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

good day

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.

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.

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?

“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.

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!

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)

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Treat it as a story and not a “mega-crossover event” and you might enjoy it.

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

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.