Final Crisis: A Look At How It Ended

In the world of comic books (and possibly elsewhere), there seem to be two very distinct brands of complex storytelling. There's the type that presents an accessible tale on the surface, written such that anyone could appreciate it, but which also hides all kinds of delightful subtlety beneath it (such as: metaphors, visual irony, historical parallels, etc). Alan Moore wrote oodles of these comics in the 1980s and 90s, with Watchmen being the most extreme example. There always seems to be two rules in this camp: tell a good story first and foremost, and then give the reader as much as he's willing to dig for, after that. In some cases, of course, some people picking up one of those comics may get nothing more than an entertaining story of superheroes punching each other (which is probably all that they expected anyway). For other, more adventurous souls - like me - they get that immediate thrill plus a whole lot more, as they can re-read the material many times over the years and be rewarded with new gold on every subsequent pass.

The other type of complicated comics is what Grant Morrison has been increasingly producing. Put simply, it eschews that initial requirement of telling a straight-forward story, and goes straight for the "dig deep, O reader, and gems ye shall find" approach. You can suss that fact out of the material itself - which is not nearly as immediately accessible as those of us among comic fandom have grown used to - and from comments made by Morrison himself. For example, in an interview published on Newsarama this week, he says, "I choose to leave out boring, as I saw it, connective tissue we didn’t really need for this story to work. I choose to leave out long-winded caption-heavy explanations that bring readers ‘up to speed’, even as they send them to sleep." One of the problems with neglecting to include 'connective tissue,' of course, is that it's usually there for a reason. It actually serves a purpose. It's intended to bring everything together and make it all work, and yet Morrison apparently regards it as extraneous to the job at hand. And that shows in his work, perhaps never more strongly than in the conclusion to his Final Crisis series.

While I'd enjoyed Final Crisis # 6 (cover shown above) on first reading, it was somewhat more confusing and disjointed than the issues leading up to it. Even so, it didn't really prepare me for the completely disorienting final issue (cover shown below) that has set the comic book corner of the online community all abuzz (and not in a good way). Reading through various interviews with the man, I can appreciate what Morrison was trying to do in those pages. He was taking the universe-rending, chaotic energy of the events in the comic itself and metatextually trying to translate it into a form through which the reader could experience it himself. That's a lofty goal, indeed, but I'm not convinced (just yet) that it was either justified nor particularly well-executed. When working on previous series like The Invisibles, that sort of gambit has been completely appropriate. However, he was spearheading DC's big comic event of 2008 here (ignore the fact that your calendar now shows "2009"), and accessibility simply has to trump any notions of experimentation or haute art.

Why? Well, for one thing, many people who will pick up Final Crisis simply aren't going to invest the time and energy into inspecting the work that's required to make sense of it. This morning, for example, I re-read both issues in question, and got considerably more out of them that I had previously. But that's not going to be a standard reaction, especially upon encountering the bizarre story structure found in issue # 7. As I initially read it last Wednesday, excited at the prospect of finally seeing how the series would conclude, I grew increasingly frustrated with how little sense it was making. From what I've read on the Internet, that reaction was both common, and somewhat close-ended. In other words, most people weren't saying, "... but I can hardly wait to read it a few more times and see if I can decipher its meanings!" Instead, they were posting, "That's it for me and DC!" or "I'm done with Grant Morrison." Neither of those are welcome reactions, I'd suspect, and nor are they the way truly great comic work has been received in the past. So I think this is a failure, no matter how many cool ideas Morrison baked into the dough this time around.

And there are tons of good scenes throughout Final Crisis. It's a shame that J.G. Jones didn't get to draw the entire thing, as his pages were all gorgeous (sadly, none of the final issue was done by him). Similarly, Morrison throws around great ideas like they're candy at a parade, but doesn't appear willing or able to spend more than a fleeting moment on any of them here. I can't help but wonder what Final Crisis might have been like if he'd been forced to work with another writer (as happened on 52), and he'd been tagged as the "idea man" rather than the "final script guy." Maybe that would've been a disappointing mess, too, but at the very least we might have gotten to see more of what apparently remained only in the author's head.

Finally, I have to admit - even after two readings - that I'm not entirely sure what the "new state" of the DC Universe is, as a result of this event. One line in Final Crisis # 7 indicates that the populace at large is now aware of parallel worlds out there (whereas only select heroes knew of the multiverse before) but what does that matter? Has DC, the publishing company, done anything worthwhile with the multiverse since reintroducing it nearly two years ago? Not by my reckoning. And besides, I'm more interested in knowing: does the average Joe still remember what it was like to be in Darkseid's thrall, and all the unthinkable acts that he may've committed during that time? If so, how are they all managing to live with the inevitable feelings of guilt, shame and self-loathing? Issue # 7 shows that the citizens of the planet are "rebuilding" and yet some of the destruction caused by those under the Anti-Life Equation's sway seemed to be fairly huge in scope. What about the heroes who were similarly used? How will they cope with that knowledge? Will any of that ever be dealt with? Or will this just be another "big event", full of (ear-shatteringly loud) sound and (at times, incoherent) fury, signifying nothing?