Final Crisis

[tommyboy]

Oh god..

They got to Tommyboy!

Please folks whatever you do... don't let them get you.

one of us!!
one of us!1
anti-life justifies my "not that good" meshes!!!1!!
submit!

[yell0w_lantern]

Sorry, I drew a Metron symbol on face. 

[The Hitman]

And I was off in another universe, getting the Deus Ex Machina Machine. 

[Zippo]

Also, for those who've read FC 7:

Spoiler

Is Batman trapped in time now, or something? What's up with that? This seems to happen every time somebody's body is turned into a shriveled skeleton upon death. Perhaps we'll see some new hero pop up using advanced technology to upstage whoever wins the battle for the cowl... 

[zuludelta]

I thought it was okay, excellent even, in stretches, but my appreciation of Final Crisis was greatly diminished by the fiasco that preceded it (Countdown To Final Crisis, which I gave up on four issues in because of the shaky art and poor editorial coordination) and the knowledge that what we saw in print is probably not the full story Morrison wanted to write, if the rumblings of discontent from both sides of the writer-editor divide are to be believed.

I don't know if those things that essentially had nothing to do with the mini-series as a stand-alone artifact soured my experience with Final Crisis and if that's an unfair criticism of the title, but in all honesty, I was less than thrilled with the final result.

On a technical and intellectual level, I get what Morrison's trying to do, but from a visceral and emotional level, the story just didn't resonate with me as much as it seems to have with readers who have a much more positive reading of the book. Interestingly enough, I have the same reactions regarding a lot of Alan Moore's work not entitled Watchmen. But hey, that's basically "varied reactions to art" in a nutshell.

I rank it right up there, probably Morrison's best work ever.

Hmmm... I'd probably put his Animal Man and All-Star Superman way ahead of Final Crisis in terms of his best superhero work. I'd probably put FC on par with the technically well-executed Marvel Boy (I don't think he's ever meshed with an artist as well as he did with JG Jones on that mini-series), which is probably one of his most overlooked "Big Two" projects.

[tommyboy]

I rank it right up there, probably Morrison's best work ever.

Hmmm... I'd probably put his Animal Man and All-Star Superman way ahead of Final Crisis in terms of his best superhero work. I'd probably put FC on par with the technically well-executed Marvel Boy (I don't think he's ever meshed with an artist as well as he did with JG Jones on that mini-series), which is probably one of his most overlooked "Big Two" projects.

I loved Animal Man, and All Star Superman. Both are a better, (or easier at least), read than FC in some ways. But both also sometimes felt a little...self contained. That's not a bad thing, but FC had this huge sprawling scope and cast that made it for me technically superior to animal Man, and probably All star supes as well.
I've heard rumblings that there were production problems and changes made to FC which may have damaged it. I don't know the truth of that.
I do know that it is pound for pound the most powerful, ambitious comic I've read this last year.
A strange comparison just occurred to me. The song by REM "its the end of the world as we know it" is similarly cluttered with apparently senseless non-sequiters and imagery, but I think it too works really well. I read final crisis a bit like I listen to that song, dwelling less on what made absolute sense than on the feelings it evoked, it's motion, it's distance from other things in it's genre. I'ts now the soundtrack for me for parts of FC. The analogy obviously falls apart pretty quickly, but I like it still.

[Vertex]

Can somebody PLEASE call Tommy a doctor!!

[zuludelta]

In retrospect, one of the things that probably helped mold my opinion about Final Crisis is my newly-developed, somewhat-mild-but-nonetheless-genuine aversion to the use of superheroes in metatextual and metaphysical contexts (Animal Man doesn't count, since I read it way before I developed this preferential quirk). I enjoyed All-Star Superman immensely despite this because it was just too much fun of a read (and I'm speaking as a comic book reader who's indifferent, at best, about Superman) but for entirely subjective reasons, I couldn't get past that aversion and fully get into FC.

As tommyboy put it in an earlier post, Morrison tackled some pretty heady themes in FC, such as the power of language, freedom vs. slavery, the nature of reality, among others, and he did a good job of getting his points across (IMHO), textual density and occasional lack of clarity notwithstanding. But (and here's where the subjective assessment comes in), I just didn't find myself being stirred emotionally by Morrison's contemplations on those themes (at least not in a positive way), and I suspect it's because my own materialist/rationalist views regarding those themes are, in some ways, diametrically opposed to Morrison's, who has spent a great deal of his comics-writing career exploring gnostic metaphysics/chaos magic-influenced avenues in his superhero writing.

