Final Crisis = Boring

pfishfood

Anyone read the final crisis series, am i the only one in thinking it was the worst story arc ive read in quiet sometime. It was just painful to read. I enjoyed the previous crises but the whole thing was confusing and didn't mesh well in my opinion.

Anybody else have this opinion.

subedei

I read final crisis in comic form, when it came out, month by month, I didnt know much about the DC world at the time and to be honest it completely lost me, I have heard you need to be a long time DC reader to get any real enjoyment from it but I was sorely disappointed and confused what the hell happened by the end of it. I personally blame Grant Morrison, while I think he can be a fine writer, I think at times his drug induced self satisfying storylines can just leave me in the cold.

Fysh

I flicked through the issues as they came out but wasn't picking it up, and certainly what I saw wasn't very appealing. It seemed to be yet another Grant Morrison story with metatextual gubbins "woven in", except it's the same gimmick that most Morrison stories use ("look, there's metatextual commentary here! magically that means i dont have to be bound by the normal conventions of storytelling or narrative structure!").

On one hand it's cool that DC were willing to for a more experimental big event comic. On the other hand it's a shame they ended up with such a breathtakingly unreadable story at the end of it. (I've seen some hilarious justifications for the various story flaws, along the lines of 'the jumps between issues are fine for readers who've spent hours poring over each issue and obsessing over it on the internet' or 'the story only seems to get rubbish at the end because the space vampire was sucking the life out of the universe')

One thing I will say is that I read and enjoyed Final Crisis Aftermath: Escape and enjoyed it, given that it was basically The Prisoner set in the DCU.

John 187

I read it through the uk reprint's Batman and Superman lengends and just found it to be of a mess and a sense at the end of "What was that all about?"
But there were bits I enjoyed the stuff with Green Arrow, Ink, Super young team, the thing with the rubik cube.
A tie-in story by Grant to Final Crisis I think called Superman Beyond 3D was very good and read better then the main story. I still found Final Crisis to be enjoyable then Infinite Crisis.

Lame Lantern

I'm actually a Final Crisis apologist. I don't think it's really meant to be read as an event with the narrative points of entry and exit like Blackest Night but rather a mad celebration of the glorious, crazy imaginations that have coloured American mainstream comic book lore for decades.

The whole thing is resolved by Superman wishing for a happy ending,

which in the context I suggested above is cool, but in terms of narrative coherence is certifiably mental. I wouldn't call it metafictional, but I do think the whole project was intended as a means of colliding all the various creative manias of DC comics and in that sense it succeeds quite well.

My only complaint is that it ruined the end of Batman RIP, necessitating Batman to come back briefly, unexplained, then die again.

And as mentioned, Superman Beyond is a terrific two-issue read.

Apolloyon

I gave up on this about issue 4. As much as I like Morrison's early work: AnimalMan, Doom Patrol and so on. I found this a chore to read. It was like I was being deliberately kept out of the 'metatextual joke' or whatever he was trying to write.

It actually put me off comic collecting to be honest. I'm not going to shell out my hard earned cash for stuff like this!

I'm a big fan of DC so in time hopefully I'll return to the fold!

Sleazus

Lame Lantern wrote: »

My only complaint is that it ruined the end of Batman RIP, necessitating Batman to come back briefly, unexplained, then die again.

I think there was a lot more that ruined Batman R.I.P., but I'm less fond of that arc than others (though inexplicably I really like the rest of Morrison's run).

I do agree with you that it was cheap to "kill" him outside his own book (and final arc), though I did quite like What The Butler Saw as a coda - even though, as you admit, a lot of Morrison's work doesn't work as a narrative, but more as a clever postmodern homage.

Mal-Adjusted

the whole book is rubbish, tbh.
from the literary abortion that is countdown and all the pointless miniseries it spawned off (which ultimately tie into nothing) to Final Crisis itself, which reads like a jigsaw puzzle and has about a million tie in issues, some of which are extremely crucial to the "plot", if it can be called that.

At least all the Blackest Night titles are all collected in books and you can understand it just fine without them, same goes for the Infinite Crisis countdown stuff.

Bob Z

what was the story with the flashes being constantly chased?

Fysh

Bob Z wrote: »

what was the story with the flashes being constantly chased?

It was something to do with DeathThe Black Racer chasing them and then being fired back in time using a MacGuffinsome daft plot device from the seventies, I think.

Bob Z

Fysh wrote: »

It was something to do with DeathThe Black Racer chasing them and then being fired back in time using a MacGuffinsome daft plot device from the seventies, I think.

But had it anything to do with the main story?

Fysh

Bob Z wrote: »

But had it anything to do with the main story?

Only in that it explained how Darkseid was taken out of the picture (I think they used Metron's Chair and the Black Racer as a way to fire Darkseid back in time, which then dropped him into the 7 Soldiers Of Victory miniseries, but don't ask me how that's supposed to make any sense), so that the Space Vampire or whatever it was could take over as the real villain behind it all...

niall mc cann

Fysh wrote: »

Only in that it explained how Darkseid was taken out of the picture (I think they used Metron's Chair and the Black Racer as a way to fire Darkseid back in time, which then dropped him into the 7 Soldiers Of Victory miniseries, but don't ask me how that's supposed to make any sense), so that the Space Vampire or whatever it was could take over as the real villain behind it all...

It was the bullet that went back in time, rather than Darkseid himself, iirc.

Darkseid was already back in time and living as a crime boss in New York, as of Seven Soldiers.

Death was chasing the flashes just like everyone else, the reason it became an issue with the flashes is that it's been previously established elsewhere that the flashes can outrun Death, hence them having their own Death, the Black Flash, the only personification of death that can catch a Flash.:o

It ties into the main story at the end when Death (the black racer) attempts to claim Barry, but barry outmaneuvers him and he takes Darkseid's body instead. Darkseid's soul then attempts to corrupt the multiverse, but Superman, having returned from beyond the multiverse, sings a note that cancels Darkseid out of existence once and for all.

>phew<

It's the same problem with all of these kinds of crossovers... you just need to know too much ancilary stuff going in, they never seem to stand on their own.

I only picked it up because I'd heard it was a sort-of sequel to Seven Soldiers, which had likewise been critically panned, but which I thought was fantastic. Still don't understand the criticism that that series gets, but I have to put my hands up in the case of Final Crisis: it didn't work very well.

And really, it was only very tangentially connected to Seven Soldiers.

As others mentioned, though, Superman Beyond was a good read, even if it was just a new take on the old Justice League staple of getting rid of Superman for most of the story so that everybody else has something to do. It's damning with faint praise to say that your excuse to keep Superman busy was better than the actual main story, though, obviously.