SmartRemarks

What.

The fuck.

Was that?

Seriously. Final Crisis #7 was every bit as crashingly disappointing as I feared it would be, and more so. Grant Morrison’s reach clearly far, far exceeded his grasp.

It certainly did exemplify a writing style he earlier described (warned? threatened?) as “channel-zapping,” though, and gods willing no one will ever be tempted to try such a style again. Morrison seems not to have considered just why the practice evolved in the first place—i.e.,  when people keep clicking that remote, it’s typically because they’re not interested in the random snippets they zap through along the way, but rather because they’re hoping (usually in vain) that something better will turn up that merits ongoing attention.

Further self-descriptions of his work? Well, there’s this…

I had the idea to develop an approach to comic narrative that would actually benefit from becoming entangled in internet fan speculation, gossip and research… I’ve always liked to leave resonant spaces, gaps and hints in stories, where readers can do their own work and find clues or insert their own wild and often brilliant theories. I’m often trying to create a kind of fuzzy quantum uncertainty or narrative equivalent of a Rorschach Blot Test effect, which invites interpretation.

and this…

Superhero comics should have an ‘event’ in every panel! We all know this instinctively. Who cares ‘how?’ as long as it feels right and looks brilliant ? …

I found myself wondering what it would be like if comics’ storytelling stopped aping film or TV and tried a few tricks from opera, for instance. How about dense, allusive, hermetic comics that read more like poetry than prose? How about comics loaded with multiple, prismatic meanings and possibilities? Comics composed like music? In a marketplace dominated by ‘left brain’ books, I thought it might be refreshing to offer an unashamedly ‘right brain’ alternative.

Never a model of humility, in the same interviews Morrison attempts to compare his writing to TV and film works like Lost and Donnie Darko, and dismisses the critics of his recent work as “lazier readers” and/or “a particularly jaded minority on the internet.” Sorry, but I count myself as part of the large and devoted fan followings of the examples he names, and of many similarly “complex” works—not because they’re stylistically complex, though, but because they tell well-structured, emotionally compelling stories—and FC isn’t even in the same ballpark. “Disjointed” is the word that’s come up more than any other in reviews of Morrison’s writing in recent months, but this issue takes the adjective to a whole new level. Morrison’s effect—indeed, apparently his intent—was to have his story swallowed up by its own lacunae, and that simply doesn’t make for a satisfying reading experience.

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Tags: continuity, Darkseid, DC Comics, Final Crisis, Grant Morrison, super-heroes, Superman

My single overwhelming impression of this issue:

Wow, that was crap.

Again.

I kind of enjoyed issue #5, enough to be hoping for an upward trend as this story neared the home stretch. Apparently that was too much to hope for, though. (Which perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise, given the book’s multifarious agenda to be simultaneously a big accessible “event” story, a sequel to Jack Kirby’s New Gods work, a sequel to the classic Crisis on Infinite Earths, a thematic capstone to Grant Morrison’s body of super-hero work, and a thematic capstone to Dan DiDio’s chaotic tenure as DC’s executive editor.)

What did we actually get in this penultimate issue? Well…

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Tags: Batman, continuity, Darkseid, DC Comics, Final Crisis, Grant Morrison, Green Lantern, Legion, super-heroes, Superman

The first six pages of Final Crisis #5 were the highlight of the series so far for me. They take us to Oa, following up on the status of Green Lantern Hal Jordan (not seen since issue #3 back in August). Unlike the brief, hit-and-run scenes that have characterized so much of this series to date, the sequence stays with its subjects long enough to clarify why and how Hal was framed and arrested, and to clear his name in a dramatic confrontation with Alpha Lantern Kraken (possessed by Granny Goodness), moving the plot markedly forward with some spot-on character moments along the way. It all leads up to a classic line—melodramatic but oh-so-evocative—as a Guardian enjoins him, “You have 24 hours to save the universe, Lantern Jordan.”

This is why I love comics.

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Tags: Darkseid, DC Comics, Final Crisis, Grant Morrison, Lex Luthor, super-heroes

After a two-month gap (partially planned, but also including an extra three-week delay), DC released issue #4 of Final Crisis this week.

And… I can’t really say that it was worth the wait.

Here’s what happens in this issue:  with Earth infected by the Anti-Life Equation, the heroes try to rally their forces against those who have been possessed. Meanwhile, Darkseid finishes reincarnating in the body of Dan Turpin.

And, umm… that’s it, really.

We get nothing new about the errant Monitor (the only plot thread that even remotely ties this in to previous Crises). We get nothing about Libra and his army of villains. Nothing about goings-on on Oa. We do get more non sequitur dialogue (the sequence between Green Arrow and the Ray, for example). We’re given the puzzling factoid that about a billion people planetwide were taken over by the ALE… which sounds large but is actually only about 15% of Earth’s population, making it odd that they seem to have a zombie-movie-like numerical advantage in all the crowd scenes. And through it all, every page practically screams at me, “none of this is going to matter to the DCU at large. There is no possible way this story can end except by pressing a giant reset button.”

(Except for the return of Barry Allen, of course. Which is itself a terrible idea:  Barry had one of the best deaths in comics history, by far the most memorable moment of his heroic career, and anything flowing from his return can only undermine that moment and seem anticlimactic by comparison.)

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Tags: Darkseid, DC Comics, Final Crisis, Grant Morrison, Green Arrow, super-heroes