[incredibledave]

And now, my review of Final Crisis

I dont think I liked it. But it was interesting.

As far as summarizing the story for people who havn't read it, its the story about how Darksied takes over the world, its not immediately obvious that thats whats happening at the time, but most scenes can be connected to that central idea. The story seems to change plot threads and entire casts of characters every 3 - 4 pages, which does give the story a very large sense of scope, but makes it incredible hard to follow. To be fair there are lots of strong moments in this (the end of Final Crisis #4 sticks in my mind, and pretty much any of the early scenes with the "Super Young Team"). You could talk for hours about some of the ideas in this but I think that ultimately it was just an interesting experiment that didnt really work out in the end.

Now, onto the crazy ideas in this book.
This is kinda like an incredible exaggeration of superhero event comics. Its clearly trying to introduce as many characters and plot threads as possible and the way it cuts between scenes almost gives the feel of reading a bunch of really short tie-in issues. Reading Blackest Night feels incredibly scaled down next to this. Given how good Morrison is at using a page to tell as much as he needs to tell (no doubt due to his time writing on 52) it pretty hard to image more being put into this comics, which raises the question "am I loving this, or would I like it to just calm down and focus on one guy?".
It reminds me a lot of discussion I heard around the discussion of the film Avatar, with a few people suggesting that now that special effects are that good they cant be relied on to impress audience so filmmakers will need to go back to strong characters and drama to bring in an audience. This seems to be trying to do the same for superhero crossovers, we've seen absouletly everybody team up with everybody else, thats not really gonna be that impressive when you do it again (unless of coarse its a Marvel/DC crossover).

The collection I got also included the 2 "Superman: Beyond 3D" issues, which tie-in (in a way) but are mostly a comment on Stories and how the connection people feel to stories can give them power. Frankly, its not particularly insightful (or maybe im just not getting it) or very clear, and that lack of clarity really robs it of what could have been a very strong final page. If a meta commentary on the power of stories is what you want read Unwritten, its good stuff.

Another thing I think is worth pointing out is the comment Superman makes at J'onn J'onzz's funeral "we'll all miss him, and prey for a resurrection". A snappy little jibe at resurrections in Superhero comics, even they seem to be aware of how often they occur.


So yeah, feel free to post your thoughts.