Unfortunately given some personal events that I wouldn’t bore you all with, I actually ended up missing the debut of DC’s new Final Crisis! Fortunately, the rest of the internet didn’t! So I’m devoting this column to a comic a few weeks after the fact.
There are some spoilers here, as I’m sure you can imagine.
The League of Melbotis gives the comic a generally positive review and defends it from some internet complaints:
From what I read, I would never recommend that the issue be taken as an entry-level comic to the DCU. The story is mired in DCU characters and continuity, and asks that readers have been paying attention to recent output from DC, but also picking up key collections as they’ve been released of late.
None of that is intended as a criticism. At some point, you’re either allowed to tell stories for people who have been following along (see: Lost, BSG), or you’re stuck in the perpetual cycle of episodic storytelling, where the reader can pop in and it doesn’t matter if they’re familiar with the concepts and characters before tuning in (see: Law & Order, most police procedurals).
The story actually seems to make events such as the abysmal “Countdown” make some sense, as well as the uncompleted, unnecessary “Salvation Run”. It embraces characters from Kirby’s 70’s run on New Gods, Anthro and Kamandi, while seamlessly embracing recent events in the DCU, such as Johns’ introduction of the Alpha Lanterns in Green Lantern. Morrison also plays with some of the toys he created during his mega-series “Seven Soldiers of Victory”, and its probably worth returning to your issues or collections of that series to get an idea where he might be headed.
But what I’ve always enjoyed about Morrison’s stories is that, despite the need for our heroes to win, his set-ups don’t tell me how the story will unfold in a neat pattern I can consume with the predictability of a McDonald’s meal.
KC Carlson, on the otherhand, was not as complimentary:
I had to learn elsewhere (Newsarama) that the caveman wearing the preppy sweater in the opening pages of Final Crisis was Vandal Savage. Vandal also appears later (and is identified by name), as a part of the supervillain group that is meeting with Libra, but there is no indication anywhere that the two characters are one and the same and that he is immortal (although implied in dialog). I know this because I’ve been reading DC comics for 45 years and have read many stories about the character. Lord help the person who, attracted by the glossy bookstore-style design of the Chip Kidd-styled cover, is picking up their very first comic book.
And then we come to the Human Flame, a loser villain who is apparently instrumental in killing the Martian Manhunter. Although Libra actually does the dastardly deed, indicating his obvious “control freak” tendencies, while poor ol’ Flamey is left to snap the death photo on his cellphone. What, you’ve never heard of the Human Flame before? Why, he was the first supervillain MM ever met (as we found out in the previous week’s “cover-your-butt” Justice League of America story). In neither comic do we learn that the Human Flame last appeared in Detective Comics #274 (December 1959), which probably no one on earth either read or remembered until it was recently reprinted in Showcase: Martian Manhunter.
The less said about the Martian Manhunter’s death, the better. Other than “yawn” and he’s been dead before…
Unfortunately, the book is full of yawn moments: the New Gods as gangsters, whatever the hell is going on with the Monitors (who just, and always have, look boring), and the whole scene with “Man” (oh, sorry, Anthro) and the other long-haired kid (Kamandi), who thankfully brought along his handy Statue of Liberty from his first issue cover to help identify him.
Doom Deluise, a few weeks after the fact, finds himself indifferent:
I remember where I was when Superboy died. I was sitting on an old blue couch that my parents gave me when I moved out, at my old rat-hole apartment in the ghetto (not to be confused with my current rat-hole apartment in a different ghetto).
I remember where I was when Batman got his back broken. I was at my parent’s house, sitting on the back porch late at night one summer way back when.
I remember where I was when Superman bought it back in ‘93. I was lying on my stomach in my parents’ basement in Cedar Falls, Iowa.
I very vividly remember where I was when Blue Beetle Ted Kord got shot through the head by Max Lord.
But a couple weeks pass, and I can’t remember where I was when I read Final Crisis #1? Yes. You know why? Because Martian Manhunter’s death was completely unremarkable. All this ad reinforces is that the brass at DC have no concept of what’s dramatically important or impactful anymore. When you pose a question like that, you better be fairly confident that the answer will be something along the lines of, “Oh, I’ll never forget where I was, because that scene shattered my entire universe.”
You certainly don’t want the response to be a pause followed by a head scratch or a shrug of the shoulders.
So what do (or did) you think?
June 14th, 2008 at 10:16 pm
i was ‘meh’ mostly. but i like Morrison and usually give him a chance on stories. so i’m interested to see what happens in issue 2 and 3.
