At the same time, however, he offers another legitimate complaint:

I [don't] know which pre-Final Crisis continuity I’m supposed to accept and which I’m supposed to ignore. Orion’s third death in FC #1 made me think I was supposed to ignore Countdown and DONG, so I never really understood when Darkseid fell (in the Final Crisis version of events), or if it had anything to do with either Countdown or DONG and the reasons behind the death of the Fourth World. I didn’t know if I was supposed to remember those motivators (the Source did it!) and some of the outcomes (like Darkseid falling, but not Orion falling), or maybe just remember the motivators and not the outcomes, or just some of the outcomes and not the motivators, or neither. The fact that I don’t know what the mystery is doesn’t make me more intrigued.

The continuity SNAFU is indeed another perfectly legitimate complaint, and I didn’t raise it mainly because it seemed like water under the bridge, having already been discussed ad nauseam online when FC #1 came out five months ago, before this blog launched. I am definitely enough of a geek to have given it some thought, though, so for the record… let’s stipulate a few things:

* DoNG was a mediocre and pointless series.

* Countdown wasn’t merely mediocre, but painfully bad.

* The climactic events of DoNG and Countdown do not mesh seamlessly, to put it mildly.

* Nor does either one leads smoothly into Final Crisis #1.

* DC editorial pretty much screwed the pooch in terms of clearing the stage for the story Morrison wanted to tell, and has no apparent excuse for having done so.

Nevertheless… a little creative thinking can manage to reconcile most of this without throwing anything out of canon altogether.

How’s this for a theory: Orion obviously wasn’t killed in DoNG, since he returned to fight the hyper-powered Darkseid. He was mute at that point, but let’s chalk that up to still not being fully recovered from his near-death experience. He did, at least, fight Darkseid to a draw.

Darkseid then turned his attention to Earth, as seen in the final issues of Countdown, where he could attempt to co-opt the remaining “soul power” he had banked in Jimmy Olsen. Orion, more fully recovered, fought him again, and successfully killed him. He then wandered off forlornly, to meet his death under circumstances later disclosed in FC.

None of this—nor the earlier New Gods’ deaths, from Lightray on up—was detected by the Guardians of the Universe (in contrast to the “deicide” alert in FC #1—a plot thread still dangling, BTW), because (let us speculate) the Source and/or Darkseid were using their powers to mask it all from the Guardians’ attention. This was no longer the case when Orion finally died, hence the Guardians noticed and reacted.

After Darkseid’s death, his life force (and presumably that of his fellow Apokaliptians) “fell backward through time,” as depicted (very confusingly) in DCU #0, and explained by Grant Morrison in a Newsarama interview (which also clarifies a number of other things not quite on the page).

He/they landed on Earth a couple of years earlier, in the form of human avatars—as seen first in Seven Soldiers—and have since been working on rebuilding their power in order to make the leap to whatever they have planned next.

How’s that?

(Not that I forgive DC editorial for putting fans in a position where we have to do so much work just to make sense of things, though. It’s more than a little offputting.)

It’s also very unclear just how the anti-life equation works. So far we’ve seen at least three methods;

1) A disease of some sort, which Mary Marvel infected Wonder Woman with.
2) An Internet/electronic communication attack. Unclear if you have to look at/listen to something for an extended period of time or if seeing/hearing any of it sucks you in. The latter’s implied, but on the other hand the free heroes aren’t going around blindfolded with their fingers stuck in their ears going “la la la la I can’t hear Darkseid”.
3) Helmet/disk attachment…which is kinda redundant with methods 1 and 2 available.

The external problem is that if this is on a par with Infinite Earths and Infinite Crisis, well, for good or bad, both of those had significant lead ups across the line and while they were going on they had strong influences on the regular books.

But as mentioned, the supposed lead ups of Countdown and Death of the New Gods weren’t. And currently, you’ve got major storylines completely unrelated to FC (or each other) going on across the line…even by the same writer! Batman RIP by Morrison, New Krypton in the Superbooks, Reign In Hell, Rann-Thanagar War, and, oddly enough given FC is supposedly setting up the Fifth World, a God from the Third World wandering around in JSA. And JLA looks to be completely ignoring FC after a quick Martian Manhunter bit.

So FC and its explicit spinoff books and minis (and even only some of those; so far Legion of Three Worlds and Rogues’ Revenge seem only tangentially related to FC) seem to exist in their own little continuity corner. All the regular books are acting like it’s business as usual, hardly covering “The Day Evil Won”. It’s hard to feel FC is at the level of its supposed previous two “BIG Crises” if all the regular books are acting like it’s not happening or going to hit a reset button real soon now.