[Blkcasanova247]

Y'know maybe I'm just not cool enough (which is kinda doubtful )...or maybe I just haven't drank enough of the Grant Morrison cool aid...but I just didn't get it! To me this whole "event" (and I wish they would stop) left me cold and feeling a little ticked? Talk about "convulted"! I kept waiting...saying to myself.."ok...it gonna get better...right? Or JG Jones art is worth it...but it wasn't. And sorry to anybody that loved issue 7...but what the hell was that?

Spoiler

He could even commit to Batman being dead! That was the only moment within that entire series that made me go "holy crap...I can't believe it...this is frickin' huge".

The fact that all of the books outside of Final Crisis proper (and legion of three worlds still isn't finished) had to fill the reader into what was happening in the main title is totally bogus and the thing that almost all fans complain about. Say what you want about "Secret Invasion" (I didn't think it was the most fantastic story) but all you needed was contained within one title. You didn't need to pick up "SI Front Line" or "SI X-Men", "SI Spider Man" or any of the supposed crossovers. Marvel at least got that right. This book didn't even come close to delivering...it was late(a lot)...paced badly and not even finished off by the series artist.

[zuludelta]

I don't think anyone here is drinking the Grant Morrison kool-aid... so far most of the responses here (both negative and positive) seem to be reasonable expressions of subjective taste and preference.

I do get occasionally annoyed with the unmitigated Morrison-worship that happens over at the CBR blogs/forums though, particularly when resident chief blogger Brian Cronin, after a commenter laid out his misgivings about the title, suggested that people who didn't like FC were probably unsophisticates too stupid to understand it. A classic pseudo-intellectual response if there ever was one on the blogosphere, of course (I suppose it never occurred to Cronin that taste in art is, you know, a primarily non-intellectual domain, and anybody who tries to justify subjective preference by calling on "objective" intellectual attributes ends up looking like the bigger fool). 

I don't think anyone can be "right" or "wrong" regarding their opinions about FC. You either liked it or you didn't, or maybe you felt indifferent about it. But the thing about art is that our responses to it are almost always visceral and emotional at their core. The intellectual side of art appreciation generally only comes in when people try to rationalize their responses to art, and that rationalization, improperly applied, generally leads to all sorts of ridiculous generalizations and pronouncements about how certain examples of art are unquestionably "better" than others and how admirers of the same are somehow "better" in terms of their sophistication and ability to judge aesthetics than those who aren't (which contributes to the common notion of the "art snob"). As my old Philosophy of Art prof used to say, there's no objective measure of good art or bad art, there's only art that you like, and art that you don't like.  

[Talavar]

I've a question: what did this Crisis actually do?

Crisis on Infinite Earths rebooted the entire DC universe (or tried), and got rid of the multiverse.

Infinite Crisis brought back the multiverse and tried to streamline some character continuity.

Final Crisis...?

[bat1987]

Y'know maybe I'm just not cool enough (which is kinda doubtful )...or maybe I just haven't drank enough of the Grant Morrison cool aid...but I just didn't get it! To me this whole "event" (and I wish they would stop) left me cold and feeling a little ticked? Talk about "convulted"! I kept waiting...saying to myself.."ok...it gonna get better...right? Or JG Jones art is worth it...but it wasn't. And sorry to anybody that loved issue 7...but what the hell was that?

Spoiler

He could even commit to Batman being dead! That was the only moment within that entire series that made me go "holy crap...I can't believe it...this is frickin' huge".

The fact that all of the books outside of Final Crisis proper (and legion of three worlds still isn't finished) had to fill the reader into what was happening in the main title is totally bogus and the thing that almost all fans complain about. Say what you want about "Secret Invasion" (I didn't think it was the most fantastic story) but all you needed was contained within one title. You didn't need to pick up "SI Front Line" or "SI X-Men", "SI Spider Man" or any of the supposed crossovers. Marvel at least got that right. This book didn't even come close to delivering...it was late(a lot)...paced badly and not even finished off by the series artist.

Spoiler

Morrison stated in several interviews before FC that something will happen to Batman and that is fate worse than death. So this turn of events was not a real surprise.

[tommyboy]

Zuludelta hit the nail on the head.
Either you like it or you don't. Neither says anything about your taste, intellect, or anything else.
Whilst I did like it, I happily aknowledge that it had faults, quite a few in fact, over and above the obvious ones like being late, inconsistent art, needing other books to fill some of it in.
But even I, who liked it, find it hard to say what it "did", at the moment.
It seemed to be removing the monitors from the multiverse, but why that is a big deal, I don't know.
It rebooted the new Gods/5th world and bought most or all of Kirby's creations firmly into mainstream DC continuity, but again, not sure how Big that is.
So honestly, I dunno what it "did", in those terms. It seemed less of an editorial/publishing device (which is all the first crisis was, really) to achieve some goal, and more of an actual story, of sorts.
I suppose bringing back Barry Allen, "killing" Batman and Jonn Jones dont count as an answer either.
I'll try to find out though..

[Blkcasanova247]

Heya guys
     I wasn't making a comparison or ripping on any of the contibuting artists work....I hoped that my love of JG Jones work would be worth continuing picking up the title...but it wasn't . I happen to think that the illustrations the other artist provided were all well done. It did also however "too me" break the flow(and I use that term loosely when it comes to FC) of the book. I hope nobody took my rant to heart...I wasn't making any attack...I merely stated "my opinion" on why I didn't like it. And I definitely appreciate everyone elses point of view but I do feel as though my points "for me" still stand.

[yell0w_lantern]

Oh, absolutely, it's all about taste. FC just isn't the kind of story-telling that works for me. I don't want this to turn into the GL Corps Message board where people ask your opinion then call you an idiot.

[thanoson]

Wait, there's a GL message board? What kinda idiot would make something like that up? You'd have to be a real @$#^%$ %$#@!#@$ for something like that.

j/k

[tommyboy]

Interesting interview with Morrison here:
http://www.newsarama.com/comics/010928-Grant-Final-Crisis.html

Bits I liked:

Spoiler

Grant Morrison:
More than anything else, it's the Final Crisis of the Monitors, as we'll see in #7 and brings that story from Crisis On Infinite Earths to a logical conclusion. It's also the Final Crisis of the Fourth World. How the challenges, possibilities and rules of the emerging Fifth World are developed is something that will either be acknowledged or overlooked by other DC creators in the years to come.
It's also 'final' in the sense that it's all about endings and apocalypses. It shows the DCU degrading, drained of all meaning, drained even of stories and characters, reduced to nothing but darkness, a mute Superman and a greedy Vampire God. We even break down the conventional storytelling modes at the end until there's nothing familiar left in an effort to convey what the end of a universe might feel like.

Spoiler

Grant Morrison:
I wanted to be faithful to the spirit of the King. This had to be a story of gods, of God in fact, hence the 'cosmic' style, the elevated language, the total and deliberate disregard for the rules of the 'screenwriting' approach that has become the house style for a great many comic writers these days. The emphasis on spectacle and wonder at the expense of 'realism', the allegorical approach...it's all my take on Kirby.

And also:

Spoiler

Grant Morrison:
It's one of the most highly-structured and demanding pieces of work I've done and brings to fruition a lot of long-time obsessions, I suppose. It's my Monitor-vision, high-altitude view of the DCU as an entity; before I take a long-awaited break to do some other work. It's my sci-fi/horror version of everything I love about DC, everything I ever thought or felt about DC, in one book. It's about the confusion and excitement of getting into this wild, colourful fictional continuum as a kid, and it's an attempt to define what makes DC unique and vibrant in relation to other superhero universes. It also offers a full cosmology of higher dimensions, including our own, and an insight into the creative impulse of God, so it's well worth the cover price, I like to think. It's filled with interesting and life-changing occult and philosophical secrets too and the more you read it, the more you'll pick up on them.

It's also a deliberate attempt to show how so-called 'rules' can be broken to create different kinds of effects in our comics. It's a way of using superhero comics to talk about the 'real' world that doesn't rely on news headlines, mock-'relevance' or 'adult' language and imagery.

I found myself wondering what it would be like if comics' storytelling stopped aping film or TV and tried a few tricks from opera, for instance. How about dense, allusive, hermetic comics that read more like poetry than prose? How about comics loaded with multiple, prismatic meanings and possibilities? Comics composed like music? In a marketplace dominated by 'left brain' books, I thought it might be refreshing to offer an unashamedly 'right brain' alternative.

