that Morrison is less serious and rigid about it all. He even has Misty saying to Zatanna, "I love the way you write about magic. It’s so like, down-to-earth and non-preachy", which I take as a criticism of how Moore writes about magic.

oh yeah, he died in final crisis, didn't he

Yeah, what actually did happen to Batman, as I can't remember now. SOmething about him being skeletonised, and put in a Kal-EL style rocketshiup, and going back to caveman times. Can anyone explain it in a way that makes sense?

IT'S A MYSTERY!!!

Has Final Crisis finally finished yet?

I've seen an interview where Morrison basically acknowledges the treatment of women characters in Final Crisis and plugs a future Wonder Woman miniseries to make amends...

I think the biggest problem with the female characters in FC is that most of them are basically put into "weeping girlfriend"/"damsel in distress" roles. Superman saves Lois, Flash saves Iris (and both of them are saved with a kiss, Prince Charming style), Ollie saves Dinah, Frankenstein (as far as I can tell) frees Wonder Woman, Weeja Dell is basically just an absent dream girl Nix Uotan is trying to find, etc. The only major female characters to get some independent action are The Question, Supergirl, and Mary Marvel, and like I mentioned upthread, their roles in the story are kinda marginal or otherwise problematic.

Okay, as promised, here's a few more notes on FC...

Final Crisis #6
I'm sure the reason Superman's now in the future is explained in some additional FC material, but it doesn't really bother me, as it doesn't affect the main story. All we need to know is that Brainiac 5 brought him there, and that he wants to give him the Miracle Machine. Wouldn't a better name for it be Deus ex Machina, though, as that is the function it will have in the next issue? The cube that stores the Machine in and how the cube opens reminds me of Moebius's art, I'm not sure if that's deliberate. There certainly was a deliberate Jean Giraud/Moebius reference in Seven Soldiers #0.

Just before he shoots him, Batman sees Darkseid's true form around his physical form, just like Shilo Norman did in Seven Soldiers #1. Does that mean Batman has become a New God too? And where did Batman get the gun he shoots Darkseid with? I guess it might've been just lying around, but it's kind of convenient that the Radion bullet just happens to fit in it.

I thought Darkseid's Omega Beams were supposed to totally kill a person, or at least that's what I remember them doing in some earlier Darkseid comics I've read. So why do they now transport Batman into the distant past? And if the beams didn't kill him rather than zap him into where he is in the end of FC #7, why is there a charred corpse of him left behind? Could the corpse belong to one of the Batman clones that were destroyed in Batman #683? Seems unlikely, as the clones weren't wearing a Batman suit, plus Superman would've most likely found more than just one corpse then. Some comments online said that the beams put Batman into a similar Life Trap as Shilo Norman was in in the Mister Miracle miniseries. I don't quite buy it, as Darkseid had reason to do that to Shilo, whereas nothing here indicates he meant to do anything else than kill Batman.

Btw, the cover of hardcover edition of FC is a variation of the final panel of issue #6, so it spoils a rather big plot point. I'd read FC before buying the book, so it didn't bother me, but I'm sure some readers will feel disappointed due to such a huge spoiler. I can see why DC wanted to put that picture as the cover, as it's bound to draw attention ("This is the story where Batman dies! No, really. Yeah, we know we already did a story called Batman RIP, but this is where he really dies! Honest."), but still...

I thought Darkseid's Omega Beams were supposed to totally kill a person, or at least that's what I remember them doing in some earlier Darkseid comics I've read. So why do they now transport Batman into the distant past?

http://fourthworldfridays.blogspot.com/2008/02/forever-people-6-omega-effect.html

Just back from vacation and totally sick with some kind of horrible hippie flu, but:

*The Omega Effect doesn't outright kill you, it takes you out of your time & makes you live your various possible existences. (That's what happened to Shilo in SS:MM #4, for instance, and what happened to Sonny Sumo in Kirby's Forever People.)

*It's been noted that "who was that masked corpse?" will be a plot point down the road.

*The cube in which the Miracle Machine is sealed was established in the Machine's earlier appearances in Legion of Super-Heroes stories. It's a deus-ex-machina device that's literally been sitting around for forty years' worth of continuity at this point...

*I've noted this elsewhere, but "Batman R.I.P." is a story in which Batman does not die and does not at any point appear to die, which begins with someone in a Batman outfit yelling "You're wrong! Batman and Robin will NEVER die!," and in which the characters who STICK BATMAN IN A COFFIN AND BURY HIM IN THE GROUND specifically note that they do not intend to let him die. It's about his psychological rather than physical destruction.

*The Question's role in this story is to serve as a bridge between secular (police) authority and divine (superheroic) authority--she's also the bridge between this world and "the world that's coming," and it's suggested that she's the model for the Global Peace Agency from Kirby's OMAC.

More in a bit...

*I've noted this elsewhere, but "Batman R.I.P." is a story in which Batman does not die and does not at any point appear to die, which begins with someone in a Batman outfit yelling "You're wrong! Batman and Robin will NEVER die!," and in which the characters who STICK BATMAN IN A COFFIN AND BURY HIM IN THE GROUND specifically note that they do not intend to let him die. It's about his psychological rather than physical destruction.

Yeah, the way I read Batman RIP (including Last Rites) is that it's supposed to be the metaphysical and meta level end of the Bruce Wayne Batman, even if he doesn't physically die. I think the concept of the dark, brooding, drive-by-his-demons Batman has been milked for what its worth, so maybe with the birth of the Fifth World we should see a rebirth of Batman too. If Dr. Hurt was (like I interpreted it) a physical manifestation of Batman's dark side, then maybe Morrison was trying to say something along those lines with Batman RIP. It's really refreshing to see Dick Grayson as Batman now in Batman & Robin, as he's quite different from Bruce but still essentially Batman. If Bruce ever comes back, I'd love to see him not become Batman again, rather than take some sort of behind-the-scenes/mentor figure for Dick and Damian, who'd continue as Batman & Robin. But of course we all know DC won't let Bruce Wayne retire (and Morrison must know this too), he will be Batman again. That's why I think the premise of Batman RIP is false any way you look at it.

I like this reading of RIP, Tuomas, and it reminds me of Morrison's interviews where he'd emphasis the changes that Batman has gone through over his comic book career. Like, he didn't want to see goofy Batman and serious Batman as two different interpretations, but as the same character at different points in his life. So maybe RIP was an attempt to say - we can end this (very lengthy) chapter of Batman and maybe when he comes back, we can try something new. The dynamics can change. He can continue to grow. (Which maybe plays into the no-beard versus beard thing, and maybe the idea of a Final Crisis in general -- trying to push past this brooding, dark chapter of the DC universe, or spend it out so that there are no more chips and something different has to begin again.)