June 14th, 2008 at 10:40 pm
Reviews who mistake “easter eggs” for “story points” irritate me. To use Final Crisis as an example - it doesn’t matter that Vandal Savage is the caveman in question. It also doesn’t matter if you know that the Human Flame really was the first villain that Martian Manhunter faced or not - I didn’t know either of these things when I read the book. I didn’t even realize that that the kid on the first page was Anthro. None of it impacted the plot because those are all, right now, nothing more than throwaway easter eggs. Inserted for fans who care about such things, but easily glossed over for those of us who actually don’t.
All you need to get out of the story so far from these things is that Metron was playing Prometheus with some cavemen on Earth, and that the Human Flame is a nothing villain who hates Martian Manhunter enough to want him dead and that Libra is both willing and able to make that wish come true. Both of these things were conveyed by the story in the book. If it becomes important that the caveman in question was Vandal Savage, or that the boy was “Anthro”, or that the Human Flame happened to be the first villain Martian Manhunter ever fought the it will come out in the story. Or it will become important and WON’T come out in the story and the complaint will be legitimate.
But right now these things are just not important. They’re easter eggs for folks who figure them out - minutia that doesn’t impact the story AT ALL. And obsessing on them obscures other points the reviewer might want to make. There’s also the fact that, as with any mini-series (indeed, as with almost all modern comics, unfortunately) reviewing the story as a whole from a single issue is an almost pointless endeavor anyway - tantamount to reviewing a book based on a single chapter or a movie based on the first 10 minutes.
June 14th, 2008 at 11:55 pm
These reviewers don’t seem to realize that Morrison meant MM’s death to be that way. Or that it doesn’t matter whether or not you know Anthro’s name; he’s a goddam caveman and that’s all you need to know. Fuck, some people can be so nit-picky.
June 15th, 2008 at 1:18 am
That League of Melbotis guy is a genius. You should click through. And send him money.
June 15th, 2008 at 11:51 am
Regarding the Martian Manhunter’s death - something being the author’s intention does not automatically make it the correct approach; reviewers should be free to disagree with it. (Personally, I kinda like it the way it is)
Given how important Turpin seems to be to the story, I was personally mildly annoyed by how he was not named until his third scene (and in a completely off-hand way), but it was hardly the end of the world. I enjoyed it enough to commit to it for the long haul, which is more than I’ve done for any recent company-wide crossover (except maybe World War Hulk, which was set aside for me more because I was getting the Incredible Hulk).
June 15th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
@TheLeague: Oh i agree, Atleast there one reviewer here without a mind of a 5 year old.
June 15th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
I think the worst about Final Crisis is that, even if is not Morrison fault, a promise was broken. Yes, it maybe solely DC editorial fault that all the lead-ins only served to drag down the quality of the actual story, either by being nonsensical, by promoting over-exposure of the characters featured in the story or just by being plainly bad. But you see, the people complaining that Countdown didn’t no purpose, that didn’t helped at all, that didn’t serve no purpose, have a right to complain about and about the impact it has on Final Crisis.
Is very rich Morrison complaining about that the dedication of the fans with continuity is ruining their appreciation of his story (yeah, I’m paraphrasing, I know), since is a work so mired in continuity itself.
Me, I dislike Secret Invasion, but at least the fact that all lead-in stories were written by Brian Bendis himself it helped internal coherence a lot. Still don’t like the story, since I think more of the same that Bendis been writing for quite sometime, but well, all the parts make sense.
As for the easter eggs… they are irrelevant. That Vandal Savage appears both as a caveman and as renowed villain is completely irrelevant, a small reward to people that read the entire output of DC publications and that is all. Not knowing these things should not prevent the story from being enjoyable. But then again, I think a lot of the things are simply not given the proper space and in a seven issue mini won’t be given this space no matter what. (So yeah, it need the lead-ins… it just need them to do their job). As in a lot of Morrison stories, what we read is a lot inferior of what (presumably) runs through the writer’s head… so maybe we should be developing something that projects thoughts instead of buying half-assed comics.
June 16th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
Right on Jer.
I think the most important thing that happened in FC 1 is that the gods created ’super heroes’ when they gave man fire. Everything else is gravy for the fan.
If you don’t like the quick way with which manhunter was killed that’s a legitimate opinion. As a counter point I thought it was unnerving. Not that MM will never come back but that - ok, this is how they’re treating the big guns here.
If you hate that this doesn’t synch up with a million cross overs we didn’t all read - and that those minis that covered the same topics don’t even match up - the answer is just that these epic, cosmic things are open multiple interpretations, like all religious experiences