After reading through Brian’s awesome Notes and all the comments, I wonder if maybe Morrison is saying real life Comic Book Readers are the Monitors (metafictional vampires that feed off stories….) and maybe Darkseid is the bitter old Comic Book Reader and Mandrakk is the bitter old Comic Book Editor, both of whom are fed up with the current status quo and want to tear it all down around themselves?

I’d still like to see some of the stories of what actually happened in final crisis. I don’t recall the Hawks dying, did not know that Mr. T was in a different place and had travelled to Switzerland or was ever in Antartica. I am not a DC reader and would have loved some more explication from this book. This really was a limited audience book. That audience may consider itself ‘elite’ amongst comics readers but really they just love Grant Morrison. Thats all well and good, it does not make FC a story though. This is really just a collection of events that happened sort of.

The other Mr. T stuff was in other stories you really did not need to read. I only address it here to appease those who care about stuff like that.

As for the Hawks dying, it’s right in the comic book. They’re blown up well good right there in the comic (issue #7).

I guess basically, you’re right — this would pretty much intimidate Mandrakk, possibly weakening him to the extent that his death was, in essence, pretty uneventful (one small somewhat murky little panel box).

Now, with that said

There are 52 multiverse worlds DC has been playing with. Isn’t the purpose of the 52 to give its writers full control (maybe that has already been going on ) over a character to make a good story to make money?? Who cares about the continuity because we have the 52 and in the end we can just say, “Oh that story and the characters took place on Earth-14.”

I wonder what Earth Action Comics and the “New Krypton” series are on? Because doesn’t fall into Final Crisis. It would have been nice to see all comic titles with in the DC universe, including “Tiny Titan” HA HA – have a one issue where the sky turns “Red” to symbolize the “Final Crisis” and wonder what is going on just so any reader not reading “Final Crisis” can pick it up and hopefully get hooked.

Does that make sense? I don’t hopefully.

“Mere mortals garble the story of the “war in heaven” in various ways, but they’re somehow able to understand and represent facing down a multiversal vampire who feeds on metafictional narrative with the help of an army of angels, talking-animal superheroes and an army of incarnations of Superman?”

I think Morrison’s dismissal of Countdown and Death of the New Gods as apocrypha worked as a nice reference to Alan Moore’s Miracleman, and as a polite answer to a question he was being asked in every interview. I don’t think the ‘mere mortals can’t comprehend the war in heaven!’ thing was ever actually referenced in-story.

And judging by the comments in this thread and all over the internet regarding FC – clearly, there are a lot of fans who really weren’t able to ‘understand and represent facing down a multiversal vampire’ etc.

As long as everyone’s weighing in with their opinion on FC, I count myself in the ‘understood it, enjoyed it a lot, but didn’t think it was a particularly great work’ camp. IMO, Morrison’s best DC work was All-Star Superman, and even though he finished it less than twelve months ago, it seems to have been forgotten post-FC. Not just by the ‘Morrison sucks!’ crowd, either – you rarely see his defenders point to it as a recent example of his ability to tell a fairly straightforward, easily comprehensible story.

Honestly, I’d say that most stories have several jobs to do – or, at least, the best stories do. And that, on some level, the success of some of those jobs affects the overall quality of the whole, regardless of how well it handles the other jobs.

To put it another way, even the most allegorical and complex of stories can be seen as a brilliant success if it manages to succeed on multiple levels. This is even more important when you’re writing for an audience in what is ultimately a “simple” genre (comics), as opposed to writing deliberately obtuse prose for an advanced literary critique class. To use an example, Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics are incredibly dense, and annotated guides certainly exist so that readers can understand references that they didn’t even realize WERE references, but in the end, it also tells a simple story which is both easy to understand and enjoy, even if you don’t have a PhD in symbology. Different readers can enjoy the story on different levels.