*The Omega Effect doesn't outright kill you, it takes you out of your time & makes you live your various possible existences. (That's what happened to Shilo in SS:MM #4, for instance, and what happened to Sonny Sumo in Kirby's Forever People.)

According to Darkseid's Wikipedia page page the Omega Beams can both erase/kill someone completely (and I'm pretty sure we've seen them do that before), or put him into the Life Trap. In the case of Shilo Darkseid seemed to have a motivation to do the latter. With Batman, I can't see any reason why Darkseid would want to put him into the Life Trap rather than erase him.

and maybe when he comes back, we can try something new.

I think the likely outcome of RIP and FC is that, when Bruce returns, his experiences with Hurt and the Life Trap have changed him, so we'll at least see a metaphysical rebirth of Batman even if Bruce assumes the role again. At least that's how I think Morrison has planned it, we'll see if future Batman writers will agree. It would be sad to see Dick give up the cape, but at least this resolution would be better than a return to the same old same old.

Here's some notes on the final issue...

Final Crisis #7
This issue features what I think are both Morrison's best and worst qualities. On the one hand, there are plenty of "OMG!" cool and clever moments, but on the other hand there's also a lot of "and then this happened and then this happened and then..." type of storytelling, which lacks proper structure and sense of drama. We've seen Morrison do this many times before, the best example I can think of is Seven Soldiers #1. But at least with SS #1 it was obvious Morrison had too few pages properly tie all the threads together, so he had to rush through each storyline. In FC #7, however, there's plenty of space devoted to stuff that's kinda irrelevant to the main plot, whereas the main story feels like several important bits were simply left out.

For example, on pages 6-7, why is there a scene with Supergirl fighting robots that look like the robot JLA from JLA Classified? The robots were only introduced a page before, and they serve absolutely no purpose in the story. On page 12 there's a panel that says "this is how Checkmate went down fighting", and there's some robots with mohawks battling Darkseid's forces. Maybe this panel refers to some additional FC material, but we haven't seen these robots before or after in the main story, and there's no explanation where they came from, so including them into that one panel feels confusing and unnecessary. And on page 14, do Hawkman and Hawkwoman die while fighting that Lord Eye? It's kinda unclear, but if they do, casually killing two longstanding characters in a fight that lasts two panels feels undramatic. On page 17 we learn about Morticoccus, "the god-bacterium designed to strip Earth's heroes of their powers", but previously there'd been only one single-panel reference to this bacterium in issue #6, where a handful of heroes are losing their powers. Seems like Earth's heroes losing their powers would be an important plot point that would've been mentioned earlier, but we don't really see anyone getting depowered besides those few folks in that one panel. In the panel preceding the Morticoccus one we see that Supergirl definitely still has her powers, so why wasn't she infected? It makes no sense to introduce a seemingly important plot element this late in the story, especially when it's done in a way that only confuses the reader.

On page 17 we see that Wonder Woman is still under Darkseid's control, but the next time we see her she is suddenly herself again. So how was she freed? Looks like Frankenstein had something to do with it, but we never really find out. You'd think it makes more sense to devote a few panels to explaining this rather than to Supergirl fighting some random robots?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the Black Racer supposed to be Death? On page 7 we are told that Darkseid was "fatally wounded" by Batman's shot, so wouldn't the Black Racer have come for him anyway? Why were the Flashes needed to lead him to Darkseid? If this was the excuse to resurrect Barry, it's kinda flimsy.

We learn that Superman wishes the Earth (maybe the whole universe/multiverse?) back together with the Miracle Machine, so why do we see him putting people in the "freezer" on page 18? Did the Miracle Machine only restore Earth, but people still needed to be freezed, and then defrosted and put back to Earth? Were all of Earth's 6 billion inhabitants put into the freezer? Seems like an impossible task, even for Superman. I don't see why Morrison had to include this scene, wouldn't it have been easier to make Superman simply wish everything (including people) back they way it was without any of this freezer business?

To be honest, I think including Mandrakk in this issue was unnecessary. Superman Beyond was awesome, the fight between Superman and Mandrakk in it was very cool, but I think it should've been a self-contained story. Darkseid is the real villain in FC, he's a much more impressive character, and his demise is more memorable. Having Mandrakk appear as a "boss number two" feels anticlimactic, especially since he is so easily beaten here. And we never even learn what Mandrakk's plan was. Did he intend to destroy the multiverse, or rule it, or just feed on it? Was he using Darkseid, or did Darkseid set him free by coincidence? I think this issue would've worked better if it had ended simply with Superman singing the celestial music to dissolve Darkseid and then using the Miracle Machine to wish for a happy ending.

Apparently the Overmonitor/God retires the Monitors, but why is Nix Uotan the only one who seems to realize this? The other Monitors act like it's back to business as usual. We see Nix become human again, but does this happen to the other Monitors too, or does the Overmonitor completely erase them? I think making all of them human would be fitting; the Monitors' "crime" was that they'd become vampires feeding on the stories of the Multiverse, because they had no stories of their own, but if they become mortals each and every one of them now has a story.

On the second to last page, in the first panel, we see that a rocket has landed where the caveman lives. It's the same rocket that we see on pages 6-7, the rocket in which Lois & co load the mementoes of humankind (including Superman's cape and Batman's light signal). So apparently it flew trough the time distortions into the distant past... What's the siginifigance of this? And surely it's not a coincidence that it looks like the rocket in which Superman arrived to Earth? (In fact it could even be the very same rocket - did Ma and Pa Kent save it?)

On the last two pages see Batman placing something on top of the dead caveman. I first assumed it was his utility belt, but if you check the previous issues, the utility belt Batman is wearing in them looks considerably different from this belt. I guess you could blame it on discrepancy between artists, except that I think Mahnke drew the last page of issue #6, and even there the belt looks different. So could the difference between the two belts mean that this Batman (or this reality) is not the same as the one we've seen before? Is Batman caught in the Life Trap?

