Superman was there like a shot to comfort Batman through his indigestion.
To be honest, I was expecting this to be something of a train wreck. DC’s big event comics are a mangy breed, many of them reviled by their own fanbase, let alone everyone else. Not only is this a DC event, but it’s a Crisis, a sub-brand of DC events almost that guarantees it’s going to be less than straight forward. Especially as this is written by Grant Morrison. Don’t get me wrong, Grant Morrison nearly always has great ideas. The trouble is they don’t always make great comics.
I was surprised that I actually found Final Crisis enjoyable. Enjoyable, but far from perfect.
Final Crisis begins with the death of Orion, one of the 4th World characters (a Jack Kirby-spawned set of cosmic books that has ties to Superman). Strangely, half the cast act like they don’t know who he is (while I don’t know who half the cast are). While Green Lanterns Hal Jordan and John Stewart investigate Orion’s death, the Society of Super-Villains are visited by a man called Libra, who offers them all their greatest wishes. This, he proves by killing the Martian Manhunter.
It’s not a massive spoiler to say that things ultimately lead to the return of Darkseid and many other 4th World characters. Certainly not as big a spoiler as the one on the cover anyway. Morrison casts the New Gods as fallen deities becoming reborn on Earth, twisting the world to meet their image, which is certainly a very interesting idea. The trouble is that it ends up competing with a different strand about the Monitors, an even more cosmic set of characters that observe and cultivate the multiverse. Here, Morrison posits that by observing the various universes under their control, the Monitors are becoming corrupted by the stories they see, changing from faceless, nameless organisms into fallible, story-driven characters like those they observe. Again, an interesting idea, but it doesn’t really gel with the Darkseid plot. It should have been taken off and grafted to another, dare I say simpler, plot and allowed to be its own story. Here it just distracts from and confuses the main story, rather than adds to it.
That’s before you even take into account that this is written by Grant Morrison. Again, a great ideasman, but he doesn’t always tell a good story. Final Crisis is unfortunately an example of this. It’s like 80% formed, but just falls short of actually working properly. The story is choppily paced. It bounces around between at least half-a-dozen odd ideas that can’t even be counted as plot-threads, because they’re never given enough room to breathe. These plotlets are all under-explained and you’re practically required to have Bachelors in DC continuity to get even the basics of what’s going on. I just about got by, but I honestly couldn’t tell you who Turpin is without Googling it. Morrison doesn’t deign to care to explain and he’s one of the main bloody characters. This will, by some I’m sure, be met by the response ‘well of course you’d have to know who all these people are to read this sort of big comics event’, but that is, frankly, bull. Every comic is potentially someone’s first. That’s the mandate Joe Quesada used when revitalising Marvel in the late 90s and it’s true. And while it’s perhaps not all that relevant for the fourth issue of some obscure little mini series, when it’s a big headline event like Final Crisis, it should be considered. There’s no way I would pass this on to a new or casual reader of DC, because there’s just too much they’re expected to already know going in. Combined with the under-explained panoply of Morrison ideas (big and small), it’s a very confusing read.
This is to say nothing of the artwork. The first two issues are fine, pencilled by JG Jones, perhaps best known for Wanted with Mark Millar back in the early 00s. Thing is, since then, Jones has almost exclusively been a cover artist and there’s generally a reason why artists like him make that transition – because they’re slow. Jones draws the first three issues, which I imagine amounts to the bulk of his lead-in time, and then scatterings of the remaining issues. The rest is covered by a variety of fill-in artists. Carlos Pacheco steps in to do some typically good work, while Doug Mahnke handles the final issue solo, albeit with a wide range of inkers. Frankly, it makes the whole series look like a bit of a mess. Marvel were in a similar position around the same time with Secret Invasion, where series artist Leinel Francis Yu was behind schedule. They opted to delay rather than hire fill-in artists, on the thinking that it was better to have a series uniformly drawn by one artist that would hold up when continued to be sold years down the line in trade paperback format, rather than rush out an uneven looking series to meet the monthly schedule. And looking at Final Crisis, it’s hard to fault Marvel on their decision.
The flow of the art isn’t helped by the break in the issues of the actual Final Crisis series collected for Superman Beyond and a one-shot called Submit. Beyond is pretty good actually. Drawn by Mahnke, it takes Superman away from the main Darkseid plot and expands the Monitor thread with a tour through the mulitverse. It was originally published in 3D, and though it isn’t here, there are odd little relics of that to be found if you’re looking. It’s an interesting two part story, but it caused annoyance when published because it ultimately ends up being essential to the understanding of the plot of Final Crisis. Fine when it’s included here, but when being sold separately and serially, incredibly annoying. Submit is another side-publication that’s essential to understand Final Crisis, to the point that I didn’t realise it wasn’t an actual part of the main series until writing this review (not helped by DC’s trade department’s pretty lousy presentation skills, naming individual issues in tiny little fonts hidden away on the respective covers). It’s a nice little breath of fresh air about Black Lightning and the Tattooed Man, a minor villain who starts to reconsider his position on the hero-villain spectrum in light of the massive cosmic destruction of the planet. I actually wish the Final Crisis series proper had been done like this, taking the story from a single perspective each issue, allowing the reader to both properly digest Morrison’s grand ideas and to get to know the characters better. Submit is let down though by the pretty mediocre artwork of Matthew Clark and, again, a variety of inkers.
With Final Crisis then we have a bit of bloody mess, albeit a strangely endearing one. I really like some of the ideas here, but they’re not well presented and expanded. The book comes with too many caveats for me to recommend it to anyone.
“You should totally read Final Crisis. It’s got some really interesting ideas, but it’s not easy to read and it’s pretty confusing for the most part and you need to know loads of DC stuff going into it and the art’s really uneven and it feels like two different stories shoved together.”
“Why’s it worth reading then?”
“Um…”