But, the problem becomes that, failure on one level can affect other levels, regardless of how brilliant they are. Write a story that is enjoyable but not deep, and you basically have a success in spite of how shallow it is. Write a story that is deep but not enjoyable, and at BEST, you have an essay, not a story… and at worst, you have pretentious twaddle. When I was in college, I actually came up with the term “Literary Masturbation” to describe that sort of writing… the sort that basically screams “LOOK AT HOW DEEP AND MEANINGFUL I AM!” This is NOT a good thing.

In that sense, I don’t think the real question is whether or not Final Crisis was “understandable”, or whether or not the people who “understood” it are somehow superior to those who didn’t. I think the REAL question is, is Final Crisis capable of succeeding on all levels, or is it simply a work that succeeds at being dense and symbolic, but utterly fails at telling an enjoyable story? And I think, ultimately, the answer to that is that it fails at the most basic level – the narrative level. His intent may have been noble, but the end result falls short of the mark.

In a way, the problem is that Morrison seems to be hell-bent on writing philosophical cryptograms when he’s supposed to be writing comic books. And hey, that’s his call – and I wouldn’t even necessarily say it isn’t a worthy goal in and of itself. But when said work is turned into the cornerstone of an entire company, in a medium that is dedicated to turning out enjoyable stories (and not Philosophy PhD thesis material), there is a serious problem.

I’ve said for years that Morrison does his absolute best work when he’s either working on original characters, or characters that no one really gives a damn about, and I think Final Crisis proves that utterly. Granted, that’s more DiDio’s fault than Morrison’s, but that doesn’t really change anything.

Personally, I think the job of a story is the same as the job of a poem, painting, symphony, or sculpture. It’s job is to take you away from your life. In my mind a great story should take you over somehow, emotionally or intellectually. Final Crisis did not do a lot for me emotionally, but intellectually I was fascinated by what Morrison seemed to be saying to me. Of course, what I thought he was saying is not going to be the same as what anyone else thought he was saying, necessarily. I think the amount of conversation going on about Final Crisis is a sign of it’s success, not failure. This story has made people passionate, which is great. I’m excited about the conversations we can have because of Final Crisis.

Now, for my part of that conversation. I think this was a complex story which asked a lot of it’s readers. By complex, I don’t mean the plot, I mean thematic ideas. I enjoyed the fact that it seemed to be more of a rebuttal of Crisis on Infinite Earths rather than a sequel of a sequel, which I was afraid I would get. I hope that Morrison’s attempt to free the stories of the DC Universe works in the future. There’s no reason for any story to be chained now. I think it’s sad that Dan Didio has said he’s going to wait for Morrison to do stories in the Multiverse, because I interpreted Final Crisis as a call for creators to tell more stories, anywhere in the Multiverse, with any character. This is of course most clear when the Zoo Crew show up in #7. Even funny animals have great stories to tell.

I completely understand that Final Crisis didn’t do for everyone what it did for me. I just wish that people would not call it incomprehensible. Final Crisis is no more difficult to understand than “Lost,” and that show is watched by millions.

They pointed out that Watchmen has a straightforward surface story that can be read and enjoyed easily enough. It’s only when you read the textual pieces and re-read thestory a couple of times that the underlying complexity and hidden layers start to come through…
In comparison to that, Final Crisis doesn’t have the surface story to skim through (a life-line for readers not trained to spot symblism, metatext, etc.) and that is what caused the uproar…
How many people said they read Watchmen, but have never read the text parts?

Personally I really enjoyed Final Crisis (far more than Secret Invasion) BUT it was hard work.

I for one would have preferred a skeleton story like Watchmen had that I could then flesh with re-reading…
As it stands, I still feel like I’m missing a few patches of skin… but it’s a nice body of work.

This is very perceptive comment, I think. It partly explains why some people (including myself) felt they understood the work just fine, while others seem to have had so much trouble. On the other hand, some of the stuff in these Cliff Notes is very, very obvious indeed. I’m quite content to say that anyone who didn’t get that the final scene is issue #1 showed a banished Nix Uotan simply wasn’t reading very well. Perhaps they were reading the words and not the pictures, a mistake when it comes to reading any Grant Morrison (who is a lot less word-focused than, say, Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman).