I never really followed the connection between the Darkseid and Mandrakk storylines - in fact maybe there really isn't one? - so I'd be interested in what if anything I missed... there was interaction between the Darkseid stuff and the monitor stuff (Nix Uotan hangs with Metron, e.g.) so perhaps I'm wrong... I don't think it's such a big deal since I don't think the story is meant to handle too much scrutiny

I don't think there actually was much connection between Mandrakk and Darkseid, except that Darkseid's shaking of the multiverse somehow allowed Mandrakk get out of his tomb. That's why I thought Mandrakk was a good villain in the mostly self-contained Superman Beyond, but rather extraneous in the main Final Crisis storyline. Leave Mandrakk out of FC #7, and the story doesn't really change that much.

Ha ha, I read this without having any real grounding in DC comics so I am still floored by there being eight Flashes.

trying to push past this brooding, dark chapter of the DC universe by paving the way for Blackest Night!

I thought Johns had planned The Blackest Night long before Final Crisis came out? I haven't been following the Green Lantern titles lately, but is there much connection between FC and TBN?

Nah, there's no real connection (yet). BN is pretty much just the culmination of several years' worth of GL storylines, spread out to encompass the DCU as a whole.

I think there were a few things in FC that were explicit set-ups for BN, like the Flash and the Batman bits.

and also the Aquaman and Hawkman bits.

Hawkman & Hawkgirl/woman are clearly supposed to die in FC--check out the two feathers on the "memorial" page--but apparently it was decided at some point after FC #7 had gone to press that they hadn't died yet. So a scene in a Dwayne McDuffie issue of JLA got rewritten in a hurry, and they got a life pass long enough to get themselves killed over in Blackest Night.

Here's some more general thoughts on FC:

* Batman breaks his vow of not using guns when he shoots Darkseid, but he also does something far more significant, which I only realized when I reread FC. Just before he shoots Darkseid he says that Radion "is toxic to your kind", so he must know the bullet will kill him. And killing someone has always been the ultimate taboo for Batman. (As far as I know this is the first time the post-crisis Batman consciously kills someone, but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.) Sure, the Flashes and Superman ultimately finish the job, but it's Batman who is responsible for Darkseid's death. More than anything, I think the breaking of his most sacrosanct moral code signals the end of Bruce Wayne Batman (at least metaphorically).

* The Monitors are told to be sort of leeches, who feed on the stories of the Multiverse because they have no stories of their own. I think this connects them to the Sheeda in Seven Soldiers, who similarly feed on the cultures of others (in this case their own ancestors), because they lack a culture of their own. And if the Monitors and Sheeda are forces of anti-imagination, this also connects them to the Archons/Outer Church in The Invisibles. (Though I think Darkseid and the Anti-Life Equation are a closer equivalent to the Archons - the ALE "slogans" in FC sound quite similar to what the Archons say in The Invisibles.) And if Superman's wish for every one to have a happy ending leads to the Monitors becoming human, then it is a similar sort of "everyone gets what they want" ending as in The Invisibles. The Monitors get out of their cul-de-sac of imagination, they all have stories now. Similarly, I thought Klarion didn't really betray the Seven Soldiers in SS #0: with him replacing the Queen and providing a fresh new vision for them, the Sheeda might find a way out of their cultural cul-de-sac, so there is no need for any future Harrowings.

Batman breaks his vow of not using guns
Has this vow ever actually been explicitly stated in a Batman comic?

More than anything, I think the breaking of his most sacrosanct moral code signals the end of Bruce Wayne Batman (at least metaphorically).
I think it's more significantly representative of the Morrison Batman that sees Brucio pragmatically setting aside his supposed code of honour to, y'know, save the polyverse.

Maybe so, but when Superman broke his equally strong vow not to kill for similarly pragmatic reasons, it was a huge deal for the character. Maybe Batman is more pragamatic when it comes to such codes of honour though?

Morrison's Batman is, at least.
Superman, of course, is all about the ideal(s). Even within his own story, he's aware that he's a symbol. Batman, meanwhile, again in his own story, is an agent of change.

Darkseid is the real villain in FC, he's a much more impressive character, and his demise is more memorable. Having Mandrakk appear as a "boss number two" feels anticlimactic, especially since he is so easily beaten here. And we never even learn what Mandrakk's plan was. Did he intend to destroy the multiverse, or rule it, or just feed on it? Was he using Darkseid, or did Darkseid set him free by coincidence?

I always read it as Darseid was the enemy within the DC universe and thus doomed to continue to have adventures and plans within DC continuity, whilst Mandrakk was a destroyer of stories and thus comics and wanted a void.

Darkseid for all his flaws works within the system of Kirby, DC, superhero figures & comic narratives. Mandrakk is outside this world and is a far worse enemy, although I also agree with readings that Mandrakk is the rot that set in when all comics had to be like the watchmen and for all Darkseids evil at least he was from the old-school trippy/cosmic side of things.

Darkseid is the baddie that is introduced early that we can all boo and hiss. Mandrakk is against the very notion of comics ( stories, narratives & adventures) having him come on at the beginning of a 7 part series is only going to have him hang around uncomfortably for 6 issues till the climax.

With Batman and the gun, I feel that Morissons Batman kind of knew that after RIP he was heading for the final act. Dr Hurt hints at this in RIP. So the gun thing is a last stand against the embodiment of all evil and an acknowledgment that it would have to be a mortal (and morally inflexible) hero like Batman to realise that only pulling the trigger would work.

The fact that its also a God must have forced him also. I couldn't see it happening if it had been Libra standing there.

Tuomas, thanks for putting your thoughts down - I just read it and had a lot of the same questions. Definitely going to re-read this while perusing that annotations site.

I think Dr. Superman's logic about Morrison's Batman v. his Superman is correct. It surely is no coincidence that Batman betrays both his anti-gun and anti-killing vows to save the multiverse which results in his own death. ("Death", since even the last page of the story admits he's not really dead, like the "hope for resurrection" of Martian Manhunter in issue #2 almost does.) Hamildan's post above seems pretty right too, regarding Mandrakk vs. Darkseid, though reading it, it did feel weirdly sudden to drop him in there in the final issue -- thank goodness Superman Beyond was included in the HC.

Really wish I'd been able to get a hold of those Fourth World books (as well as the Seven Soldiers books) before reading this, but I still totally dug it, even if I don't totally understand everything in it, just what seemed like what Morrison was trying to say about comics in this "FINAL CRISIS".

OK, trying to answer a few more of Tuomas's questions, and forgive me for overlapping with some things in the annotations that Tuomas already noted:

FC #1:

The caveman (he had his own comic for a while in the '60s, but for our purposes all you need to know is that he's a caveman) is given knowledge/fire by the gods, and his task is to put the protective symbols everywhere. (We see in #7 that his life's work has been writing them all over the place in his travels, and we also see them turning up as they're needed.) I gather that he has a vision of the end times in the same way that Kamandi has a vision of him--one of the effects of CoIE, and this crisis too, is that times are collapsed together in an alpha-and-omega way--the first boy on Earth encountering the last boy on Earth. Kamandi, as we see from his flash of dialogue in #7, has had a vision in Command D of the new Kirbyized world.

