the rolling Final Crisis thread

QUESTION: Does this mean the DC Uni/Multiverse has just been recreated/reimagined by Superman???

You mean, "Is Superman God?"?

precisely.
Whereas the post-COIE DCU was largely shaped by the paradigms of Watchmen and DKR, can we now have 20 yrs of comics derivative to ASS? PLEASE

Mordy: Orion's the god of war, so after he dies, all the heroes spend the next three issues getting clobbered--the best they can do is run.

Dr. Superman: Yes--as Iman notes (in Spanish), Superman reboots/jumpstarts time. Crises end with a reboot...

I guess the fact that Metron is the one who resurrects Nix is one connection between the Darkseid/Mandrakk plotlines...

Yes, obviously Superman rebooted the uni/multiverse, but what I'm more interested in is whether or not it's been recast in his image, so to speak...

Yeah, I imagine when Bruce Wayne finally comes back from way back whenever, he's going to have a lot fewer aches, pains, old gunshot wounds, broken backs, rheumatiz, Joker-inflicted knife scars, etc

Yes, obviously Superman rebooted the uni/multiverse, but what I'm more interested in is whether or not it's been recast in his image, so to speak...

― Oh Why, Sports Coat? (Dr. Superman), Friday, January 30, 2009 12:35 PM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I'm thinking yes. Also hoping, at least a little. And looking forward to the inevitable G-Mo interview where he opines that probably Superman recreated the whole multiverse, including our own and is therefore the being some may think of as YHWH.

In ASS, Morrison made the link between Neitzche's ubermensch, and Superman, so it wouldn't be hard to see him using Superman as some kind of platonic perfect human. Theologically, this would fall into the Voltairian "If God Didn't Exist..." statement, by which man - which is to say, the perfect man, the ubermensch - creates the Universe/God out of language. So literalized, a man - men, to be exact; Siegel + Shuster - created this perfect man, who then replicated their own genesis by recreating his own universe.

Or something.

(Comix as Existentialism moreorless.)

Actually, the more I think about it, the more I feel like ASS + Final Crisis need to be read against/with each other.

In ASS Superman is Jesus, not Jesus' Dad. Looking forward to the Superman as Holy Spirit miniseries.

Maybe he can be a being of pure energy, and they can make him blue or something! Oh, wait...

um...

Mentioned this elsewhere, but Superman-as-creator? Look at the panel where he's activating the Miracle Machine: the giant hand in the foreground with the spiral-nebula shape in front of it is what Krona saw at the beginning of time in GREEN LANTERN #40, the origin-of-the-DCU image that's been referred to many times over the last 40 years!

okay, this is a stretch here, and a little cyclical, I'm just brainstorming..but mightn't Superman, in all his midwestern modesty and deepseated affection for humanity, recreate the world in such a way that although, yes, he's the creator, he is not the creator? That he would create, within his creation, a Creator even greater than He?

OMG, the Spectre is now Superman's FIST (or whatever Rucka called it)!

Siegel as Christ figure, discuss.

Why have all the Marvel titles disappeared from my comics shop?

He Loves You.

I can' help thinking it would have been better if Superman had panicked at the miracle machine and wished for the Stay-Puft marshmallow man.

Nix " what did you wish for supes?"
supes "I couldn't help it, It just popped in there"
Nix " What Did You Wish For Superman??"
Supes " I tried to think of the one most harmless thing, something I loved from my childhood. something that could never destroy us."
Nix " what did you wish for???"

Stay Puft man appears and stands on the Miracle machine, crushes mandrake and dooms the world to the void.
Morrison hands that draft to Dan Didio, then exits the building whistling a merry tune.

the end.

I think that, much as I love the final issue, I love even more that I live in a world where that is the final issue of Final Crisis, if you see what I mean.

I wonder how much of Grant Morrison's artistic and political capital at DC, for lack of better terms, he spent in the creation of FC. It might be zero, I dunno, just wondering.

I'd guess not a lot: it sold over 100,000 copies an issue, and pretty much all the spinoffs sold in the 50-100K range too. If vocal Internet reaction were the same thing as sales... well, "Blue Beetle" would be DC's biggest title.

