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kilroySo, I remember hearing about the Crisis on Infinite Earths when I started collecting comics when I was nine. I missed it by a few years, but I started sifting through comic shops until I assembled the entire series. It was probably the first thing I actively hunted for. And I put that amount of effort into it because it was an amazing spectacle. I knew maybe five of the hundred or so characters in that series but I absolutely had to know what happened next. I still go back and read it occasionally, and while the magic has dimmed to a warm glow I still appreciate the craft with which they put it together. It was a ridiculous spectacle. It was landmark. It was probably uniquely responsible for getting me interested in the DC universe beyond Batman.
It worked.
Final Crisis... doesn't. It doesn't work as a story, or a superhero story, or a metastory. The plot is incomprehensible, there isn't any meaningful causality anywhere inside it, and I found myself not caring about characters that in other contexts I care deeply about. Archetypal DC characters were written not just badly, but wrong. And there's no payoff. These people have either forgotten how to write comics or the DC higher-ups aren't letting them write them the way they should be.
More than anything else, this drives home to me the death of the comics industry in its current form. DC isn't going to make it another ten years. When DC goes, comic shops go. And once comic shops go, it's over. Comics will continue, of course, but the current system will be dead. The "Final" in Final Crisis applies to me personally a lot more than I like. For the past few years I've been trying to convince myself that industry comics are just going through a bad patch, that they can still turn themselves around and be great again. Now I am, at last, convinced that it's over.
This came out a lot more maudlin than I expected, but don't think that I wasn't spitting nails and tearing my hair out this morning when I finished the series. Specific angst under the cut-- go take a look if you want to see what finally pushed me over the edge.
The Flash. So, they brought Barry Allen back after killing Bart earlier this year. This is bad form in any case because it takes away from Bart's death, but the thing that really gets me is that nowhere in any of the crossover titles is there even a tiny, one-line, throwaway explanation of how he came back. He's just there, poof! Hi guys! Oh, and did I mention they help kill Darkseid by outracing Death?
(side note: the only part out of the whole Crisis that I would actually keep is the part where Flash's Rogues Gallery lays the beatdown on their replacements summoned by Libra. It was classy, hard-bitten writing that was true to the characters. Only one problem: it's never explained anywhere where Libra got the replacements.)
Libra. Oh, yeah, the "main villain" of the series turns out to be completely irrelevant to the plot by issue four. They don't bother unmasking him or killing him, they just forget about him. Why was he necessary in the first place? You never did anything with his league of villains except stupidly and needlessly kill the Martian Manhunter in the first issue (yes, you read that right). All it would have taken was one dramatic unmasking scene where it turns out "Gasp, he was working for Darkseid all along!" but no, we don't get that. His story gets shunted off to a Secret Origins that nobody read and he drops off the face of the planet without so much as dying.
Lanterns. Red lanterns! Blood! Explanations none! Unnecessary sublot about Jordan being (really, really stupidly) framed for murder and (really, really stupidly) acquitted. The whole red/yellow/green lantern subplot is NOT NECESSARY to Final Crisis and could have been excised entirely into another book. And given enough space to not be idiotically brief.
Wonder Woman and most of the other iconic women of DCU are mind-controlled off-camera without even showing them fighting it off, and sent off as the hot-women kill-squad of the apocalypse.
The God-Box. Ultimate solution to the problem? Superman uses a "miracle machine" from the Legion of Super Heroes era to visualize world peace. I shit you not. Oh, and this after they summon 50 alternate universe supermen for one panel's worth of work.
Batman died. Fine. But they used a last panel to show that he might be back in the stone age. Psych! Also, he died killing Darkseid-- cool. Even if Darkseid could have totally vaporized him instantaneously before he could do it. But Batman did it by shooting him with a gun. A gun which was put into the series in issue one just so Batman could kill someone with a gun. There is no--repeat, no--good reason why this weapon exists. No precedent that I know of in the continuity, Morrison just made it up. And Batman shows no hesitation about using the weapon he's spent his life fighting against. He just does it.
And there's stuff about Revelations (God! In superhero comics!) too, but that deserves another entry and me having the energy to talk about it.
ARGH.
It worked.
Final Crisis... doesn't. It doesn't work as a story, or a superhero story, or a metastory. The plot is incomprehensible, there isn't any meaningful causality anywhere inside it, and I found myself not caring about characters that in other contexts I care deeply about. Archetypal DC characters were written not just badly, but wrong. And there's no payoff. These people have either forgotten how to write comics or the DC higher-ups aren't letting them write them the way they should be.
More than anything else, this drives home to me the death of the comics industry in its current form. DC isn't going to make it another ten years. When DC goes, comic shops go. And once comic shops go, it's over. Comics will continue, of course, but the current system will be dead. The "Final" in Final Crisis applies to me personally a lot more than I like. For the past few years I've been trying to convince myself that industry comics are just going through a bad patch, that they can still turn themselves around and be great again. Now I am, at last, convinced that it's over.
This came out a lot more maudlin than I expected, but don't think that I wasn't spitting nails and tearing my hair out this morning when I finished the series. Specific angst under the cut-- go take a look if you want to see what finally pushed me over the edge.
The Flash. So, they brought Barry Allen back after killing Bart earlier this year. This is bad form in any case because it takes away from Bart's death, but the thing that really gets me is that nowhere in any of the crossover titles is there even a tiny, one-line, throwaway explanation of how he came back. He's just there, poof! Hi guys! Oh, and did I mention they help kill Darkseid by outracing Death?
(side note: the only part out of the whole Crisis that I would actually keep is the part where Flash's Rogues Gallery lays the beatdown on their replacements summoned by Libra. It was classy, hard-bitten writing that was true to the characters. Only one problem: it's never explained anywhere where Libra got the replacements.)
Libra. Oh, yeah, the "main villain" of the series turns out to be completely irrelevant to the plot by issue four. They don't bother unmasking him or killing him, they just forget about him. Why was he necessary in the first place? You never did anything with his league of villains except stupidly and needlessly kill the Martian Manhunter in the first issue (yes, you read that right). All it would have taken was one dramatic unmasking scene where it turns out "Gasp, he was working for Darkseid all along!" but no, we don't get that. His story gets shunted off to a Secret Origins that nobody read and he drops off the face of the planet without so much as dying.
Lanterns. Red lanterns! Blood! Explanations none! Unnecessary sublot about Jordan being (really, really stupidly) framed for murder and (really, really stupidly) acquitted. The whole red/yellow/green lantern subplot is NOT NECESSARY to Final Crisis and could have been excised entirely into another book. And given enough space to not be idiotically brief.
Wonder Woman and most of the other iconic women of DCU are mind-controlled off-camera without even showing them fighting it off, and sent off as the hot-women kill-squad of the apocalypse.
The God-Box. Ultimate solution to the problem? Superman uses a "miracle machine" from the Legion of Super Heroes era to visualize world peace. I shit you not. Oh, and this after they summon 50 alternate universe supermen for one panel's worth of work.
Batman died. Fine. But they used a last panel to show that he might be back in the stone age. Psych! Also, he died killing Darkseid-- cool. Even if Darkseid could have totally vaporized him instantaneously before he could do it. But Batman did it by shooting him with a gun. A gun which was put into the series in issue one just so Batman could kill someone with a gun. There is no--repeat, no--good reason why this weapon exists. No precedent that I know of in the continuity, Morrison just made it up. And Batman shows no hesitation about using the weapon he's spent his life fighting against. He just does it.
And there's stuff about Revelations (God! In superhero comics!) too, but that deserves another entry and me having the energy to talk about it.
ARGH.