FC #2:

The Japanese heroes echo the Forever People (but so do the "six missing kids" that Turpin's looking for). Sonny Sumo is a version of a character who encountered the New Gods in the Kirby era--that version was sent to the past thanks to the Omega Effect, this one says something to the effect that he fell out of another world into this one & this Sonny Sumo's old life.

What brought Barry back: that's a question for Geoff Johns, I suspect.

Libra didn't abandon the Metron chair, he was just away from it at the time Barry and Jay discovered it. (The meetings of his society seem to happen during the day, the Barry/Jay scene is in the middle of the night.) Libra's group relocates to Florida very shortly thereafter, either because of their HQ having been discovered by the Flashes or because of the events of Revelations #1.

FC #3:

Mary Marvel is indeed possessed by Desaad. The hand writing "know evil" is a sort of digital/Earthly analogue to the hand writing messages on the Source Wall.

Superman Beyond #2: Yeah, Morrison's got a really odd relationship to Moore's work--he acknowledges it constantly, but he also tries to write things that act as a corrective to it. Superman Beyond has a lot of stuff that functions on a metafictional level--traveling through all the iterations of the Superman story (even, in that wonderful one-panel Civil War gag, the Marvel universe!) and trying to figure out where that monumental story-generating myth comes from and what it means, & obviously the Moore/Watchmen variation on it is a big one to grapple with.

Submit #1: The helmets don't (just) transmit the Anti-Life Equation, they make their wearers into Justifiers--actual foot-soldiers for Darkseid, as opposed to slaves who've lost hope.

I think that when the Metron sigil started appearing everywhere, people protected by it might've noticed that they were protected...?

FC #6:
Superman's in the future because he got called there in Legion of Three Worlds. (But that's not really relevant to FC proper, it's true.)

Darkseid seems, in general, less interested in killing anyone than in _destroying_ them.

FC #7:

The Supergirl-fighting-robots scene, and a lot of what follows it, seem to be there because of the conceptual frame for that section: it's literally a bedtime story being told to children, a fabulous fable with lots of action before it's time to go to sleep.

The robots with Mohawks are the OMACs (or Biomacs)--some of that got set up in "Resist," some of it is just Morrison reprising some stuff that was in Infinite Crisis and also echoes Kirby's "Great Disaster" material.

The freezer business predates Superman completing and being able to use the Miracle Machine--everything is collapsing in on itself, up to and including the story itself (the pace of all of FC starts fairly slowly and keeps getting faster and faster and faster and faster up to the ending), and so Superman is trying to save everyone by preserving them in much the same way that we bag-and-board-and-file superhero stories to preserve them.

I suspect the rocket that lands near the prehistoric Batman is in fact the one fired off earlier in the issue that contains all the most important artifacts of the superhero legends.

As for the Monitors as vampires: like the Sheeda and like the Archons, "us" and "them" turns out not to be a useful distinction. In Superman Beyond, there are a few strong parallels drawn between the Monitors and the readers of comics, and it's interesting to think about the story that way--readers living on stories in ways that can be heroic or vampiric... again, there don't seem to be specific answers to what the Monitors are supposed to mean or represent, just a lot of resonances.

I gather that he has a vision of the end times in the same way that Kamandi has a vision of him--one of the effects of CoIE, and this crisis too, is that times are collapsed together in an alpha-and-omega way--the first boy on Earth encountering the last boy on Earth.

I got this part, but what I would've liked the comic to explain is, A) how Kamandi knew about Metron's pattern, and B) how did he relay that info Black Lightning? Or did Black Lightning get the info from someone else? Kamandi's appearances in FC make little sense from the point of view of the story; he's basically there to emphasize certain plot points, but it's impossible to know what exactly happens to him and why.

Sonny Sumo is a version of a character who encountered the New Gods in the Kirby era--that version was sent to the past thanks to the Omega Effect, this one says something to the effect that he fell out of another world into this one & this Sonny Sumo's old life.

I thought this explanation Sonny Sumo gives is curious. If he's someone else than the real Sonny Sumo's life, does that mean he's actually a New God who fell into Sonny Sumo's body, just like Darkseid fell into "Dark Side's" body? Anyway, Sonny Sumo is yet another character who's relevance to the plot is flimsy. Mr. Miracle comes to recruit him, and supposedly he has some good reason to do that, but Sonny doesn't really do anything in the story, does he?

The hand writing "know evil" is a sort of digital/Earthly analogue to the hand writing messages on the Source Wall.

I still think it also has to do something with the Hand of Glory in The Invisibles. I think the fact that The Hand of Glory was called a "cursor that moves in time" in The Invisibles, and the "know evil" hand being an actual cursor (and the same colour as the HoG too) is too much of a coincidence. See also the Hand of Glory/Mandrake/Mandrakk connection I made upthread; I know it's kinda far-fetched, but this is Morrison, so who knows? Also, I'd love to hear people's theories about what "know evil" actually means. What is the hand trying to say and why?

The freezer business predates Superman completing and being able to use the Miracle Machine--everything is collapsing in on itself, up to and including the story itself (the pace of all of FC starts fairly slowly and keeps getting faster and faster and faster and faster up to the ending), and so Superman is trying to save everyone by preserving them in much the same way that we bag-and-board-and-file superhero stories to preserve them.

I got this, but since it seems unlikely Superman actually freezed all the sentient beings on Earth (or in the universe), I don't understand why he did in the first place? If the Miracle Machine does whatever you wish it to do, couldn't Superman just have wished for everything to return to the way it was without any of this freezing business? Did Superman only freeze his friends and loved ones (that's how it looks like in FC #7) in the case the Miracle Machine wouldn't work?

I suspect the rocket that lands near the prehistoric Batman is in fact the one fired off earlier in the issue that contains all the most important artifacts of the superhero legends.

It is the same rocket, or at least Mahnke draws it the same way. But what I was really asking is, what does it mean it landed there? Surely it's no coincidence that it's in the same place Bruce Wayne is now... Was Batman's body actually put in the rocket, and then he somehow recovered during the its trip? (That wouldn't explain the different-looking utility belt though.) And why does the rocket look like the one Superman came to Earth in? I guess/hope these questions are explained when Morrison or someone else eventually brings Bruce Wayne back.