But it isn’t, and it can’t be, and frankly it shouldn’t be. Lots of other writers have lots of other stories to tell about these characters (heck, Grant Morrison’s still got more, judging by his plans to return to Batman in a while.) There is always a “what happens next?” in comics. It’s part of the joy of the medium, knowing that you’re following a part of a narrative that was begun before you were born and that you will pass off to your children and your children’s children.

But there are people who don’t want that. They want to be able to say, “I wasn’t there at the beginning, but I was there for the end.” They feel like the whole thing has gotten old and stale because they’re losing interest, and so they think that means it’s time to wrap the whole thing up and move on to something else. (Hmm…parallels to Darkseid’s attempts to end the universe with him?) These people got their hopes raised dramatically with the very announcement of a “Final Crisis” series, and it feels like a personal betrayal to them that it wasn’t the final crisis they hoped it would be. I think that’s where a lot of the hate comes from, the feeling that they were going to be there for the ultimate event, the end of the universe, and now it’s seven months later and not much has changed. (Me, I disliked it because I’m bored with comics that are preoccupied with the past. Any series that spends its whole time tying up loose ends from comics that came out before I was born is a series that is looking the wrong direction to me. But that’s my personal preference, and I see no need to inflict it on others at length.)

So in short, I think that the biggest problem with “Final Crisis” was the title. If Grant Morrison had called it “This Week’s Crisis”, people might have liked or disliked it, but I don’t think they’d have hated it.

This sounds really stupid, since the logo for this blog comes straight out of We3.

To be clear: I think it’s natural to see your own viewpoint as the most logical (that’s why it’s your viewpoint, after all) and everyone should be welcome to make their point and defend it. It’s only the people flinging insults on the one side or trying to “prove” that something other people enjoyed wasn’t on the other good that I’m complaining about (and while they have the right to do those things, I have the right to complain about it).

Honestly, I think whether most people see FC as understandable or not has less to do with their ability to understand it than with their standard for what’s required for something to be considered understood. The general plot of the book is pretty clear (Darkseid unleashes Anti-Life, heroes fight back, heroes win,
Mandrakk shows up, heroes win again), but no one knows who the monkey guy was or how Wonder Woman was freed and opinions differ on the final fates of several characters (I agree that the Hawks were supposed to be dead, for what it’s worth). If you think it’s important to know how Wonder Woman went from being Darkseid’s slave to tying him up (my guess: he forgot the safeword) then that whole chunk of the story was basically like an Underpants Gnome plotline (South Park reference, for those that didn’t get it – basically a plan with a step 1 and 3 but no step 2). If it’s enough for you to know that she escaped without being told how, then it made perfect sense.

A lot of the details don’t make sense, because (and Morrison has pretty much confirmed this in interviews) some of them aren’t SUPPOSED to make sense, either to underscore the confusion the characters are experiencing or to allow the reader to interpret events as he or she will, and frankly Morrison likes to throw a bit of nonsense into everything he writes ’cause it’s fun (minimum number of moves necessary to solve a Rubik’s Cube? C’mon, he just thought that was cool). If you’re the kind of person who gets to the last scene of a murder mystery and just wants to know who the killer was, you’re probably fine with that; if you’re the type who needs to see how all the clues fit together and gets bothered by red herrings and evidence introduced at the last minute, the little things may bug you too much to enjoy FC too. You may fall somewhere in between. Really, it depends on your reading style and what you bring to the table, and really, no one’s wrong. It’s impossible to misenjoy a comic book.

I think FC really is a seven-issue long Rorschoch test.

Which means it’s really just viral advertising for the Watchmen move.

He needs to release a book of comic-related essays to get this out of his system and return to writing actual stories primarily about people rather than his current rut of writing stories primarily about what Grant Morrison thinks about earlier stories.