Tag Archives: Final Crisis

Dear Comics Internet…

Dance: FaceSpace Status UpdatesI’d like to make a suggestion to comics fans everywhere. Or at least on the internet. Actually, probably most fans on the internet (comics or otherwise) could benefit from this suggestion.

But first, some background.

I’ve been trying for a few weeks to register to comment at DC’s official blog, The Source. Or rather, I’ve registered, but the original message never arrived, so I’ve been trying to get it to send me a password. No luck — only about 1 in 4 password resets actually show up in my mailbox, and I have yet to receive an actual password after confirming one.

But clearly someone is able to register, as you can see from the high quality of commentary on this Final Crisis Aftermath: Dance preview. (Be warned: there’s some swearing if that sort of thing bothers you.)

The Commentary

is it just me or is DC beating a dead horse with release after release of Final Crisis Aftermath mini series??? Enough all friggin ready.

For the love god, ANOTHER spin-off from a failed mini-series? DC, when you host your retailer summits, do you even listen to the retailers? Do the retailers stand and say, “Hey, Dan, can you please flood the market with a lot of junk and we’ll ’see-what-sticks’? And while you’re at it, how about dismantling your core characters to the point where they are no longer recognizable using rotating creative teams who constantly mess up continuity?”

I’m done.

There’s actually a point in this one (dismantling core characters), but it’s buried inside the “how dare they publish something I don’t want!”

gay. really gay. fuck final crisis and fuck all 4 of its “after the shitty job we did” mini-series.

Gee, not only swearing, but using “gay” as an insult. Obviously someone with discerning taste here. 🙄

From the DC Comics Corporate Offices:

“Our target demography is picking up Manga over comics, so if we create a team of young Japanese superheroes. It’s really going to change to comic industry!”
“And hey, let’s introduce them in Grant’s FANTASTIC summer event, he’s such a great writer! By the way, has he killed Batman the second time yet?”

FAIL.

Red Kitty Rage Alert!

Dextar

I do agree with mambazo, who says:

The ridiculous fan entitlement in this comment section only serves to show that the average comic fan has the maturity level of about an eight year old.

The Suggestion

So I’d like to make a suggestion to comics readers everywhere:

If you aren’t interested in a comic, and have no stake in the characters, JUST DON’T BUY IT. Don’t waste everyone’s time whining about how DC/Marvel/YoMamaComics is putting out some product that you personally have no interest in.

I can understand if you actually read the book and didn’t like it.

I can understand if you’re a fan of SuperUltraGuy, and you don’t like the latest take on the character. (Trust me, I understand!)

But if a publisher decides to print a comic book that you have no interest in whatsoever? A book that features characters you don’t care about in a story you don’t care about, that doesn’t interfere with books you are reading? Why get angry? Why take it personally?

I don’t read Superman, but I’m not going to get on message boards saying that DC is stupid for publishing it.

DC publishes dozens of comics that I have no interest in. So do Marvel, Dark Horse, Image, etc. So what? I couldn’t afford to buy every comic published. And if I did, I wouldn’t have time to read them all. I don’t have time to read all the comics I am buying — I’m about five months behind on Buffy and two on House of Mystery and Farscape, and I still haven’t read anything from this week or last except for Flash: Rebirth #2.

As long as there are comics I do want to read, why should I care that there are comics that I don’t want? As long as someone wants to read it, and as long as it’s not screwing up (IMO) characters and stories that I do care about, what’s the problem?

Velocity and Well-Spoken Sonic Lightning Flash

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Joe Casey talks to CBR about Dance, the Final Crisis aftermath book featuring Japan’s Super Young Team. Two speedster connections: first, the Super Young Team has their very own speedster, Well-Spoken Sonic Lightning Flash. Second: Casey and Dance artist ChrisCross were going to be the team on Top Cow’s Velocity series, and Casey talks a little about what happened to that.

Y’know, we were primed to do a “Velocity” series for Top Cow and although I wrote and got paid for three issues and Cross penciled a first issue that was so visually stunning and the best-looking thing Top Cow would’ve published this year, somewhere along the line that famous Top Cow brand of common sense disappeared into an unexpectedly bizarre rift in time and space, they started firing staff left and right – including our beloved editor – and our book was suddenly no more, resulting in an obviously broken promise to four million Pilot Season voters. Ouch.

But, hey, their loss is DC’s gain, right? Before you could say, ‘Diamond minimums,’ Cross and I landed on this series, which, let’s face it, is a lot cooler and will probably sell a few more copies.

Boycotting DC?

The New Teen Titans vol1 #39People can get very worked up about their hobbies, and comic books are no exception. Final Crisis, for instance, has inspired some very passionate responses. Between that and Barry Allen replacing Wally West*, I’ve seen a number of people say things like “I’ll never read another DC comic again!”**

I don’t understand this reaction.

To clarify: I understand dropping comics because you’ve lost interest in them. (I’m down to one ongoing DC book, Flash, and it’s technically been canceled.) I also understand dropping a series because of something you disliked in that series. If you don’t want to read it anymore, then by all means, you shouldn’t be obligated to read it anymore (but be prepared for people to tell you that you aren’t a “true fan,” whatever that means).

What I don’t understand is protesting something that happens in one book by refusing to buy other books. It just doesn’t make sense to me. If you like, say, Booster Gold but dislike the direction that Batman is going in, dropping both series isn’t going to encourage DC to make more books like Booster Gold.

