I’ll be honest here and say that when the Final Crisis comic book miniseries was released, I didn’t get it.
No, not “I didn’t get it” in terms of I couldn’t comprehend what was going on—although there were elements of that at times, too—but I didn’t get what Morrison was trying to DO, exactly.
Having read the upcoming hardcover release, though, I get it completely: Final Crisis is Grant Morrison’s answer to a generation of fans whose favorite writers are Alan Moore and Garth Ennis–twenty-odd years of readers who believe Watchmen to be the best superhero story ever told and who have bought into the myth that the only “smart” superhero stories are the ones written by guys who clearly hate superheroes. And the answer is, in the words of Final Crisis‘ unlikely hero The Tattooed Man, “Here’s where we all say ‘no’ to that.”
Certainly this hardcover is the best way to read Final Crisis; it includes the core miniseries itself, as well as the Superman Beyond two-part story (not in 3-D, which is a blessing and a bummer at the same time) and Morrison’s Final Crisis: Submit one-shot featuring Black Lightning and the Tattooed Man. I imagine that reading a “complete” edition (as described by Morrison and clamored for by many fans on message boards), including the relevant “Batman R.I.P.” issues and the rest of the (non-Morrison) tie-in books would be a rich experience, but one that would bog down the narrative and slow down the story…not to mention constantly changing narrators. While having a different hero narrate every tie-in is fine when you need a POV for a one-shot, jumping from Geo-Force to Green Arrow to whomever would likely be a little disconcerting for a collected edition. The story here is linear and logical, making sense of the many complexities that baffled me a little bit on the first read-through (presumably because I was trying to keep track of too many story beats over too long a period of time, while the book got later and later).
After all the mind-boggling complexity and metaphysical imagery of Final Crisis subsides, though, the final resolution–”He’s Superman. He wished only the best for all of us.”–is incredibly poignant. At one point Metron describes the Fifth World as the era when “men become gods,” and certainly the incorruptible, Christ-like nature of Superman is toyed with here in a way that makes the (new) Genesis moment of that era ring with sincerity.
The change in artists about halfway through the series—a necessary evil to keep to some semblance of a production schedule for the “monthly” comics—is more obvious than ever in the collected edition, but less distracting because of the presence (and the powerful, unique style) of Doug Mahnke in the Superman Beyond chapters as well as peppered throughout the whole book “after” those. It also helps that the fill-ins have already happened and we have, by and large, seen these books so the element of (often unpleasant) surprise when you turn the page to see another new penciler working is lost here, where it might have been an issue in the floppies.
Ultimately, it’s probably fair to say that where Final Crisis failed rather spectacularly as a monthly serial story, it succeeds mightily in this nicely-put-together collected edition. And oh, yeah, as a bonus? Empress and Shiloh Norman are black again now!
June 10th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
Final Crisis is Grant Morrison’s answer to a generation of fans whose favorite writers are Alan Moore and Garth Ennis–twenty-odd years of readers who believe Watchmen to be the best superhero story ever told and who have bought into the myth that the only “smart” superhero stories are the ones written by guys who clearly hate superheroes. And the answer is, in the words of Final Crisis‘ unlikely hero The Tattooed Man, “Here’s where we all say ‘no’ to that.”
No, that was Flex Mentallo. Final Crisis was an insular trainwreck that will have no lasting appeal outside of hardcore DC fandom, whereas series like Watchmen and Preacher are at least actually capable of bringing new readers into comics.
Not that you’d understand the concept of non-obsessive readers, given your hyperbolicaly dismissive attitude to Nina Stone’s Virgin Read column.
June 10th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
I still have no idea why you can call this a failure fairly. It sold pretty well, and while a lot hated it, a lot liked it.
To say it was middling…ok. Mediocre…ok. Failure? To you, fine. But overall? Really?
June 10th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
And really, who the heck talks about Preacher outside of Vertigo/Ennis fans? The “outside world” doesn’t even know who Ennis is.
June 10th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Hear, hear, Russell! I enjoyed it much more than the nihilistic pap plaguing summer crossovers heretofore this millennium.
June 10th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
Where the hell does he mention Nina Stone?
June 10th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Did they fix the colouring issues (e.g. White Shilo Norman) in the HC?
June 10th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
@Brendan: You should have had Alex put that on the bookjacket!
@Fred: He’s making a reference to a different thread, not in here.
June 10th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Just one thing, Ennis hates superheroes of course, but Alan Moore? Not at all. His run on Supreme is the biggest love letter to Superman there is.
