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So, 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.
( Specific spoilers for pretty much the entire DC universe )
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.
( Specific spoilers for pretty much the entire DC universe )