Sony Sumo is the link between Shilo Norman & the Super Young team. He's the reasons the Super young team want to join them.

and Shilo says he needs Sonny to "recruit a team"

But the Super Young Team doesn't really have much to do in the story either, does it? Nothing Shilo does in FC requires a team to support him, so it's kinda unclear what he needs one for...

I just noticed an interesting detail in Superman Beyond 3D #1 (I think Douglas may have mentioned it in his annotations): on page 8 Zillo Valla calls The Bleed "Ultramenstruum", and in The Invisibles the same term is used for "Magic Mirror", i.e. the floating, reflective ooze that comes out of Lord Fanny's orifices, and which is said to be the stuff that binds the universe together. This raises a few interesting thoughts. First of all, with this terminological trickery Morrison cleverly reclaims the authorship of the The Bleed: obviously it was first created by Warren Ellis, but by naming it "Ultramenstruum" Morrison is saying that The Bleed is actually the same stuff he'd already introduced in The Invisibles, years before Ellis. Secondly, if The Bleed and the Magic Mirror are the same stuff, that would mean that The Invisibles universe is part of the DC multiverse, possibly even one of the 52 universes. I doubt anyone's gonna follow up on that idea, but it's fun to speculate.

Now that I think of it, there's actually quite a few similarities between The Invisibles and Final Crisis, let me try to list the ones I can think of:

* Both series deal with a war against the forces of restriction and anti-imagination.
* Both series have a scene where a protagonist who's sworn never to use a gun uses one to destroy the main bad guy.
* Both series have a similar ending: in The Invisibles everyone gets what they want, even the enemy, and in Final Crisis Superman wishes the best for all of us, a happy ending.
* Boths series end with the pictures/words fading into white, which is essentially a victory of the imagination; the infinite potentialities of the blank paper triumphing over the restriction of the ink.
* And of course there's the Ultramenstruum stuff mentioned above.

Can you think of more connections/similarities?

Question: in FC#7 Superman sings away the last remnants of Darkseid's spirit, and you see it dissipate. In the last panel on that page, you see... something... blow up. A spaceship floating in the Bleed or... I'm not sure. I'm not even sure where that scene is taking place (I assumed the Fortress of Solitude was where he was building the Miracle Machine). But uh, what happened at the end of that page?

The thing that blows up is the space station where Superman and most of the heroes have been hanging in for most of this issue (except for the flashbacks). It's a composite of The Fortress of Solitude, the JLA headquarters, the Titans tower, and, er, something else I don't really recognize (the Batcave?). You can see it properly on page 5, panel 1 of FC#7. There's no explanation on how it came into being, but I guess the heros just built it. I really have no idea why it blowing up leads Superman to a dark place where Mandrakk is, though, or why Metron's chair is there when we last saw it in the villains' hideout.

Ah - I thought that piece did look like the Titan Tower OR the Watchtower or something. I see what it is now, thanks. Looking at it now I think that last battle is still taking place there, since I assume the Miracle Machine and survivor freezer has got to all be in the same location as it's blowing up.

One thing that I've always believed about Morrison, at least his DC work, is that he's writing one story, connected in more than the fact that the characters were all published (and largely owned) by one publisher. So I'm a hearty endorser of Tuomas' observations. It almost makes me want to read FINAL CRISIS again. Almost.

I wouldn't say it's all one big work, but there's a definitely major connections between Animal Man, Flex Mentallo, The Invisibles, The Filth, Seven Soldiers, and Final Crisis at least: they all deal with fictional entities breaking through the fourth wall into the "real" world, and a major them in all of them is the power of imagination and how it relates to being human (The Invisibles, 7S, and FC are quite explicitly about a conflict between the forces of imagination and anti-imagination). But with his other major works (like All-Star Superman, JLA, New X-Men, Doom Patrol, Batman), while they certainly have some thematic and narrative connections to the above mentioned stories (ASS, for example, provides the final proof of what the child universe Qwewq is, which is rather important for 7S and other interlinked stories too), it's harder to say they're all one and the same story. It's true, though, that almost all of his works contain rather obvious links to each other: Kill Your Boyfriend, WE3, and Mystery Play are the only ones I can think of that pretty much stand alone and don't connect to the larger "Morrisonverse".

"One story" might be overreaching, but it's all certainly the Morrisonverse, at least in terms of his DC work. And perhaps it's most useful to set that as the boundary.

The Watchtower blows up as its the last thing to survive in the face of the anti life equation. it has to blow up to show how superman is totally alone in the universe.

I think at the end of FC7 you see it being bombarded by the anti-life

it is Superman (& miracle machine) vs. everything else (the anti life)

and how with the miracle machine his wish for a happy ending recreates everything from nothing.

this is how far evil had got in Final Crisis. it had beaten everything except superman (cause he cant be beat, amirite?)

but by Supermans final wish, everything was recreated.

Er, I don't think Superman is alone in the universe, because the Superman Squad, the Green Lantern Corps, the angels, and the other assorted heroes show up to fight Mandrakk too. Or did Superman use the Miracle Machine to wish them there?

Actually, I think it's Nix Uotan who summons all those folks there. So Superman is definitely alone.

"definitely not alone"

I believe it was Nix Uotan who did the heavy lifting there, though there is a panel where he says something like "Signal received, Superman" after the Miracle Machine wish, I think. And he did have all the billions of people in the freezer and those other living superheroes, though Anti-Life's cosmic cloud or whatever was suffocating the station.

According to either Wolk or Uzimeri's annotations, what happens in the last scene with Nix Uotan is that the Overvoid (the white page) is swallowing up the Monitors and their universe, as there's no more need for them, and hence they'll stop feeding on the Bleed, allowing the multiverse to grow unchecked. (I suppose this is part Superman/Morrison's happy ending!) So Nix's reward is that he gets to live out his own story as a human, but does that mean the other monitors just faded out of existence? Also resurrected on earth? Does Nix Uotan remain the Judge of All Evil, or is that role now unnecessary? It his story of true love over too, ending tragically? Or is this all simply left unwritten?

(tbf I don't know how many of these questions are relevant to FC, if any)

I think the other Monitors must have been resurrected on Earth too, otherwise it's not a happy ending for all, and that's what Superman wished for. The happy ending for the Monitors is that once they have become mortals, they all have stories of their own, and they don't need to feed on the stories of the Multiverse anymore.

