Final Crisis Retro Review Part I: Overview

So, a decade goes by…

DC's big crossover event for 2008 was Grant Morrison's Final Crisis. I started this blog very shortly after FC concluded, which would have been a fine time for me to write and post a breakdown. But, at the time, I focused on other subjects, and since then, I've commented on ongoing events while gradually working my way through comics history with retro reviews going from the Thirties back up to the 2000s. Now, I've worked my way up to the point where the blog started, ten years ago, and the time is right for a breakdown of Final Crisis. There's enough to say about it to fill more than one post, so I'm going to start with comments here about how the story was structured and some of the factors that I think detracted from the way FC reached the fans.

Final Crisis was not received by fans as warmly as other comparable DC events, including the previous two "Crises." Critical reviews on Amazon call it messy, scattered, and even incomprehensible. I think, for various reasons, the criticism is fair, and I'll spend some time talking about why. However, unlike a work that begins well then loses its purpose, or is mediocre in every aspect, Final Crisis – I believe – benefits enormously from re-reading and careful attention. I hope that with a thorough breakdown, it can be a much better story for people who give it more consideration.

Naturally, Final Crisis has already received a fair amount of attention, most of it during and immediately after its 2008-2009 release. I have the benefit of standing on the shoulders of those giants who've analyzed it before. I'm giving my breakdown now for a few reasons:

1) Working your way through it page-by-page with detailed annotations still loses the big picture. If the difficulty many readers have is that it's messy, annotations merely shine light upon the mess. What can help is an overview that puts the details into a meaningful structure.

2) I've enjoyed the work many times over the years, but I still didn't have a solid grasp of FC on the highest level – what it's saying about superhero stories and the people who write and enjoy them. The feeling that all the pieces fit into place didn't come for me until 2017.

3) As we'll see, the plotlines of Final Crisis weren't really complete until 2010, as some of the backstory was filled in with a Morrison mini-run in Batman #700-702, the fate of a Batman clone in Batman and Robin#8, and some mention of the Fourth World at the end of Return of Bruce Wayne. Some extremely helpful clarification was added by Multiversity in 2014. Some very fine annotations posted in 2009 weren't privy to all the information we got later.

4) Final Crisis commented on many the same things that Doomsday Clock is discussing now. It is timely to bring FC's comments into the discussion, and Johns' story may soon prompt us to do so.

An Apology

Among the various crossovers and tie-ins, ostensibly meant to give readers additional information or related reading, there are several that related to Final Crisis poorly – even very poorly. It's safe to say that there were works that strongly implied a connection to Final Crisis, perhaps even in the title, that turned out to be disconnected, or even contradictory. This surely didn't help the community of readers trying at the time to understand the story, and surely subtracted from the reception of the series itself. I will discuss these here, and the problems with them.

Countdown (to Final Crisis), The Death of the New Gods, and (Final Crisis) Last Will and Testament are three works that a reader would naturally expect to be connected, plotwise, to FC, but that failed to do so in an effective way, prompting a few disclaimers from the creators, mainly found online, that told readers to disregard their plot points as unrelated to Final Crisis and even continuity as a whole.

Countdown (#51-#1) seemed hardly to know what to do with itself, despite the fine talent of Paul Dini at the helm. It did not match FC in themes or tone. It did little to prepare readers for the important plot points of FC. Fifty-one issues were far beyond overkill for establishing those few plot points, and yet Countdown didn't perform that simple task adequately. The existence of multiple Monitors, the nature of Morticoccus, the fate of Earth-51, the temptation of Mary Marvel, and the death of Darkseid are all illustrated in Countdown, but in ways that seem mildly or substantially different from their depiction later in Final Crisis. And, really, there is no need to introduce the multiple Monitors before Final Crisis; it is not hard to understand their existence from the first page one sees them. If anything, the reader of Countdown is slightly less well prepared for Final Crisis than a reader who simply skipped it.

The same, and worse, is true of Jim Starlin's Death of the New Gods. DOTNG, a nice work in and of itself, with Starlin disposing of Kirby's Fourth World creations in a whodunit that establishes the Anti-Life Equation as a sentient and corporeal being. New Gods are killed, one after another, with Superman along as a combination soldier, detective, and witness as the ALE succeeds in killing every last New God using the Infinity Man as its tool. It's a good story, well told, but this plot is strikingly contradictory with that of Final Crisis, which begins with its own, utterly different whodunit, with Orion as the fallen victim. Orion dies in both stories, but at the hands of different killers and means. In FC, Orion is shot in the head with a time-travelling bullet by Darkseid, and his dying words are spoken to Dan Turpin in Metropolis before the Green Lanterns and Justice League take up the case. This is quite different from DOTNG, in which Orion's death takes place far from Earth and is known to Superman, who has no knowledge of any of this when FC begins. It's essentially impossible to digest DOTNG as having occurred before the events of Final Crisis.