June 10th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
I actually like Final Crisis as a monthly. I can understand where people wouldn’t and would vocally despise it, collected or not, but I think that’s true of everything.
June 10th, 2009 at 5:57 pm
The blog might have eaten the comment I tried to post, so I’ll give it another go. Sorry if this appears as a second and different, albeit similar, response.
I agree with the first sentence of what Dave (first reply) said above. Creating positive, forward-thinking superhero comics that celebrate the joys of the genre as a purposeful antidote to the dark and cynical comics that seem to be in vogue with readers and critics is a noble aim, but Morrison has been doing it for years and years now. In fact, according to the interview in Timothy Callahan’s GRANT MORRISON: THE EARLY YEARS, ZENITH was written in direct and deliberate response to DKR and WATCHMEN. That’s from Day 1.
I don’t think FINAL CRISIS is the strongest entry into the superhero “re-constructionism” subgenre. In fact, I don’t think it’s Morrison’s strongest entry. Having said that, you’re right that his take on Superman is really beautiful. That’s what makes ALL-STAR so worth reading.
And Moore loves fantasy fiction. I read the entire ABC line as an apology for WATCHMEN.
June 10th, 2009 at 6:42 pm
The “Good?” headline and all that flowed from it really just comes from the fact that I personally, as a reader and a critic, hated this book in the floppies. So I knew a positive review would be viewed by anyone who had read my other comments as a 180, and I wanted to acknowledge it–not just because that speaks well of the work but because it eliminates the need for me to justify my position later.
June 10th, 2009 at 8:33 pm
No thoughts on FC… I didn’t read it, and have no interest in reading it. DC mega-crossover events don’t matter to me. So be it.
But saying Moore hates superheroes? How do we explain “Whatever Happened To the Man of Tomorrow” then? Or any other great Superman or Batman tales the guy’s written? I think saying he “hates” them is a bit much.
June 11th, 2009 at 4:40 am
fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.
Thats how I feel about Final Crisis. Theres no way in hell I’m picking this up.
June 11th, 2009 at 4:50 am
i was really hoping they would have let Mahnke redraw some of the last issue, as it reeked of rush job near the end with the crowd shots. disappointed
June 11th, 2009 at 5:24 am
Did they atempt to fix the art mess that is FC Submit? Did they re-ink (and redraw) some of the pages in the extremely rushed FC #7 (final issue)?
June 11th, 2009 at 6:28 am
Dave said it best. There is nothing in Final Crisis that wasn’t done a thousand times better in Flex Mentallo. At least Seaguy is playing with some themes outside of Morrison’s usual meta-superhero narrative (granted, he handled these themes in the Invisibles, but Seaguy is somewhat more mature in its approach). I’m all for Morrison, but there are so many better books that deserve your time and money more than this.
June 11th, 2009 at 6:33 am
Has anyone else noticed the similarities between Obama’s victory and Darkseid’s in Final Crisis?
Each has a legion of mind-numbed sheeple at his back and call, one thanks to the Anti-Life Equation, the other thanks to repeating “Hope and Change” over and over again. “The Day Evil Won”, indeed…
June 11th, 2009 at 6:38 am
I ‘ve read Final Crisis three or four times all the way through and it amazes me how dense it is. Each time, I come across new material. I love it.
June 11th, 2009 at 7:03 am
“I imagine that reading a ‘complete’ edition… would be a rich experience, but one that would bog down the narrative and slow down the story…not to mention constantly changing narrators. While having a different hero narrate every tie-in is fine when you need a POV for a one-shot, jumping from Geo-Force to Green Arrow to whomever would likely be a little disconcerting for a collected edition.”
Right, because the main narrative of Final Crisis doesn’t involve a thousand different points of view, from Anthro to Dan Turpin to Kamandi in the first issue, to a finale of fill-in-the-rest-of-the-plot by having Supergirl and Lois Lane telling stories.
June 11th, 2009 at 7:20 am
Alan Moore has written some excellent, loving superhero stories. His little character-driven Green Lantern stories have provided other writers like Geoff Johns with threads to run with for years to come. I’ve re-read Final Crisis as a complete series and it is more coherent, but it still veers into the absurd at times, with little to no resolution. Still can’t figure out what the ultimate purpose of the Super Young Team was…
June 11th, 2009 at 7:26 am
The idea of paying big bucks for a story you already own makes no sense to me at all. But DC really appreciates the deep pocketed fan boys who keep the industry going.