(Same goes for R.I.P., which for all the online carping about it--to quote Marc-Oliver Frisch's commentary over on The Beat, "For the last four issues, it seems like somebody nailed it to 103,000 copies and went away for an extended vacation. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a blockbuster storyline hold on to its audience as consistently well as this one.")

another way to look at it is that GM invested a massive amount of political captial in FC and Batman RIP and the gambles paid off. if the series had tanked or infuriated fans, morrison would have lost the ability to do similar stuff in the future. as it stands, i imagine he can do pretty much whatever he wants to/with the DCU. you know, within reason...

just read it. kinda like i expected: satisfactory and even poignant, if not entirely satisfying. heavy-duty action and constant revelation of FC6 and beyond 3D2 replaced by narrative puzzle-piecing and a reflective, retrospective tone. the process of settling gently back down to earth(s)

superman as god concept echoes all-star superman, where kal created a pocket universe for experimental evaluation - in this universe "superman" exists only as a philosophical ideal and as a comic book character...

reading back, i guess that second point got hashed out last week. oops.

ilx0r-in-absentia skidmo has read it

still a little confused as to what might have precipitated darkseid's "fall" (not having read death of the new gods or countdown).

did like the bullet's loop (from darkseid to orion, then back to darkseid via batman, perhaps dug out and fired back once more through time? or maybe it's a different same bullet? i dunno). but why would darkseid go ahead and fire the bullet after discovering that it would be his ultimate undoing? and why was he still so concerned about orion there at the end, when it had become clear that killing orion wouldn't actually accomplish much? i mean, when the bullet is fired, orion's been dead for some time, and darkseid is nonetheless clearly on his way out.

Maybe, in some way, it was worth it for Darkseid in his evil divinity to BE everything for even a brief period of time, since, y'know, time collapsed in on itself, so, in effect, he did get to be everything forever.

Plus, we all know he'll be back in time for the 25 yr old SPOILER ALERT great darkness saga.

so, hey, do the flasheses in this collapsing/collapsed universe also loop enternally, leading death to darkseid, and than pursuing his bullet back to orion, and then leading death to darkseid, etc?

tom spurgeon's crit of this series is the first piece i've read that isn't all 'duh this comic is confusing and complicated' or 'duh this comic is a masterpiece of comic bk art' - i particularly like his final paragraph:

http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/midnight_snack_yawn/

The jump cuts bounce back and forth from suggestions of adventures and slivers of story moments that are meant, I think, to indicate entire scenes. They do so in unconvincing fashion. They don't feel like stolen moments from a rich and diverse universe of remarkable events. They feel like snippets created for snippets' sake, fake trailers to non-existent movies. Their inauthenticity makes seeing them strung together feel like watching the One Shining Moment montage of a sporting event without having watched any of the games.

otm, but overstated. i said something similar upthread: that the fragments don't effectively hint at a larger world, because everything's equally fragmented and therefore there isn't a coherent core story for the reader to hold onto and spin out from.

also agree with the compaints about the uneven, rushed, sometimes-just-plain-bad inking. don't know why this was such a problem, and for a big prestige job like this, it just shouldn't have been. parts of 6 & 7 are just amateurish.

overall, though, i'm much more satisfied with the story than spurgeon seems to have been. as with morrison from day 1, i'm more interested in and charmed by the details than the large-scale plotting. i like the way he writes and the way he thinks enough to overlook the fact that he often lets the marginalia overwhelm the story he's trying to tell. and in this case, i like where he's left the DCU. it seems a promising place from which to explore.

okay, not quite from day 1. from mid-doom patrol on.

How many issues do you think it would have taken to decompress out all that was hinted at on screen?

Now after reading the second half of Secret Invasion, it is interesting that it fell short in almost the opposite way of Final Crisis. There are pages of splash fight scenes that go on and on, coming out over months but actually being like a couple of days. It was almost in slow motion. Final Crisis on the other hand was for many overly most compressed and dense with lots of the action just inferred or shown in hindsight.