The same can be said of Last Will and Testament, a work published midway through FC and originally intended to tie into it, but reference to FC was removed from its title before publication because it, too, contradicts FC on basic facts. In LWAT, Brad Meltzer shows how different superheroes react to the knowledge that the world is going to end the next day in a fight that they will lose. However, nothing like this situation occurs in FC, which, like other Morrison works that decade, shows a sneak attack as the killer blow, reflecting the real world events of the September 11 attacks. Therefore, LWAT can't even take place in DC continuity at all, and it becomes an unintended Elseworlds story, as does DOTNG.

Finally, the planned release schedule turned out not to be realistic, which led to artist J. G. Jones beginning the series, illustrating it wonderfully, but then handing off some of the duties as he fell behind. The fill-in artists performed admirably, with Superman Beyond's penciller Doug Mahnke doing memorable work on FC #7, but the shift from Jones to Carlos Pacheco and Mahnke was still a case of the original vision suffering due to an unintended failure on the organizational side.

One glitch may be bad luck, but four are a pattern, and this was only a partial list (note that Aquaman returned from the dead in FC, but all later stories ignored that). It is difficult to take this set of facts and not conclude that the writers of other stories were simply not informed of Morrison's plans by Morrison and whatever editors hold responsibility. And this certainly led to confusion on the part of readers as well as a bit of a grudge that they'd spent their comic-buying money on sixty or more prologue issues without receiving what they expected.

Flagship Crossovers

There was also confusion engendered by stories involving DC's two flagship characters, Superman and Batman that tied directly in with Final Crisis. In this case, a lack of communication cannot be blamed, because Morrison himself wrote two out of the three stories that I'll mention here. In these cases, nothing is strictly contradictory from one story to the next, but the plots become more convoluted than seem strictly necessary.

In the case of Superman, the confusion is this: After Lois Lane is incapacitated by a bomb in Final Crisis #2, he is called away on a mission that sidelines him from the main action. Two missions, in fact. In Legion of Three Worlds, Superman is summoned into the future to help the LSH fight an attack that threatens their survival. In Superman Beyond, Superman is summoned into alternate dimensions to protect higher-level worlds, and all worlds, against the first attack by Mandrakk. Both of these stories, which are both quite good, have a curiously common context and seem to serve the same role, which may confuse readers as to which occurred first (if "first" even has an easy interpretation in stories with time and interdimensional travel). In both, Superman's summoners both promise him that he can be returned to the "exact instant" from which he was taken. In fact, this seems not to be the case. The timeline, from Superman's point of view, must go like this:

1) Lois Lane is injured by a bomb.

2) Superman is taken on an adventure involving the Monitors.

3) Superman is flying in the sky over Metropolis.

4) The LSH brings Superman to the future.

5) Superman and the LSH defeat the threat.

6) Brainiac 5 shows Superman the God Weapon that can do anything.

7) Superman returns to Earth and witnesses that Darkseid has conquered it.

This can all be sorted out from the stories, but not until Final Crisis #6 at the earliest. Perhaps there's no proper cause for complaint; a mystery is what readers often expect and appreciate. However, this feels more like an over-busy nesting of storylines with confusion that has no payoff except understanding the basic facts. It feels as though the premise of Superman being called away was perhaps intended for one of the two side-stories, but then was used for both of them.

Something similar occurred with the Batman title, then penned by Morrison. Final Crisis was published concurrently with Morrison's masterpiece, close to my heart, Batman R.I.P. The publication times interlocked, with RIP beginning before FC began and ending before FC ended, with about four months during which both stories were in monthly publication. However, the story timelines were related in a completely different way, with Batman, R.I.P.'s main plot (flash-forwards withstanding) ending completely before the main action of Final Crisis' Darkseid plot began. Readers eventually found out, in 2010, that about four days of story time took place between the end of Doctor Hurt's attack in Batman and the death of Orion early in Final Crisis. Until then, it had been a mystery how Batman made his way between the plots of RIP and FC and from his zapping in FC to the start of Return of Bruce Wayne. Readers picked up each of the following issues with some significant uncertainty regarding how "Batman" had arrived into the situation:

• Batman #676: An unidentified Batman and Robin declare that they will never die.

• Final Crisis #1: Batman surprisingly alive after RIP.

• Final Crisis #7: Bruce Wayne in a cave, writing on the wall.

• Batman #682: Narrating flashbacks from his entire career.

• Return of Bruce Wayne #1: Again at the cave.