Maybe it’s because I’ve never been one to refuse to buy a company’s comics. I might have held Marvel and Image in disdain back in my teenage years, but if something looked interesting, that didn’t stop me from buying it. (Not that I found much of it interesting, but it wasn’t a hard-and-fast rule.)

So I’m curious: Who out here has done this? Or are you planning to? What tipped you over the edge? Why did you decide to drop all of the company’s books and not just the ones that bothered you? Did you extend it to other brands owned by the same company (Vertigo, Icon, etc.) or only the particular division? How long did you keep it up, and if you went back, what did it take?

*Yes, Barry is replacing Wally. Wally has highlighted the main Flash book for most of the last 23 years, and after Flash: Rebirth is over, Barry will, and it looks like Barry will be taking the Flash spot in Justice League of America as well, leaving Wally in Titans. Just because they haven’t actually killed Wally doesn’t mean he’s not being replaced.

** Update: Lying in the Gutters reports that a lot of retailers have been hearing this, too — from their customers.

Quick Thoughts: Twitter Through 2009-02-01 (Final Crisis Finale)

  • Sheesh, Dark Knight was nominated for EIGHT Oscars. That’s not a snub. Not having a celeb face doesn’t make FX, editing, etc unimportant.
  • What if the Flash ran into a wall of Oobleck? [edit: link to forum post is dead]
  • Comic book science that Just Bugs Me(tm): evolution as a deterministic ladder instead of an environment-influenced tree.
  • What if…Obama kept a mini-statue of Spider-Man on his desk to remind him that with great power comes great responsibility?
  • What I Bought: Final Crisis #7 and Mysterius the Unfathomable #1 (heard a lot of buzz on this over the past week)
  • Not reading this review of Scott Pilgrim Book 5 because I’m buying it anyway, but nice to know it’s getting good reviews
  • WB Producer Charles Roven: The Flash movie is “shrouded in mystery” but not yet dead
  • *sigh* EVS says that getting Wally out of “Barry’s suit” means he can “be his own Flash again.” So he WASN’T for the last 20 years?
  • It seems like every time someone at DC talks about Flash:Rebirth, they chip away a little more of my interest in it.
  • The whole thing reminds me of shipper feuds spilling from fans into canon as fans turn pro. Like Nightwing and Dick/Babs vs. Dick/Kory.

Focus on Final Crisis

  • Final Crisis had so much story that IT should have been the 52-long weekly series. Just as long as DC got it in the can first.
  • BREAKING NEWS! Giant Multiverse-spanning epic turns out NOT to be ALL about Barry Allen! How can we forgive this SNUB!?!? *headdesk*
  • Lots of Final Crisis search terms today. My favorite: “final crisis seven is awful” – I guess someone only wants to read bad reviews.
  • More snarky searches: “final crisis 7 plot” and “final crisis 7 explained”
  • Also: “captain carrot” showing up surprisingly often
  • More searches: “what happened in final crisis?” “final crisis sucked” “did anyone like final crisis?” To answer the last one: Yes. Mostly.
  • Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds #3 preview at Newsarama

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Review: Final Crisis #7

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Final Crisis #7

This is it. The conclusion to Grant Morrison’s tour-de-force exploration — and dismantling — of the DC Universe. Plagued by delays, DC finally brought in a committee of artists to finish the whole thing just one month after it was originally intended to wrap up.

So how was it?

The word I’d actually go for is bittersweet.

Final Crisis is more ambitious and, in a way, more epic than Crisis on Infinite Earths, Zero Hour, or Infinite Crisis. They destroyed alternate universes, revised the current universe, or went back in time to adjust the beginning of the universe, but despite the fade-out pages in the middle of Zero Hour, none of those ever gave the impression that it was all over for the good guys, and they were left picking up the pieces.

In this issue we learn just how hard it is to kill a god. We learn what super-heroes do when they can’t save the world by fighting. Multiple plots by multiple characters come together, and we learn just why some characters are in the book in the first place.

The narrative structure has fragmented even further, with some events only getting a panel or two and maybe a caption, much of it told in flashback from the end of all things. I’ve been saying for several months that it’s a 12-issue story chopped down to 7 books, but now I’m beginning to think to really do justice to all the ideas presented, and all the plot threads, you’d have to expand it to at least 24 issues, possibly more.

There’s also a heavy meta-textual emphasis on story, which I suppose I should have expected after reading Superman: Beyond. Thinking about it, this goes back at least as far as Morrison’s run on Animal Man, in which the title character learned that he literally was a comic book character, with writers artists and editors dictating his life. But it also made some parts of the issue feel like I was reading Sandman (more about that later).

It’s only in these last two issues that I really felt like pieces of the story from tie-ins were missing. I didn’t have a problem with the bits of Batman’s story that were told only in “Last Rites,” or the story with Black Lightning and the Tattooed Man from “Submit.” But then I didn’t read either of those, and just took things in stride. I did read “Superman: Beyond,” and while I felt that the yellow submarine and the multiversal Superman mission would have worked fine without that story, the introduction and nature of Mandrakk the Dark Monitor still felt out of place, even after having read the side story. (Interesting: I just realized I’ve actually provided supporting evidence for my Final Crisis Theory of Impenetrability.)

Anyway, at this point I don’t think I can say anymore without revealing too much, so spoilers after the cut. Continue reading →

Review: Final Crisis #6

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Final Crisis #6

You know how sometimes, when an issue of a comic book has been delayed for a long time, it finally shows up and it’s absolutely worth the wait? The last few issues of Fray and Midnight Nation come to mind. Unfortunately, