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.

Last Week in Comics #4: DC Universe 0

DC Universe 0
W: Grant Morrison and Geoff Johns
A: Various
I: Various
Ed: Dan Didio


DC Universe 0 is purported to be the kick-off point to DC Comics's summer miniseries and crossover Final Crisis. Like all of DC Comics' crises, this one promises to fix the complicated continuity of the DCU once and for all. As the captions in the page to your left summarizes:

The first crisis brought death to nearly all of creation. One lone universe was spared. A second crisis witnessed the violent resurrection of 52 new parallel universes. And so begins the final chapter in the sage of the multiple earths. The final crisis.

Why any one would believe that Final Crisis will solve the "problem" of the multiverse is beyond me. While the page to the left has a certain narrative economy, it actually ignores two other attempts to clean up continuity between Crisis on Infinite Earths and Infinite Crisis: 1994's Zero Hour and 1999's Kingdom. By the end of the summer that means there will have been five attempts to clean things up since the mid-1980s. On average, there has been a "crisis" every four years with the duration between crises getting shorter and shorter. Either this means that the creators at DC Comics have managed to tell increasingly convoluted stories since the mid-1980s, or these crises have not adequately done their job, and/or these events are profitable and thus have a commercial worth that makes up for their artistic and functional demerits.

In a very real sense these projects are doomed to failure. None of the crises have been truly revolutionary acts as none of them have rolled back the clock to the year zero. They have tried to solve the problem of having a complex 40-year old narrative structure by telling another narrative. In a very real sense, they have tried to dig the DCU out of a hole by digging deeper. All that these crises do is to add an extra lawyer of narrative on what has come before. Nothing becomes streamlined; the ontological structures within the narratives themselves become increasingly more byzantine, more complex. The forms of the DC's Modern Age (1986 -present?) rests not on the supposed ashes of the Silver Age as the above page would make you believe, but on its very fertile and sprouting ground. Unless Final Crisis is preprepared to say goodbye to all the stories since the late 1930s than this crisis will only create a new, but temporary status quo. And even if it was willing to take this daring step it would only be a half-victory. As Kingdom's Hypertime revealed with some insight if not elegance: these are all just stories and we remember them even if they aren't "official" anymore.

If we cannot count of Final Crisis or its lead-in DC Universe 0 to make good on its mandate to rearrange the DCU in a more intelligible way, we should try and understand it on a more local level. We should instead ask, "How does it read as a story and only a story?"DC Universe 0 manages to be both an expression of Faulknerian modernism and nothing more than a shameless in-house ad for this summer's story lines. I suppose this might be the inevitable fate for any comic that is co-written by the inventive mind of Grant Morrison and the mainstream, nostalgic wasteland of Geoff Johns's talent.

Let's start with DC Universe 0 the commercial before we get to DC Universe 0 the modernist experiment. To be frank, there is no organic story to DC Universe 0. It consists of a host of fragmentary episodes that spotlight or foreshadow coming events in several DC books, most of which will probably have little to do with Final Crisis. Each section is then followed with a purposeful house ad in a unified style promoting said storyline. The difference between the house ads and the "content" comes down to little more than length. The connection between these storylines is of course never made clear and if Final Crisis does attempt to do so, it will probably do so unsuccessfully. This of course means that the narrative of DC Universe 0 is fragmentary and as any good student of modernism will tell you, fragments are part and parcel of the modernist aesthetic.

What holds together DC Universe 0 is a disembodied consciousness that slowly becomes self-aware as it narrates the issue's events. The first page of the issue features a splash page of a a galaxy with a small lightning bolt rushing across from it. Two captions collectively read, "This is everything. This is me." This disembodied consciousness who elides his identity with the totality of the universe allows Morrison and Johns to essentially link together this heap of unrelated images. As the issue continues the narrator becomes self-aware and the captions shift from black to red until the identity of the narrator, now separate from the universe, becomes apparent.

While this does show some formal inventiveness both on the part of Morrison and Johns, and on the part of letterer Nick Napolitano it does not mean that the issue's utter commercialism is mollified by its turn to stylistic modernism. Instead this stylistic turn in fact aggrandizes the very reader who would taken on the task of the disembodied consciousness. For the managers and editors of DC Comics are hoping that someone else will read the legion of comics that DC will put out this year. Reading all these titles, reading across the universe, subsuming oneself into this universe is at once the ultimate act of modernist self-effacement and at the same time the ultimate act of comic book consumption.