It would not be a bad thing if BMB were required to let someone else plot the last issue or two of all his story arcs.

Final Crisis 7 was the final comic I am ever going to buy.

It ended so perfectly I thought I would rather leave the ensuing stories to my imagination and not DCs writers.

Have I made the right decision???

There are other comics than those published by DC, you know?

Lots of them. Lots and lots.

I bought the hardcover collection and read all of FC (plus Batman 682-683) again, and I think many things made a lot more sense on the second reading, but there's still a few things that I felt were left totally unexplained. Maybe they're explained in all the additional FC books, but I'm not gonna read all of those just to find out... So I thought I'd ask about them here, if some of you could give some answers or educated guesses.

In an issue-by-issue order:

Final Crisis #1
What's the deal with the caveman here? Why does he suddenly transport into the future of an alternate Earth? Reading this thread I found out that the blonde guys in the alternate Earth is Kamandi, the last boy on Earth (I take it it's the same Kamandi who appeared in Crisis on Infinite Earths)... But how does Kamandi know about Metron's weapon, and that the cavemen has it, and that it is needed on a parallel Earth? It looks like Kamandi doesn't have the time to get the painted pattern, so how does Black Lightning get it by Submit #1? I take it Metron's weapon is not simply a pattern to paint over one's face, because that would seem kinda banal, and if that's the case, why would Metron give to a caveman 40 000 years ago? Wouldn't it have seen easier to give it to JLA two years ago? I assume to weapon is some sort of meme/idea that allows humankind to fight oppression (like the caveman fights against the evil cavemen with fire), and it was necessary to give it to caveman so the meme would spread from generation to generation, and 40 000 years later it would be in the collective sunbconscious of all/most human beings. (This would also explain why the pattern keeps showing up in different places, as someone mentions in some later issue.) I take it the painted pattern is merely a way to activate this meme, right?

Final Crisis #2
Are the Japanese superheroes and Sonny Sumo supposed to be Earthly incarnations of New Gods? I think at some point Sonny Sumo tells Mr. Miracle that he's not from this plane of existence or something, which might hint that he is a New God in human form. My knowledge of the New Gods is not very good, so I can't really match Sonny or any of the other Japanese heroes with them.

In the final page we see Barry Allen resurrected, but we're never explained how or why it happened. He just makes some vague mention that "something" pulled him out of death, but what was that something? Is this supposed to be a meta joke on Morrison's part: is that "something" actually DC editors, who wanted to bring Barry back to life?

Also, Metron's chair seemed to be kinda important to Libra in the previous issue, so why would he abandon it for Wally and Jay to find? Is it because he couldn't find Element X in it the way Superman did in FC #7?

Final Crisis #3
What's the deal with the magical hand writing a message ("know evil") on page 3? Who is writing that message and who is supposed to get it?

Is Mary Marvel possessed by one of Darkseid's henchmen here? Looks like she's "gone evil" before any of the other heroes did, and she seems to have much more personality thant the other heroes controlled by Darkseid in the later issues.

Tuomas -

Most of your questions were covered in Douglas' excellent annotations here:

http://finalcrisisannotations.blogspot.com/

Instead of my rehashing his info, take a look and then see what questions remain.

Superman Beyond #1
How does the society of Monitors relate to the Monitor we saw in Crisis on Infinite Earths? Was there always more than one Monitor, and the Monitor in CoIE simply never mentioned the other Monitors? Or did this society of Monitors only come into being after CoIE? The way I interpreted this issue is that the Monitor in CoIE was the probe the Over-Monitor/God sent to investigate a flaw in itself (i.e. the multiverse)... And it was only after the probe came into contact with the multiverse that Over-Monitor/God became "infected with stories", creating this story/history of a society of Monitors, which became reality because any story the Monitor(s) believe(s) in does come true. If this is correct, is Dax Novu/Mandrakk the Monitor of CoIE? In this issue he is said to be "the first son of Monitor", which could mean he was the probe mentioned earlier.

(x-post)

Okay, thanks! I'll look into that, and see if there are still some questions left unsanswered.