• Blackest Night#5: The clone body fried by Darkseid.

• Batman and Robin#6-7: Again the clone body.

• Batman and Robin#15: In silhouette, tells Doctor Hurt, "Turn around, Doctor. It's all over."

Eight times in two and a half years we saw a version of Batman enter the story without readers knowing who that Batman was. We also saw Batman depart from the stories of RIP and Final Crisis without understanding what the helicopter crash or eyebeam zap really meant. Twice, he apparently departed from the DCU, though the RIP helicopter crash ultimately proved to be of minor consequence and its drama at odds with the mundane escape-from-crash that got Bruce Wayne home by the end of the night. (In addition, two RIP crossovers strictly contradicted this by showing Batman's superhero allies unaware of his fate after RIP.) That's not to say that all of those scenes amount to mistakes: These were, in many cases, deliberate mysteries intended to heighten intrigue and keep readers guessing; however – and here's the rub – only in many cases. In other cases, there are scenes that seem straightforward with undramatized mysteries behind them; in other cases, there are scenes that seem mysterious with a perfectly mundane reality when all the facts were known. Simply put, there was sometimes annoying confusion rather than entertaining mystery. Cumulatively, these disconnects detracted from the overall experience, and Final Crisis was one of the works to lose a bit of cachet.

I have posted the aforementioned comments here because I feel it's an important critique of FC in the larger sense, and once one allows for the many, highly flawed connections FC and other stories, it further emphasizes how good FC itself was as a standalone work. Having dispensed with my critical comments regarding the crossovers, I will close this post with a quick summary of how my next two posts will review the series itself.

What Final Crisis is…

Final Crisis is a seven issue miniseries, but also had many crossovers. I won't review all of that here. For my purposes, Final Crisis is the seven-issue miniseries plus the two issues of Superman Beyond, which chronologically fit into the middle of FC. That said, I find many of the crossovers, particularly Final Crisis: Revelations, to be very good. Material found in some other places, including Batman #701-702, Multiversity, and online interviews illuminate the discussion, but I'll only discuss those insofar as they cast light on FC.

It is very helpful to note the general structure of FC and I will offer this here, then elaborate on it in the next two posts.

Final Crisis has two central plots that are not connected to one another in a straightforward cause-and-effect way.

1) The Darkseid Plot: Darkseid and his underlings hide on Earth, kill the last New God, Orion, and carry out surprise attacks against the superheroes. When they have accomplished their preliminary goals, sidelining most of Earth's defenses, they seize control of the world, holding it for several weeks until Earth's major superheroes liberate it and undo the damage.

The Darkseid plot is enclosed by a somewhat larger context of the entire timeline of the interaction between Kirby's Fourth World characters and the superheroes of the DCU; this is seen in flashback

The great majority of Final Crisis #1-7 and a few of the crossovers are devoted to the Darkseid plot. In many respects, I think the reader response was almost as though Final Crisis simply was the Darkseid plot, or that it should have been no more than that.

2) The Monitor Plot: As introduced by Marv Wolfman as part of Crisis on Infinite Earths, godlike beings of ancient origins called Monitors observe and direct events in the DC Universe, though Wolfman only posited two characters called the Monitor and Morrison gives us 52 Monitors, each responsible for one of the 52 dimensions of the Multiverse. In recent times, at least two Monitors named Mandrakk and Ogama conspire to destroy and feed upon the worlds of the Multiverse. They fail in two attempts to kill Superman, and are fated never to defeat him, with the good Monitor Nix Uotan returning from exile to aid Superman, other Supermen of the Multiverse, and the Green Lantern Corps to defeat Mandrakk and his ally Ultraman.

The Monitor plot is found in just a few sections of Final Crisis, predominantly in issues #1, #5, and #7, in addition to almost the entirety of the two issues of Superman Beyond. There are also a few scenes that tie the Darkseid and Monitor plots together, and many scenes that narrate events in the Darkseid plot but intertwine thematically with the Monitor plot.

The Monitor plot is not simply a superhero-supervillain story, but is an allegory that comments upon the relationship between comic book writers and comic book superheroes.

Interestingly, while a large proportion of reader commentary online had a critical or mixed reaction to Final Crisis, most readers seemed very supportive of Superman Beyond, and I wonder how the response would have been if Final Crisis #7 had simply ended with the defeat of Darkseid and then the material that ended Final Crisis #7 with the culmination of the Monitor plot had appeared under the banner of "Superman Beyond #3". I suspect that this minor alteration of the structure would have led to a warmer response by fans, who would have found the second encounter with Mandrakk to fit more easily within the framework of Superman Beyond.

Next up: The Darkseid plot!
Part III: The widely misunderstood Monitor plot.