Final Crisis: the real horror story is the writing...

[jducoeur]

Okay, I've mostly been trying to keep my journal light and upbeat lately. But you have to have some darkness to contrast with the light, right? So for my darkness I'm going to say exactly what I think about DC's current Super-Epic-Mega-Stupid crossover, Final Crisis. The following is more a rant than a review.

Let's be clear: I like Grant Morrison a lot. His best work has been among the high points of comics of the past 20 years -- stories like Animal Man, Doom Patrol and The Invisibles have demonstrated just how weird you can be while still writing a compelling comic book. I suspect that that's part of why I'm so very annoyed by Final Crisis: I can't just say, "Oh, it's just Jim Shooter" and shrug it off as expectedly crappy.

And really: it *is* crappy, both as a comic and as a crossover. First, let's talk about the writing. Now granted, epic crossovers are rarely magnificent examples of the medium, and the Crises have always been particularly dicey. But this is even worse than usual. I mean, in the middle of issue 6 (which provoked this little rant), we have two characters bemoaning how they love each other, but cannot bring themselves to tell each other, despite the imminent end of the world. It reads like a segment of a badly over-the-top romance novel. Worse, I have absolutely no idea who these characters are (and I'm not exactly ignorant of DC continuity), and these two panels are their only speaking moment in pretty much the whole story. So an attempt at pathos comes across as, sadly, pretty pathetic.

Then there's how disjoint the whole crossover is. I can't even keep track of all the End Of The World grade elements in this particular crisis. There's Darkseid, who was killed last year (in two different and contradictory stories), and has been reborn in human form along with all the rest of Apokolips through means that have never actually been explained and is now using the Anti-Life Equation (mark 5.2) to take over the world. There's Vandal Savage, who has apparently been Cain all along, who is going to take over the world. There's Libra, a minor JLA villain who has pulled all the super-villains together in a plan to take over the world. And there's this desperate attempt to rectify all of the various versions of the Legion of Super-Heroes in a plot that so far doesn't make a lot of sense, but probably involves *somebody* trying to take over the world.

The Crises have always been sprawling messes, but even by that standard this is confusing as all get out. Some parts are definitely contradictory (in particular, anything that they foolishly allow Jim Starlin to touch), and really -- there are just too many plots. I can't help but compare it with the ongoing Marvel crossover that's been running for several years now. That's big and complex as well -- indeed, the Marvel stories have been touching the entire Marvel universe much more comprehensively than anything DC is doing. Yet each six-month phase of the Marvel story can be summarized in a concise sentence: "Iron Man leads the government in regulating the super-heroes, and Captain America leads a resistance movement"; "The Skrulls infiltrate and invade pretty much everywhere"; "The Hulk breaks Manhattan"; etc. The result is that Marvel's had a clarity and consistency that is just plain lacking in DC right now.

And then there's the big moment. (No, really, big spoiler coming up.) At the end of issue 6 of Final Crisis, Batman Dies! OMGWTFBBQETC! Let's see: how many different ways did they screw this up?

• First, there's the fact that they have been foreshadowing this blatantly for months. For heaven's sake, they've been advertising stories by the collective title of "Batman, R.I.P." for ages. This kind of kills the shock value.


• There's the dreadfully contrived symbolism of the climax: Batman, Mr. "A Gun Killed My Parents; Only Bad Guys Use Guns; I Will Never Ever Ever Use a Gun", uses a gun to kill Darkseid, and is killed himself in the same moment.


• Then there's the fact that this all feels rather familiar. The very next page after Superman walks out with Batman's dessicated corpse, we get the two-page ad for "The Battle for the Cowl", showing all the people who are going to try to take over the name "Batman" in the coming months. Those who have been playing along at home for enough years will find this all eerily familiar: yes, it is *exactly* the way they handled Superman's death a decade or so ago. You will note that Superman stayed dead for exactly one year -- I would lay decent money that Batman will follow suit.


• Finally, just to put the cherry on top, what did they do in the issue right before this? They *brought back Barry Allen*. Yes -- one of the two important deaths from the original Crisis, the *avatar* of death in the DC universe, is alive again. Surely, there is no more effective way to demonstrate that death is meaningless and temporary here than to bring back the character who, for many years, they swore they would never bring back.

So where this is supposed to be deep and dramatic, it comes across as nothing but cynical -- and worse, unoriginal.

I'm a serious, longtime DC junkie. I've been following DC comics pretty faithfully for 30 years. But about a year ago I decided that I was going to give DC through the end of Final Crisis, and if they screwed this one up I was going to swear off of the bulk of the line. So far, they've done nothing to dissuade me, and I've been dropping an average of about one book a month. I find myself alternately angry and pitying about the whole thing, as only an apostate can be. But the fact is, DC is managing to disgust me as thoroughly as Marvel did fifteen years or so ago. And I suspect the result is going to be the same: me dropping nearly the whole line for a fair number of years, until they wise up and start hiring people with a clue again...