Personally, I hated FC and wouldn’t pay a nickel for this, but I’m sure those who enjoyed it will enjoy this as well. But if you’re paying for it a second time, it must be nice to not have to worry about money. Why not spend that money on some titles that need it?
June 11th, 2009 at 7:31 am
Darkseid reads much more like a super-powered Dick Cheney to me.
June 11th, 2009 at 7:36 am
@Jacob “I still have no idea why you can call this a failure fairly.”
I can’t speak to Final Crisis as an artistic entity, because I don’t own the whole series — nobody told us that the Superman Beyond issues were mandatory reading, and without those the ending makes no sense whatsoever. By the time I found that out, I decided to simply cut my losses.
Which is my segue into describing Final Crisis as a failure from a publishing perspective. It was completely inexcusable to learn after the fact that Morrison considered four other comics to be “essential” reading for Final Crisis, but DC took absolutely no steps to indicate that to the reader. Add in the delays, the artist swaps, the other tie-ins which ranged from superfluous to contradictory (and in one case, are *still* far from over), and the whole thing was just a tremendous cluster—- on DC’s part.
In time, the collected edition may indeed be recognized as a modern classic for DC Comics. But for a lot of readers, we’re still smarting from how badly we got burned last year.
-J
June 11th, 2009 at 7:47 am
Loved the issues, I’m picking it up after work. I think I missed something, does it have any of the parts from last rites to show how batman got there – and more importantly, got out? Just for the Batman angle alone this is a must have.
June 11th, 2009 at 8:00 am
Amusing to see people still dealing with the promotion and not the content.
Treat it as a story and not a “mega-crossover event” and you might enjoy it.
June 11th, 2009 at 8:12 am
I think most of Morrison’s stories read much better when all issues are read together, such as the JLA’s Rock of Ages and World War 3, and The Invisibles.
However, unlike JLA where I was counting down the days until the next issue came out after reading the previous one, I looked forward to Final Crisis with about as much enthusiasm as I did for a dentist’s appointment.
June 11th, 2009 at 8:15 am
Final Crisis was a mess. I tried to read it, but it was unreadable. If you didn’t have a PhD in DC mythology, you had no clue what was going on.
June 11th, 2009 at 8:33 am
“Final Crisis was a mess. I tried to read it, but it was unreadable. If you didn’t have a PhD in DC mythology, you had no clue what was going on.”
That’s the exact opposite of the case. I found that folks with no prior experience with the DC Universe took everything at face value enjoyed this. Folks who had a LITTLE to a lot of knowledge felt confused. Folks with a huge amount of knowledge weren’t confused but were somewhat annoyed at some retcons made.
June 11th, 2009 at 8:47 am
@avengingtitan – I agree, I didn’t like it the first time, I have absolutely no interest in trying again.
I won’t disabuse the value of a repeat reading, but only if you liked it enough the first time to warrant it. If it didn’t entertain on the first read then it simply failed, like it did for many of us.
The failure may be attributable to different factors: story (plot & theme), art consistency, schedule, distributed-ness – but at the end of the day it failed to live up to its Crisis billing.
June 11th, 2009 at 8:52 am
Final Crisis along with the godawful Batman RIP were the absolute worst comics I have ever read in thirty years of comic reading and during that time, I’ve read a lot of bad material. Thing is, in the past, a lot of that bad material was surrounded by other comics with good material that kept me reading, thus pouring more money into the comics industry.
However, Final Crisis was the final straw. I had given up on Marvel with Joe Quesada’s poor leadership of that company (and I don’t care how high sales are, the stories that I read during his tenure were horrible — and the Spidey fiasco was the nail in the coffin for me spending money on Marvel Comics) and now, after 8 years of reading the terrible fan fiction published under Dan Didio’s leadership, I have offically stopped buying all NEW DC Comics.
I’ll still follow the news just to find out what new material will be coming by George Perez, but other than work by him, no new comics for me. And George Perez doesn’t do regular monthly work so I don’t consider purchasing new work by him as me continuing to buy new stuff.
So, if for nothing else, I can safely say that something very positive has come from Final Crisis — and both Joe Quesada and Dan Didio’s leadership of Marvel and DC: they cured me of my addiction to buying new comics. So to Marvel and DC, RIP!
June 11th, 2009 at 10:29 am
Like any other comics where the collections seem to fix the monthly “disaster”, I’ve been thinking of reading Final Crisis yet again. Maybe I have to get the HC only because I never got the second issue of Superman Beyond nor any of the tie-ins except for those relating to the other stories (Legion of 3 Worlds, and Red Lanterns).
