Final Crisis #1 & #2

Two issues into Final Crisis and I can say without hesitation that Grant Morrison and J. G. Jones have - despite the better efforts of DC Corporate - managed to craft a compelling tale.

Previously, I had expressed my conflicted anticipation for the series. Grant Morrison I like; DC's latest endless cycle of EARTH-SHATTERING extravaganzas have often been exhausting and frequently nonsensical. Of course, Morrison and Jones have not entirely avoided the problems of DC Corporate, but read as a self-contained textual artifact, Final Crisis holds together as well as any comic with sixty years of stories behind it can.* Readers of Countdown to Final Crisis and Death to the New Gods did encounter several contradictions and major plot holes which were essentially the product of editorial fiat and failure. The most flagrant gaff so far is that they had to see the the soldier god of New Genesis, Orion, die twice and in different ways. Morrison explained the situation to the comics website, Newsarama thusly:

Although the 52 writing team was asked to contribute to Countdown, we were all seriously burned-out by the demands of the weekly schedule and I think we all wanted to concentrate on our own monthly titles for a while, so when Countdown was originally being discussed, it was just a case of me saying ‘Here’s issue 1 of Final Crisis and a rough breakdown of the following six issues. As long as you guys leave things off where Final Crisis begins, we‘ll be fine.’ Obviously, I would have preferred it if the New Gods hadn’'t been spotlighted at all, let alone quite so intensively before I got a chance to bring them back but I don’t run DC and don’t make the decisions as to how and where the characters are deployed.

However, seeing as I read neither Countdown or Death of the New Gods (both had the stink of surplus crossover on them), none of this has actually impended on my enjoyment of Morrison's script or Jones pencils.

What Morrison and Jones are striving for - and accomplishing with a good deal of success - is to tell the story of when evil finally defeated good in the ultimate battle. The catch to the series relies on the fact that the battle has already been won by the forces of evil, but the good guys just don't know it. In order to tell this story, Morrison and Jones need to establish a darker mood than the DCU normally accommodates. On this account, they are more than successful. Martian Manhunter is inglorious slaughtered and Batman is brutally, and yet casually, tortured. With these narrative acts, Morrison and Jones establish that the age of heroes is over. Indeed, the only betrayal of this tone might be in the fact that Jones's heroes remain too heroic looking. Chris Weston, who worked with Morrison on the absolutely depressing and revolting The Filth, might have been a better choice. His figures, like Jones's, tend towards the photo-realistic, but Weston's spandex-wearing warriors always have a seedy awkwardness to them that would have really captured the tone of the series.

Adding to the creepy mood of Final Crisis is that much of the series is told from the perspective of Dan Turpin, a retired Metropolis cop turned hardboiled investigator. Morrison uses Turpin to ground the series in the nitty-gritty of daily life and its his sullied view of the world that matches the tenor of much of the plot. Hot on the trail of some missing kids, Turpin discovers a far deeper mystery concerning the battle between good and evil. Running into the transformed evil gods of Apokolips in a kind of near dream-like logic, Turpin is told again and again that evil has won; however Turpin, like the apostles in the New Testament, seems unable to understand that the bad news has come no matter how clear the Bad Gods make it known.

Now, all of this has proven to be interesting, moody, and in many ways really quite disturbing. But the voice of doubt in the back of my head keeps on telling me that the series is going to hit the skids under editorial mandate. As of the first issue, and continuing on into the second, Morrison has established for himself four different plot threads for the series:

1) The transformation of the New Gods after their death and the victory of the evil gods.
2) The interference of the New God Metron in the development of human beings, and the necessity of such interference sometime at the end of time.
3) The re-establishment of the Society of Super-Villains by Libra (presumably working for the Darkseid the evil god supreme)
4) The mismanagement of the mutliverse by unscrupulous monitors.

Now presumably, 1-3 all go together easily enough. One imagines that Metron's involvement with the caveboy Anthro will help solve the plot complications that result from plot thread #1. Furthermore, its easy enough to see that Libra is in someway responsible for the events of plot thread #1. The events of #4 however seem like another attempt by DC Corporate to rearrange the byzantine architecture of their fictional nomos. As of yet it seems to have nothing to do with the other three plot threads.

Instead of expressing an interest in telling a Crisis-style story, Morrison seems to be using Final Crisis as an endcap for most of his DCU work to date. The connection between the Society of Super-Villains and Darkseid's victory over the earth resonates strongly with his "Rock of Ages" storyline in JLA ten years ago. Furthermore, the transformation of the New Gods hearkens directly back to Morrison's groundbreaking work in Seven Soldiers - elements of which seem to be in conflict with the plot points of #4.

Nevertheless, these are two solid issues and Morrison and Jones have me, presumably, until the end of this series.

* I realize that this is paradoxical.