Comments

[baron-steffan.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've been subscribed to Green Lantern and GL:Corps for a few years now, and so peripherally I've been following the rest of the DC 'verse, and it's been pretty sad. I'm unapologetically stuck in the heyday of my comics-reading days with the heroes I knew, as I knew them, in the 50 and 60's thank you very much. With a very strong nod to the alternate 'verse of "Kingdom Come", which is one of the best things I've ever read, period. But the crap they're spewing now? The "finality" of DC's endless string of final-ultimate-really-gosh-we're-not-f'ing-kidding-this-time-I-swear-it-with-a-cherry-on-top crises is about as "final" as the "Halloween" horror-movie series.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

"Oh noes, I killed someone with a gun!" needs to be on TV Tropes as hackneyed and never effective. Isn't that what led to Captain America hanging it up? And, wait, isn't he "dead" this year too? And wasn't there a "Cowl Race" for that garment as well? Cycles within cycles.

(Hmm. I forget if that was the doom for MacGuyver, too.)

It's not like any of this sticks. The explanation in Fables applies: you can't keep popular characters dead, for a very in-story, metaphysical reason: they just refuse to stay dead if enough people believe in them.

[jducoeur]

And, wait, isn't he "dead" this year too? And wasn't there a "Cowl Race" for that garment as well?

He *is* currently dead, and they're leaving quite ambiguous what that means -- indeed, one of the most curious things about the story is that we are *still* in the story called (every issue) "The Death of Captain America". Marvel being Marvel, even in-story a lot of people don't quite completely believe it.

It wasn't really a traditional cowl race, though. Bucky (see: nobody is ever really dead) slowly got forced into picked up the shield, and has been fighting against a bad guy also in the uniform (a brainwashed 1950's Cap), but the story was managed in a much more organic way, rather than the "look at the six parallel stories of people taking over the name" that DC has tended towards.

(And of course, then there's the Avengers/Invaders crossover, which is intentionally just messing with everybody's minds -- it's the 1940s Cap, everybody *knows* it's the 1940s Cap, but it's a very effective turning of the knife...)

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

Those who have been playing along at home for enough years will find this all eerily familiar: yes, it is *exactly* the way they handled Superman's death a decade or so ago. You will note that Superman stayed dead for exactly one year -- I would lay decent money that Batman will follow suit.

Delightful pun.

[gyzki.livejournal.com]

the *avatar* of death in the DC universe,...the character who, for many years, they swore they would never bring back.

Once they brought back Ferro Lad, it was clear nothing was sacred.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

"this desperate attempt to rectify all of the various versions of the Legion of Super-Heroes"

OK, stop right there. That's grounds for committal in Arkham for anyone involved in such a clearly-insane idea.

In the litany of unoriginality, you left out one good bit: After 'killing off' our headlining character, he gets a sendoff two-part story in his two traditional monthly books, written by the coolest British author we can get. With practically the same title, even.

I've been overhearing a few echoes of industry gossip about this one. Apparently, it isn't *all* Morrison's fault. Early drafts were very different (e.g., Batman really, for-true dies -- and becomes a New God, while Dick Grayson becomes Batman from then on), but DC kept changing stuff and screwing things up. GM says "I think my story would be more effective if the New Gods were left fallow for a year or two, so they're cool and different when I use them"; DC promptly schedules a highly-promoted story, "The Death of the New Gods". There's lots more such dirt out there, but I've mostly been ignoring it.

[jducoeur]

That's grounds for committal in Arkham for anyone involved in such a clearly-insane idea.

Actually, it's worse than insane -- it's trite. Perhaps more than anything else, it drove home to me that DC has been taken over by idiot fanboys: it's exactly the sort of thing I expect from mediocre fanfic.

DC promptly schedules a highly-promoted story, "The Death of the New Gods".

Which was, mind, terrible. I used to be a Jim Starlin fan (I adored Dreadstar), so I picked this up, but it was pretty wretched. Nor was it an outlier: having read a few recent Starlin series now, I'm coming to the conclusion that he (a) has his own story that he is going to tell, and to hell with continuity with the rest of DC, and (b) has entirely forgotten whatever he once knew about writing. I mean, he's never been Neil Gaiman, but all of his recent work is just plain *bad*. It's quite disappointing, and has finally gotten him dropped from my list of writers I follow...

[querldox.livejournal.com]

Morrison's a writer who I think really needs a fairly strong editor (who also, equally importantly, knows when *not* to edit) to get his best work out. Particularly in a mainstream superhero story, someone needs to be able to tell him "Look, I'm sure this makes sense with all the background in your head, but I and the readers don't have that. It needs to be clearer on the page".

For example, the two characters you refer to only were introduced back in FC#1. The background material published in various previews and sketchbooks made it clear that Morrison's really thought out who and what they are and why they could be very interesting. But almost none of that made it through to the actual comic, and they've been pretty much ignored since #1.

There's also an "idiot plot" bit. Despite the long established bit that Darkseid wants everyone under the control of anti-life as, well, his life's goal, they're not bothering to put Luthor, Sivana, etc. under it. Anyone who knows anything about these guys knows they're going to rebel in that situation. But lets just leave them free from control. Nah.