[zuludelta]

Interesting interview with Morrison here:
http://www.newsarama.com/comics/010928-Grant-Final-Crisis.html

I like how he makes the comparison to 1999's Marvel Boy. I guess I wasn't just talking out of my pooper when I made a technical connection between what he was trying to do in that series and FC in an earlier post. Hooray for me! (on the other hand, this is probably also a sign that I spend way too much time reading and re-reading my old comics... boo for me!).

[yell0w_lantern]

Wait, there's a GL message board? What kinda idiot would make something like that up? You'd have to be a real @$#^%$ %$#@!#@$ for something like that.

j/k

http://www.thegreenlanterncorps.com/Forum/

[DrMike2000]

Interesting interview with Morrison here:
http://www.newsarama.com/comics/010928-Grant-Final-Crisis.html

Bits I liked:

Spoiler

Grant Morrison:
More than anything else, it's the Final Crisis of the Monitors, as we'll see in #7 and brings that story from Crisis On Infinite Earths to a logical conclusion. It's also the Final Crisis of the Fourth World. How the challenges, possibilities and rules of the emerging Fifth World are developed is something that will either be acknowledged or overlooked by other DC creators in the years to come.
It's also 'final' in the sense that it's all about endings and apocalypses. It shows the DCU degrading, drained of all meaning, drained even of stories and characters, reduced to nothing but darkness, a mute Superman and a greedy Vampire God. We even break down the conventional storytelling modes at the end until there's nothing familiar left in an effort to convey what the end of a universe might feel like.

Spoiler

Grant Morrison:
I wanted to be faithful to the spirit of the King. This had to be a story of gods, of God in fact, hence the 'cosmic' style, the elevated language, the total and deliberate disregard for the rules of the 'screenwriting' approach that has become the house style for a great many comic writers these days. The emphasis on spectacle and wonder at the expense of 'realism', the allegorical approach...it's all my take on Kirby.

And also:

Spoiler

Grant Morrison:
It's one of the most highly-structured and demanding pieces of work I've done and brings to fruition a lot of long-time obsessions, I suppose. It's my Monitor-vision, high-altitude view of the DCU as an entity; before I take a long-awaited break to do some other work. It's my sci-fi/horror version of everything I love about DC, everything I ever thought or felt about DC, in one book. It's about the confusion and excitement of getting into this wild, colourful fictional continuum as a kid, and it's an attempt to define what makes DC unique and vibrant in relation to other superhero universes. It also offers a full cosmology of higher dimensions, including our own, and an insight into the creative impulse of God, so it's well worth the cover price, I like to think. It's filled with interesting and life-changing occult and philosophical secrets too and the more you read it, the more you'll pick up on them.

It's also a deliberate attempt to show how so-called 'rules' can be broken to create different kinds of effects in our comics. It's a way of using superhero comics to talk about the 'real' world that doesn't rely on news headlines, mock-'relevance' or 'adult' language and imagery.

I found myself wondering what it would be like if comics' storytelling stopped aping film or TV and tried a few tricks from opera, for instance. How about dense, allusive, hermetic comics that read more like poetry than prose? How about comics loaded with multiple, prismatic meanings and possibilities? Comics composed like music? In a marketplace dominated by 'left brain' books, I thought it might be refreshing to offer an unashamedly 'right brain' alternative.

Recently, I've been finding Morrison's interviews better than his comics. Not that his comics are bad, but his interviews are usually fantastic, this one was no exception. It would be a great idea if they were printed in the inevitable trade of Final Crisis along with the actual strips.

[AncientSpirit]

I read this and still don't have a clue what happened.    (Only read the main FC books, none of the tie-ins.)

To me the reason this was called Final Crisis is because it's the final time I will fall for a DC book that uses the word crisis in it.

[thanoson]

Ok, I saw number 7 yesterday. I am in agreement with the other statements of WTH? It was very hard for me to follow for some reason. It kept jumping back and forth. And why did Black Flash wear that ugly outfit? Didn't even realize that was him. I like how Clark is just so casual with the machine.

[tommyboy]

Ok, I saw number 7 yesterday. I am in agreement with the other statements of WTH? It was very hard for me to follow for some reason. It kept jumping back and forth. And why did Black Flash wear that ugly outfit? Didn't even realize that was him. I like how Clark is just so casual with the machine.

I am pretty sure it was the Black Racer, not Black Flash chasing the Flashs. The Black Racer is a long established Kirby New Gods "death" type character. Not sure if Black Flash is supposed to be the same "character" as they do seem to have pretty similar functions.