But let me just say: IN NO WAY DOES OR DID FINAL CRISIS STOP YOU GUYS FROM BUYING COMICS ANYMORE! It didn’t, because if there is one thing everyone knows is that if there is a bad comic, here is always a good comic, better comic, to go to instead. So if Final Crisis sucked for you, Blackest Night won’t. You hated Batman R.I.P., well then it seems you’ll probably like the Batman books now of Batman reborn, idiot writing from Wonder Woman: Amazons Attack? Go to Gail Simone’s smart writing in her current run on Wonder Woman, and let’s just say: I’ve been intrigued since OYL started, and the Legion arc, on all the Superman books. Let’s not forget Green Lantern, Flash, and a whole big pile of stuff coming our way from Geoff Johns to JMS!
So, people, like Brett, Final Crisis may not have been to your liking (it didn’t for me) but don’t stop buying DC or Marvel for that matter. Something good will or has already come out of this, and you will miss it if you stop now.
June 11th, 2009 at 10:47 am
Final Crisis was nothing short of amazing. Easily one of my favorite books of all time. It takes a certain amount of dedication to read a lot of Morrison’s books, and FC was no exception. Every issue, I reread every other issue before it, and it worked perfectly. I’m so excited to reread the HC (I’ll admit, the 3D stuff was unnecessary).
June 11th, 2009 at 11:07 am
1. I don’t believe that he was saying that MOORE hates super-heroes. I believe he was saying that that is a popular perception of the book by the many, many people who have read nothing else by him, or who missed the point entirely. After all, look what lessons many of today’s writers learned from Watchmen – tragedy, angst, rape and murder. They took none of the powerful storytelling, and all of the lackluster devices. While Moore may not hate superheroes, he certainly inspired a fair number of writers who do.
2. You do not need a ‘PhD’ in DC mythology to read and enjoy Final Crisis. I don’t know where that myth comes from, but it’s wrong. The actual problem is, a fair number of comic readers have lost the ability to take things out of their idea of continuity. The average reader, when picking something like this up, will say something along the lines of “This guy says his name is Turpin and he’s a detective. I know what I need to know’ and move on, because… well, because that’s all you need to know about him coming in. The rest, you pick up as you go along.
People who claim that you need an advanced degree to understand FC, however, will see the same thing and wonder where Turpin is from, why he’s being used, what his history is, etc… not realizing that none of that information is even remotely necessary to reading and even enjoying the story.
June 11th, 2009 at 11:21 am
I read the 12 issues: FC 1-7, SMB 1-2 and Submit, Resist and the requiem issue again in one sitting…and found it ok when read all at once….just as long as I didn’t think about continuity….
Talk about a sacrifice..but it worked…the story still a hodge podge granted but I got to enjoy some of the bits more…
I will have to see if this tactic works with other big events that missed the mark with me (Civil War, Infinite Crisis, Deathmate (the Image centric issues at least) and of course RIP)
June 11th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
Nate,
Final Crisis and Batman RIP was, is and always will be the Final Straw for me buying comics on any kind of weekly or regular basis. YOU may think that there are other good comics out there and perhaps there are, but not to me and certainly not enough to draw ME into the shop on a weekly basis. Not anymore.
The big two have been putting out poor material I’ve only been marginally interested in for so long, that takes me months to read that’s how disinteresting I find them, because they know they could get away with publishing garbage because comic readers are addicted and they’ll buy anything just to get their weekly fix.
For a while, they were right. I kept buying for years just because going to the shop weekly was a habit. But the material has been so bad for so long, they killed my interest and therefore, killed the habit.
I haven’t been to a shop in weeks and feel no poorer that I am ‘missing’ Dick Grayson as Batman. I read that story 10 years ago. Is Grant Morrison’s version going to be better? Don’t know, don’t care.
For me, I’ll be perfectly happy watching the news to see when that new George Perez comic will be out (whatever it is he is doing at any time) and I’ll be happy going into the store once every six months just to pick that up. Going forward, it’s back issues and George Perez for me and I’m happy as a clam!
June 11th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
Brett Says:
“Final Crisis along with the godawful Batman RIP were the absolute worst comics I have ever read in thirty years of comic reading…”
So you haven’t been reading Ultimatum then? If you want to decide whether FC was “good” or “bad”, Ultimatum will really put it in perspective!
Personally I enjoyed FC, but mainly because I’m a Kirby geek, so the hefty load of references to his DC work in the 70′s made me smile big smiles.