I guess the dead body of Batman in FC is explained in Batman and Robin #8, sort of... But I still don't quite get it: why did Darkseid think he would need a dead copy of Batman? What use did he have for that, when he was about to conquer the whole world anyway? And why did he put the clone in a Batman suit between the time the real Batman escaped and when he shot him? He didn't know Batman was coming to him, so it's not like he could've planned in advance of sending Batman back in time and leaving the clone body behind. Plus I still don't get why he sent Batman back in time instead of killing him in the first place?

But I still don't quite get it: why did Darkseid think he would need a dead copy of Batman? What use did he have for that, when he was about to conquer the whole world anyway?

WHOLLY EXTRAPOLATING HERE:

As a tool; the better to break morale, let's say. Clearly he's learned by then not to underestimate Batman (respecting his enemy enough to commission an entire army of clones from him, the better to bend and break break break the world), so, whilst the hunt for Batman continues, he can parade the bloodied corpse of this man, this...epitome of AWESOME, on a pike so as to permanently impress frowns on any remaining resistance, the ensuing river of tears being put to good use for his hydroelectric power plant...of Evil!

Plus I still don't get why he sent Batman back in time instead of killing him in the first place?

Clearly he expects him to die of smallpox within moments of arrival.

Or bcz that's how Omega Beams work? Also BOO AT TUOMAS for flinging spoilers for B&R#8 willy-nilly!

Like someone said upthread, in previous Darkseid stories we've seen the Omega Beams can both totally erase someone out of existence, and send someone to live in alternate realities/histories. Here is an example of the former:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TheomegaeffectNG11.jpg

What I don't get is why Darkseid choose to do the latter instead of just terminating Batman's existence?

Sorry about the spoiler, I thought now that B&R #9 is out too, everyone would've read #8 already.

Whoops, sorry, this is the pic I was supposed to post:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5a/TheomegaeffectNG11.jpg

uh but desaad was still around after that!

Yeah, because Darkseid later resurrected him. But the Omega Beams didn't sent Desaad to some alternate history, they completely erased him. So saying that Batman was sent to the past because "that's how Omega Beams work" doesn't sound like a good enough explanation, because in previous stories they have been shown to kill people.

From here:

Well one of the big questions that everyone is going to be asking is what exactly is the Omega Sanction. In Seven Soldiers, we saw the Omega Sanction transport Mister Miracle to a number of harsh realities until he arrives back seven days later. I could be wrong, but it also seemed like you suggested in Final Crisis #6 that Sonny Sumo might have been sent through time via the Omega Sanction. And of course, there's Bruce, who is sent all the way back to the dawn of man and the last days of Anthro when he's hit. So what is the Omega Sanction, and why does it affect people differently?

Morrison: It fires its victims through time. Originally, it sent people back to different time periods in Earth's past, as seen in 'Forever People', and then I came up with a version of it that actually reroutes the victim through a disorienting succession of different lives, each of which grows more hopeless and more horrible until your soul is dead. Kirby did the bouncing-through-time original and I made up the multiple-corrupted-lives adaptation for the "Mister Miracle" series.

It affects people differently because of the higher levels of cruelty shown by the incarnate Gods in Seven Soldiers and Final Crisis.

Yeah, I know what the Omega Effect is and what it does, but I've been trying to say is that that's not all Darkseid's beams can do. In previous Darkseid stories it's been show he can also kill people with them. (He'd be a pretty weak-ass God if all he could do is zap people into the past.) And I don't get why he doesn't do that to Batman. That quote from Morrison doesn't explain it, unless Morrison thinks the Omega Effect is the only effect the beams can have.

I know this sounds like a minor point to complain about, but I thought the way Batman averted death in FC was weak. Darkseid has no reason not to kill him. And Batman's heroic sacrifice was probably the most awesome moment in the whole story, so it was kinda undermined by the revelation that Batman didn't die after all. And I really like the idea of Dick finally taking the mantle of Batman, and in Batman & Robin Morrison has managed to make Dick a likable character, who both works as Batman and is significantly different from Bruce. I'd have no problem with it if Bruce had actually died and Dick would become Batman permanently. I know this isn't something Morrison could've actually pulled off, but I just find this whole Bruce-is-not-dead-but-in-the-past thing a weak way of getting back to status quo.

And I don't get why he doesn't do that to Batman.

Because then they couldn't do a RETURN OF BATMAN storyline.

Also, you seem to miss point of the cynical cruelty that is The Life Trap!

^^This. Erasing someone ends their torment - trapping them away from all they love and making them more and more miserable is a far greater punishment. Thus, he used the Omega Sanction vs the Omega Effect.

I still say the coolest way to bring back Batman would have him either just walk into the Batcave or show up at JLA headquarters and with no explanation maybe except needing a shave. Why is he back? Batman doesn't need the JLA or his Corps of Robins to go into time and bail him out, because he is the goddamn Batman, that's why.

Yeah, because Darkseid later resurrected him.

uh but Darkseid couldn't REsurrect someone if he had never existed! make sense, Tuomas.

I can't cite Kirby chapter & verse here, but:
Wiping someone out of existence is something Darkseid seems to do to his own minions (esp. Desaad) when he is annoyed by them. In his mind it's a petty punishment easily undone according to his whim. It reminds them of their insignificance in the stony face of Darkseid. Remember that the Anti-Life Equation, which Darkseid seeks above all else is not so much about destruction as it is about the domination of his will over everyone else.

I still say the coolest way to bring back Batman would have him either just walk into the Batcave or show up at JLA headquarters and with no explanation maybe except needing a shave. Why is he back? Batman doesn't need the JLA or his Corps of Robins to go into time and bail him out, because he is the goddamn Batman, that's why.

Batman=Kenny!

now that I've read #8:

And why did he put the clone in a Batman suit between the time the real Batman escaped and when he shot him?

Presumably he was already in the Batman suit.

Sorry about the spoiler, I thought now that B&R #9 is out too, everyone would've read #8 already.

Didn't they come out like a week apart?

Anyway also now I've read it, GRRR ARGH DC for not putting Final Crisis on the cover of the two issues of Batman that Morrison intended as part of Final Crisis (or collecting them in Final Crisis), and then being two years behind floppies in your TPB program [yeah I know there's a hardcover of RIP, but if you think I'm paying $40-50 for a hundred-some pages of Tony Daniel, you have been CRUSHED by the LIFE TRAP]

Both of them actually have "Final Crisis" on the cover! See http://www.comics.org/issue/536026/cover/4/?style=default and http://www.comics.org/issue/536027/cover/4/?style=default ...

those links don't work but argh! I guess the issues sold out in my shop then. they certainly weren't promoted as being proper parts of FC ahead of time though. or if they were, underline my TPB whinge.