I read Douglas's annotations and they did answer some of my questions: now I know who Sonny Sumo is, what happened to Mary Marvel, and (maybe) what the hand writing "know evil" is about. I have to say, though, that I immediately connected the hand to The Hand of Glory in The Invisibles; I think it was mentioned there that The Hand of Glory is "cursor that can move through time" (or something like that), and here we have a cursor hand. So maybe it is Jack Frost's hand reaching from another series, saying that you should know evil, i.e. embrace your dark side and think beyond simple binaries. (Which is kinda what happens when Superman and Ultraman merge in Superman Beyond.) Or alternately, it's saying that you should know evil is never an external, unknowable force, rather than something that was always in you - note that both of the big bad guys in FC are born out of good guys. I also noticed that the Wikipedia page for Hand of Glory has this interesting bit of information:

The legend is traceable to about 1440, but the name only dates from 1707. It was originally a name for the mandrake root (via French "mandragore" and thus, "maindegloire"[2] - "hand of glory") that became conflated with the earlier legend. The confusion may have occurred because mandrakes are said to grow beneath the bodies of hanged criminals.

So, Hand of Glory = Mandrake = Mandrakk? Is this Dax Novu/Mandrakk trying to inform Frankenstein about the nature of evil?

Other than those above, I didn't find answers to my questions in the Douglas's annotations, so I'd like to hear what you think about them?

Okay, here's a few more questions:

Superman Beyond #2

I get that throughout this issue there's a meta-commentary going on towards Alan Moore in general and Watchmen in particular, kinda like what Morrison did in Zatanna #1 and Manhattan Guardian #1-2. But in those issues it felt pretty obvious Morrison was doing a good-natured cricitism/satire of Moore, whereas this one seems a bit more ambiguous in it's commentary. We have the doomsday clock, the bloodstain, and Allen Adam as Dr. Manhattan, but I'm not sure what Morrison is trying to say with them? Is Allen Adam a commentary on how far up his own arse Moore can go, or does he signal admiration for the sort of concepts Moore managed to bring into superhero comics? Maybe both?

Also, I can't quite figure out what's going on with Zillo Walla? She was the lover of Mandrakk, does that mean she was actually in league with his? If that is so, why did she gather those Supermen to fight him? Did she change sides when, as she put it, she "found a better story" than Mandrakk's, i.e. the story of Superman?

If Mandrakk was, like Zillo Walla says, fed by the Monitors' belief in him, that would explain why they didn't simply erase/kill him when he first turned evil. The Monitors were infected with stories, and most stories require a proper antagonist, so Mandrakk was kept alive in his tomb so he could come back for the conclusion of the Monitors' story, their Final Crisis.

Tuomas, I think your readings (questions) about these are ones that won't ever have a right answer; ie: require interpretation. I don't think anyone is going to have a definitive response to Morrison's use of Moore imagery in Superman Beyond, and as long as you've located the basic imagery, I don't know whether someone on this thread (Douglas included) can give you the correct answer. I would suggest, also, that one of Morrison's favorite tropes is the interpretation/symbolism of comic books and comic book iconography, and if you're struggling to understand his stuff, that's the correct place to be in. (I know it's kinda a cop-out answer, especially in a medium where obfuscation is a weakness, but it's kinda like reading Adorno like poetry; sometimes the form is apart of the text.)

Well yeah, I didn't think there would be any "correct" answers to any of these questions, but I was wondering if at least some of them were addressed in all the related FC material I didn't read. And even if they weren't, I'd like to hear what other ILCors thought about this stuff - surely I'm not the only one asking these sort of questions?

(I'll write more about the latter issues of FC when I have more time, because I feel I need to get this stuff out of my head, but maybe I'll try to formulate it into theories about FC rather than just asking potentially unanswerable questions.)

the more answers you get from final Crisis, the more questions you have. I am being kind to Morrison that sometimes you really have to fill in the blanks. most of the Libra stuff seems just to disappear and the monitor stuff gets confusing but keep asking the questions as if anything it means I'm not the only one stumped on these things.