June 11th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
watchmen is not the best superhero story ever.
but you were right about Ennis. Hes my favorite.
June 11th, 2009 at 9:21 pm
I always felt FC would play better in one volume rather than spread out in monthly installments.
June 12th, 2009 at 12:18 am
What’s that old saying, you can put a beautiful dress on a pig, it might be a beautiful dress, but it’s still a pig.
June 12th, 2009 at 2:31 am
I loved it when it was first released, even though the last issue was a little anticlimactic. I imagine I’ll love it even more after reading it again.
That said, I was really considering buying this collection even before selling my singles but I saw it at the shop and was surprised to see that it was standard-sized trim. I’ll wait for an oversized edition (if one is ever released).
Does it include a cover gallery of the series?
June 12th, 2009 at 11:00 am
Sorry but i have to laugh reading all these comments from the guys over at DC…oops, i mean normal comic reading guys out there, telling us how Final Crisis is best read in one sitting, in a rather nauseating attempt to hoodwink people into shelling out for this piece of utter garbage.
The bottom line is quite simply this;
No matter how much you try to rebrand or repackage crap, in however many different ways or formats, it will always remain what it essentially is; CRAP!
And i’m sorry to say, that’s just what Final Crisis was.
June 12th, 2009 at 11:23 am
Good lord – get the hell over yourself. You don’t like it fine, but that means that anyone who dares to disagree with you is a plant from the company? Jesus – do you tire of living the sterotypical Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy lifestyle? I mean – read what you wrote in Comic Book Guy voice – it’s like word for word lift from a Simpsons’ script. Congrats for keeping discussion in the cave there, Beppo.
June 12th, 2009 at 11:48 am
Feh. Marco freakin’ Rudi drew more of this book than anyone else. A gentleman who indicated on his blog that he had learned to ink less than a year ago at the time. A gentleman who at the time was only comfortable drawing every shot at mid-range. As in, how people who draw stick figures draw. A gentleman who had done one 3-issue miniseries for that sales juggernaut, Jim Valentino’s Shadowline Comics (Image).
Mr. Didio reaaaaaallly should have been fired for this. It is not a “necessary evil” to have fill-ins on your highest-profile series. All that is necessary is to hire talented, reliable artists, and give them plenty of lead time.
DC under Mr. Didio’s reign is really pretty awful. I was reminded of this while reading the solicits for that Superman: Kryptonite book written by Darwyn Cooke and drawn by Tim Sale. “Originally presented in Superman Confidential 1-5 and 11″. What freakin’ garbage. I bought the first 5 issues – that’s $15 plus tax, with the reasonable expectation that it wouldn’t take half a year to read the rest of the story. And the parade of faceless, marginal pencillers on the Teen Titans and Superman books is truly depressing. Why in heck would I read a comic with unattractive pictures that look like fan artwork?
I’ve cut back from 5-6 DC books a week to 0-1. I look forward to Mr. Didio’s departure, when I can go back to reading reliably published titles, which is the whole point of buying comics as far as I’m concerned.
June 12th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
Comic books are the only medium that even its most dedicated fans will give up, simply because a story is published against their liking.
These fans do not read comics to enjoy good stories, they read comics to see ‘status quo updates’ on characters they have followed since they were a kid. When these ‘status quo updates’ veer too far away from the cookie-cutter repitition that they are used too, they grow angry because the comic book no longer resembles the one they have in their head as being “theirs”, as if they own it.
So, the comic book becomes an extention of their ego. As seen in the Simpson’s depiction of ‘comic book guy’, the greatest character flaw of any hard-core comic book collector is the infantile ego, and the extention of that ego to the interests of the comic collector.
Anyone who disagrees with the comic collector is therefore seen as a fool, and anyone not ‘in-the-know’ is viewed with hostility as an outsider.
Examples of creatively superior comic book creative teams that turned off long-time fans of mediocre series include:
Peter Milligan & Mike Allred on X-force/X-statix
Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely on New X-men
Flex Mentallo is better than Final Crisis, but FC is not just better than everything else on the stands, it may be the only great superhero story published in the past year.
June 13th, 2009 at 8:08 am
I would have bought it except for one detail that was brought up in the review there is no 3 D. I Mean they had thme the the black dosier so why would it be any hader to include them it
this 3 d is fun when done right and this was done perfectly as a reader it feels like being cheated
good day
June 13th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
I think the monthly issues were better because if you read through them all, you can know which tie-ins to weave into the 7-issue main arc. My main arc consists of 16 issues, including the 7 main, some Batman, and Supeman Beyond, along with Submit and Resist, Requiem, etc…. I find it a more appealing story that way.