And why did he put the clone in a Batman suit between the time the real Batman escaped and when he shot him?

Presumably he was already in the Batman suit.

But he wasnt! In both Last Rites and Batman & Robin #8 we clearly see that the clones were (as you'd assume) naked in their growing tubes. So somehow Darkseid must've predicted what would happen and put one of the clones in a Batman suit for Supes to find.

Also, I don't really buy the "Omega Sanction is a worse punishment than destroying Batman" explanation. Not long ago, in Seven Soldiers: Mister Miracle, Darkseid had already witnessed that a strong-willed individual can escape the Omega Sanction. And he must know Batman is strong-willed enough, since he'd just escaped from an almost similar trap in Last Rites. So why, instead of completely destroying Batman, would he risk Batman escaping again, especially considering Batman had proven resourceful enough to almost kill him?

Ego. Anyone can kill Batman, but Darkseid would be the first to break him. Darkseid wasn't ever interested in killing everything; he was always about domination. He needs his enemies to know he defeated them. When Darkseid kills an enemy it is to cause greater despair in that being's allies. Using the Omega Sanction on Batman and than dressing a clone in his garb achieves both - Batman will know the despair of being unable to help his friends and all he's fought for and the other heroes think him dead. Win-win.

Darkseid had no problem killing Mister Miracle in Seven Soldiers, though, after he'd escaped the Life Trap. And unlike with Batman in FC, in SS Darkseid totally had the upper hand, he could've done anything to Mr. Miracle, but chose to just shoot him.

key - after he'd escaped the Life Trap.

If Batman comes back and challenges Darkseid we'll see what happens. The Darkseid of Seven Soldiers is chronologically after the Final Crisis Darkseid - he's still falling backwards through time. Mister Miracle's escape is in Darkseid's future, so he doesn't know the Onega Sanction is possible to defeat.

I don't think you're ever going to believe this version of Darkseid is consistent with other DC lore, despite lots and lots of explanations and proofs from other people. You don't like what Grant wrote. We get it.

The Darkseid of Seven Soldiers is chronologically after the Final Crisis Darkseid - he's still falling backwards through time. Mister Miracle's escape is in Darkseid's future, so he doesn't know the Onega Sanction is possible to defeat.

I don't think this is true. Unless I'm completely wrong, Darkseid's fall back in time is because of his "death" in Countdown to Final Crisis, not because of his actual death in FC. After Countdown he falls back in time into the "Dark Side" body he has in Seven Soldiers. In Seven Soldiers that body is still healthy, but in FC we learn that he has worn it out, which is why he needs to move into Dan Turpin's body. So the FC Darkseid is chronologically after Seven Soldiers.

I don't think you're ever going to believe this version of Darkseid is consistent with other DC lore, despite lots and lots of explanations and proofs from other people.

It's not even consistent with Morrison's previous usage of Darkseid... Anuway, my point was not so much to argue about DC lore rather than to say that the way FC dealt with Batman's much-advertised "death" felt like a cop-out. The Omega Sanction solution both undermined the dramatic effect of Batman's heroic sacrifice, and was kinda dubious from a character point of view.

But he wasnt!

idk what Last Rites is but IIRC from one read of B&R #8 Darkseid says "okeydokey, flush all those dodgy tube-Batmen down the drain except one which we'll keep around in case"

so they flush the rest and then dress up the one they decided to keep as a cunning decoy

right?

also re 'much-advertised "death"' - Morrison repeatedly said over and over in RIP publicity that he wasn't going to die

Okay, with the issue in front of me:

But he wasnt! In both Last Rites and Batman & Robin #8 we clearly see that the clones were (as you'd assume) naked in their growing tubes.

"DISPOSE OF THEM. ALL BUT ONE."

As I said.

So somehow Darkseid must've predicted what would happen and put one of the clones in a Batman suit for Supes to find.

"A PERFECT COPY OF BATMAN, DEAD?

I CAN USE THAT."

Gosh you're right T-dogg, no reason at all to infer that Darkseid would have stashed his dead Batman clone in a Batman costume to make people assume it was Batman! What WAS I thinking?

Er, my point was that the cunning decoy Batman corpse would've been kinda useless if the real Batman was alive and kicking, or if anyone saw what happened to the real Batman, so Darkseid must've somehow predicted that after Batman escaped he wouldn't join the other heroes, rather than come after him alone, which would give him the chance to send Batman into the past and replace him with the clone corpse without anyone else noticing. I guess it's possible Darkseid planned the whole thing like this, but it still seems a bit far-fetched to me.

Anyway, I just realized that Final Crisis might've provided an answer to a question that always bugged me about the Rock of Ages arc in JLA. In that story, the time-travelling heroes must stop Superman from destroying the Philosopher's Stone/Worlogog, because its destruction will lead to the dark future where Darkseid has conquered Earth. What bugs me is that the story never explains why destroying the Worlogog would lead to this future, especially since there's no obvious connection between the Worlogog and Darkseid. However, in the end of Rock of Ages, the heroes give the Worlogog to Metron, and in Final Crisis #7, Superman discovers "Element X" in Metron's chair. Element X looks similar to the Worlogog, and Superman uses it to power the Miracle Machine, so I guess it's possible the dark future in Rock of Ages would've resulted from Superman not being able to use Element X in FC. However, there's a couple of problems with this theory... First of all, since Superman has seen the Worlogog before, wouldn't he have called it that in FC #7, and not "Element X"? Secondly, Supes discovers Element X only after he has (supposedly) sang Darkseid to death, so I'm still not sure exactly how the future of Rock of Ages would've happened, since Element X isn't used to kill Darkseid.

And speaking of unexplained things in Rock of Ages, can someone explain to me why, in the future Earth of that story, Orion destroys the universe after Darkseid had been defeated? That one bugs me even more than the Worlogog thing. Orion says he does it so that the universe will be free of "Darkseid's taint", but by that point the heroes had already defeated Darkseid and he was dying. So what was the point of destroying the universe?

Darkseid didn't have to predict exactly that Batman would come after him alone after escaping from something not shown in the comic, he could keep his Batman clonepse around IN CASE an opportunity presented itself!

I remain glad that I did not read anything Final Crisis related.

