Thursday, January 29, 2009

Final Crisis? What Crisis?

No Spoilers following:

Bah. So Final Crisis #7 came out yesterday and while reading it I was still confused as to what was going on and how this matters to the rest of the DC universe. I would have been okay with this event series if it was entertaining in its own right like Superman Red Son, but there was just too many things going on without any one of those story elements having any frame of reference for the reader as to why they should care. Really the whole series has been a chore to read. Grant Morrison (the writer), often has too many ideas that he introduces in any one of his stories without fleshing out those ideas before going on to his next big idea (for good Morrison stories check out All Star Superman, Filth, Animal Man, and Doom Patrol. I guess I'm just not taking the right drugs (actually the only drug I'm ingesting is caffeine).

The art in this last issue by Doug Mahnke was mostly good (I'm guessing that because he was brought in at the twelve o clock hour to do this issue is what required the multiple inkers for this issue) and I think he would have been a better fit for the whole series over J.G. Jones (who didn't even do all of the previous six issues). I hope that those who bought Final Crisis at my store got more enjoyment out of this "event" than I did and I hope that it doesn't sour you on DC superhero comics (but I could understand it if it does).

I wish I had photoshop skills to insert a drawing or photo of Superman sitting in that lounge chair in place of that guy on this cover of that Supertramp album that accompanies this blog entry - now that would be comedy (but maybe it wouldn't be as appreciated by those who aren't as familiar with Supertramp as I am)!

2 comments:

Rick Tucker said...

Here I was thinking I was alone. I still have two issues to read, but wonder why I bought them?
Worse, I've read the first two issues twice just to see if I'm missing something.

Rick

Todd C. Murry said...

There is a great deal of critical division on this series (maybe it has "broken the internet in half"), which seems to break down along a line between those who were OK with getting an "idea bath" instead of a story, and those who found it uncomfortably confusing to have a series positioned as the culmination of the development of a backbone for the DC Universe be uninterpretable as conventional narrative. If this sounds slanted, let me say that it seems I liked it more than you (I enjoyed it a lot in bits, and enjoyed the more disjointed stuff more), but found the willful ignorance on the part of Morrison or DC or both frustrating.

It's like the nature of the project opened up a big schism between the success of the project as a postmodern media piece and it's very existence as a focal point of DC publishing (so much so that I think this may be a critical blow to DC, who had "gone into hock" in terms of reader goodwill, and ultimately didn't deliver what was promised here - many readers will be gone). This is like if Lost ended with a season of interpretive dance with the same actors and loosely about the themes of the show (or, even worse, what the show means to the audience). The interpretive dance may be top notch, but would seem silly to defend the show's producers by calling the audience stupid for not getting it (which I'm seeing a lot of).