December 30th, 2009 at 1:11 am
I would like to preface my argument by saying that I am not a habitue of the weekly issue and have not as of this posting read Final Crisis (I am waiting for it to come into my local library). This said, I must also confess that I am a fan of most post-watchmen revisionism, i.e. grittier and more “realistic” style of storytelling. But it seems that most of this revision happened beyond the bounds of the main-staple of the DCU. After all, almost all of Ennis’ work for DC was on the Vertigo or (the later acquired) Wildstorm imprints, which were geared for a more adult audience. After all it isn’t as if he introduced massive ammounts of his trademark sex and violence into the mainstream of comics.
And besides, there’s already been countless backlashes against the so-called dark age of comics, so calling FC Grant Morrison’s answer to: “answer to a generation of fans whose favorite writers are Alan Moore and Garth Ennis–twenty-odd years of readers who believe Watchmen to be the best superhero story ever told and who have bought into the myth that the only “smart” superhero stories are the ones written by guys who clearly hate superheroes” seems a bit overblown. Why is he disabusing them now? Did his Zenith fail? Did “What’s So Funny About Truth Justice and the American Way?” become nonexistent? I’m not really sure that many people do see Watchmen as a diatribe against superheroes, which it isn’t, it’s just seeing superheroes in the light of some reality and in varying shades of gray. And besides, Morrison is a party to the Dark Age, with the terrific Batman tale Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, which blurred the line of the Batman mythos in truly startling ways, making Batman seem no more sane then the Joker or the Mad Hatter. It was certainly more interesting than R.I.P. which was basically a drug trip mixed with elements for Batman: The Cult.
Morrison seems more and more to be going down the Miller route at least as far as Batman is concerned. While, he may not have written as terribly wonderful a meme as the “Goddamned Batman!”, he is also eroding all the great work he did on Batman, with stories that seem to have an increasingly slipper grip on Batman.
I am of the opinion that Batman was able to not only brave the Dark Age, but to come out stronger because of it, with more writers now having a grip on the dark and brooding nature of his character, even if not all of them were completely correct about his ethics. Morrison was one of three writers (the others being the aforementioned Miller and Jeph Loeb) who seemed to have it their characterization of Batman down cold. But in recent years, all except one (Jeph Loeb who wrote the great, if sometimes infuriating Hush) seem to have lost their grip on Batman and instead of writing about him, they are writing what they want, in Frank Miller’s case it’s just Sin City in tights, in Morrison’s, it’s more of this post-modern B.S. that I’m just getting sick of. I don’t think it is changing the medium, the medium of comics really isn’t going to be changed by a confusing mess of non-linear story telling or any of Morrison’s little touches. If he and the rest of comic writers today really want to re-construct their world, why not, oh I don’t know FIX IT AND STOP KILLING EVERYONE OFF! This may itself sound like a tirade, but I’m sick of every few months a new series coming along and killing off characters, some of whom I happen to like quite a bit, for no seemingly rational point. For example, Countdown was started by one pointless murder in order to get to someone…to murder for no purpose.
And, on a related note, Morrison is quoted as saying he thought that “the root of the Batman mythos is the gun and the bullet that created Batman. So, Batman himself is finally standing there to complete that big mythical circle and to have the image of Batman up against the actual personification of evil and now he’s got the gun and he’s got the bullet. It seemed to me to work”. This is great for him, but frankly, it just doesn’t work for me. So what that his mythos starts with a gun? The real genesis of Batman is in his decision NOT to kill. Unlike Superman who was raised with the values of Truth, Justice, and the American Way, or Wonder Woman who IS the Spirit of Truth, Batman’s morals are shaped by only one person himself. And central to this is the ABHORANCE of using guns! Even when he IS tempted to kill people (well…the Joker) he never even considers guns. A gun ruined his life, killed his parents, and shattered any hope he might have for peace, within himself or outside himself. Therefore, it’s a slap in the face to the character to have him be kill with a gun. Even his removal doesn’t really negate it. And I’m really not trying to sound like a fan boy here, but it’s been a rough few years for my favorite super-heroes and the last straw was Batman’s “death”. I wish DC would get Morrison off of Batman and onto Superman, where his considerable talents not only lend themselves to but are considerably more welcomed.
This said, it’s a Thur…Tuesday…well, I never really got the hang of Tuesdays either. So Long
January 17th, 2011 at 12:25 pm
This blog was unbelievably helpful. Your the man. lol