You shouldn't be! It's not a bad series or anything, just a bit of a mess, even by Morisson's standards. But there are enough of cool and awesome moments to make up for the plot incoherence. And the Superman Beyond 3-D mini is simply one of the best things Morrison has ever written. IMO it's even better (and more fun) encapsulation of the major themes in his work than Flex Mentallo, and in half the space.

It's just that it seems like one of those things where you would need to have a PhD in the (rubbish) DC Universe to have the vaguest idea what's going on.

Pretty much. The whole thing is framed on characters like Anthro & Metron, who only show up to signify the gravity of the crossover. Show me one DC stan who has ever read an Anthro comic.

ANTHRO is one of those great oddball late 60s titles that temporarily made dc a semi-interesting comics company, eg CAPTAIN ACTION, HAWK AND DOVE, ANGEL AND THE APE, THE CREEPER, BROTHER POWER THE GEEK etc etc. ANTRHO was written and drawn by a guy called howie post, who had a really interesting career in and out of comics and animation, and some issues were inked by wally wood! Far more interesting and entertaining than 90% of DC's usual superhero balls

I've never read an Anthro comic and I didn't who the guy was when I first read FC, but it didn't matter, because his role in the story it's pretty obvious even if you have no knowledge of his history. Metron is another thing, but he's not a minor forgotten character, is he? I'm not that well versed in DC lore, but I had no problems getting what the various characters do in the story. If you have the basic knowledge on the major DC heroes (Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Flash) and know at least something about Darkseid and the New Gods, that should be enough. Knowing about some of the minor characters might enrich the reading experience, but what they do in FC is not hard to follow even if you don't know who they are. For me, a much bigger problem was that the plot had some holes in it and was sometimes hard to follow because of itself, not because of my lack of PhD in DC mythology.

It's just that it seems like one of those things where you would need to have a PhD in the (rubbish) DC Universe to have the vaguest idea what's going on.

Gah! No! FC proper is totally formulated to be self-contained. Yes, there are lots of obscure references that enhance the text if you understand them, but you aren't left in the dark if you don't. It's one of the few superhero-centric comics I'd feel comfortable recommending to a non-comics person (assuming that person has a generally competent level of reading comprehension, as that seems to be the biggest stumbling block w/r/t reading FC).

You guys I am totally going to do my page-by-page explanatory walkthrough of Final Crisis as a video. No, seriously. In about a month. (I've been called upon to do it at a couple of parties already.)

It's one of the few superhero-centric comics I'd feel comfortable recommending to a non-comics person

Really? Even if I agree that it doesn't an extensive knowledge of DC trivia to read Final Crisis, I can't imagine anyone without a good knowledge of superheroes as a genre appreciating it. So much of it plays with, comments on, takes for granted, and deconstructs superhero comic conventions (and also specific conventions relating to Batman and Superman) that I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't familiar with those conventions. Take Superman Beyond 3D, for example: the whole thing is pretty much a meta-commentary on superhero stories. I can't imagine the bits about the Limbo of forgotten characters or about the alternate universes would make much sense even to a indie comic reader who's unfamiliar with superheroes, let alone to someone who hasn't read comics at all.

someone get ready to edit in Tuomas every ten seconds going "but what about--?"

x-post Tuomas OTM

I guess the Limbo thing was better explained in Animal Man, where it first appeared, but if you only come across it in Final Crisis, you'll probably have to already know what the term "comic book limbo" means in order to understand that you're seeing a literal interpretation of the metaphor.

As a casual comics Christian, I would definitely not recommend Final Crisis to me, let alone to a comics infidel. Maybe offer the All-Star Superman instead?

I'd definitely watch that walkthrough, Douglas! I still haven't figured out the answers to most of the questions I asked upthread.

what would be in the walk through? is it the kind of footnotes people do to those League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Comics, so people can get all the references to DC nerd stuff Grant Morrison drops?

the rolling Final Crisis thread

I pretty much never agree with Tuomas about anything but he's OTM about FC being near incomprehensible to non-DC comics nerds. It was near incomprehensible TO ME and I have more than a passing familiarity with most of the major characters (never heard of Anthro before tho)

yeah, I pretty much just tried to find a way to enjoy it without having to understand it.

Has there ever been a big superhero crossover event that would be comprehensible to non-superhero readers though? When I first read Crisis on Infinite Earths, it was pretty hard to swallow too, because I didn't know much about pre-Crisis DC characters. These kind of series are essentially meant for the loyal fans, right? The only difference with Final Crisis is that it was written by someone with a large fanbase outside superhero readers, so some non-nerds have tried to grapple with it too.

I think the main story is generally understandable even if you don't know all the references. Even as a fan I still needed a ton of help (like Douglas' notes) to get them, though, and when you don't get those references, you can feel like you're missing a huge chunk of the book, both in plot and greater conception - then it can seem like a really scattered, badly jumbled adventure with too many characters with minor roles jumping in and out that isn't even as enjoyable as say, the original COIE, or various other clusterfuck crossover stories. (Bear in mind I REALLY dug FC!)

I don't honestly think any non-comics fan, or even a casual fan, is really going to get what Superman Beyond was about? Though I guess it's arguable how much it really matters/connects to the central Darkseid story.

COIE was pretty straightforward though, the only weird thing a casual reader would have to understand is the concept of the multiverse, but not necessarily who Huntress was. Other than that, I found it pretty easy to read through a year or so ago (with no memory of what was going on in the DC Universe in '86 or who many of the characters were). It's paced well over the 12 issues, and doesn't feel too overstuffed. FC was gettin' in all this stuff from previous Crises, the aforementioned crazy 60s comics, and the Kirbyverse!

I found COIE literally unreadable. I think it was not so much the DC Universe stuff that melted my brane but the really fussy layouts.

I reckon superhero crossovers could be theoretically understandable by a casual reader, so long as they had heard of at least some of the superheroes involved. I suppose the problems come in if you start bringing in ones that a serious fan would know but a casual reader would not - do you throw in loads of "as you and I know" dialogue for the casuals or just let them sink or swim?

I have to re-read FC now, because I am convinced that you are all RONG. I do think reading some of the Morrisonian set-up books (52, Seven Soldiers, ASS, Animal Man, etc.) is helpful, and I would recommend reading those prior to FC, but I really do remember FC proper being among the most comprehensible of Morrison's works. It involves some close reading, but it does make sense. Douglas's notes were awesome, but I read them after the fact and didn't need them to sort out the what's what.

I dunno. If my girlfriend (who knows maybe slightly less than zero about anything relating to superhero continuity) makes it through Doom Patrol and is interested in reading more Morrison, I might see if she's up for testing my theory.