Showcase Presents

When I was a very young child my favorite television show was the Super-Friends.* I'm sure this comes as a shock to many of you. I loved Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman and Robin. My favorite game was to play superheroes, casting myself as Superman and doling out the other parts as a sign of ranked friendship. While I've outgrown sucking my thumb and having accidents, I have not outgrown superheroes or comics. My fascination with both message and medium will either lead to my destruction, as a stack of bagged and board comics will invariably topple over and crush my vulnerable skull, or it might lead to some form of marginal academic success. At least, maybe an article in The Journal of Popular Culture or MELUS.

However, before I go on about possible future additions to my CV or my broken skull, let me talk a little bit more about The Super-Friends.** When my parents got cable in my early teens, besides being taken by Comedy Central and MTV, I was enthralled by The Cartoon Network. They aired reruns of The Super-Friends and although I watched them religiously during the summer, I was really taken aback by just how incredibly lame they seemed. It wasn't like I remembered it at all. Compared to the comics there was hardly any story. Compared to the Paul Dini animated Batman and Superman cartoons there was hardly any violence. It wasn't that I wanted a bloodbath, but I was expecting a little bit of punching at the very least. Even the animated credits of the Adam West Batman show had punching. "What's the point of having super strength when you never use it?" I mused. Superman & Co. never really fought anyone. Instead of using direct physical force against the Legion of Doom,*** they always ended up fighting jungle animals. Correction: They ended up fighting robots that looked like tigers. At the time, I was a teenage know-it-all and I interpreted the lack of violence as the interference of some well meaning but misguided parents group. While the show did not encourage children to hit each other, it did encourage animal cruelty, or at least cruelty towards machines that looked suspiciously like regular-old animals.

Having transformed from a teenage know-it-all to an undergraduate pedant, to hopefully something a little more humble, a little more intelligent, I have come to understand that with age comes knowledge, but more importantly the wisdom that as you learn, you understand just how much you don't know. Making this point ever apparent to me is the arrival of DC's Showcase Presents titles. Collecting over 500 pages of material (or about two years worth of comics), these inexpensive reprints provide a glimpse of what comics were really like in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Having just completed the first two collections, Green Lantern vol. 1 and Superman vol. 1, I have to say that neither of these titles provide the violence that I so wanted to see in junior high. While this supposed lack was probably due to the power of the official censoring board of the industry, The Comics Code Authority, I can't say that the stories are really harmed by the lack of physical encounters. Instead of dwelling on Superman's invulnerability and strength, the stories collected in Showcase Presents: Superman understand the appeal of the Superman character is not that he's strong per se, but that his strength may give out. What makes these stories successful is that they understand that the true themes of Superman are impotence and insecurity.

One story that illustrates this perfectly involves Superman developing a new superpower, a miniature double of himself that has all of the Man of Steel's regular superpowers, while leaving Superman himself normal. Superman becomes so jealous of his doll-sized helper that he anguishes, "Everyone's impressed. . . except me! Don't they understand how I feel playing second fiddle to a miniature duplicate of myself. . . a sort of super-imp?" Indeed, Superman's jealousy is so intense that when the little imp sacrifices himself to save Superman, the Man of Tomorrow cannot even muster the super-empathy to feel sad for his dead partner. As the miniature doppelganger fades from existence, Superman thinks to himself, "I wonder. . . did it have a life of its own which it sacrificed for me, or was it just carrying out my thoughts. . . before I could put them into words? I . . . I'll never know!" That's the best Superman can muster: "I wonder if somebody died for me. Oh well, best not to think about it."

It is the funnier, crazier, and wackier stories that work best in both collections. My favorite of the Green Lantern anthology uses the conventions of the Lois Lane/Clark Kent/Superman romance. Green Lantern's brother Jim is being pursued romantically by a reporter who is wrongly convinced that Jim is really Green Lantern. Of course she can't prove it, but whenever she's around Jim, he disappears (usually knocked out by a mobster) and all of a sudden Green Lantern shows up. While the super-imp issue is near and dear to my heart, my favorite of the Superman collection would have to be the issue where Superman gets amnesia and cannot remember that he is Clark Kent and so masquerades as an Englishman named Clarence Kelvin. What is great about this conceit is that Kelvin decides to work for The Daily Planet. Superman's disguises are so convincing that none of them recognize him as either Clark of Superman. Even better, Superman can't recognize himself as Kent even after seeing a picture of himself in his Kent disguise. This is perfect.

While these editions are printed on less expensive paper and in black and white, the amount of material reproduced here is well worth the price. These stories are fun to read and are much more affordable than DC's Archives line or trying to hunt down the actual back issues. This is an excellent purchase for anyone wanting to read 1960s comics or who need to do archival work in comics research. This would be me and about ten other folk.

*There really needs to be Super-Friendster. Superheroes need to keep in touch too. I'm sure it's been a long time since Captain Comet got to knock back a few with Bobo the Detective Chip.

** Those feeling like Beatrix at the end of Kill Bill vol. 2 when she screams "How much longer does this last?" when Bill is giving his monologue about Superman are totally in the right at this point.

*** Why is the Right so much better at organizing? The Villains had an entire Legion, a Legion of $%#^in' Doom! The superheroes only had a social hall. They might as well have been Quakers.

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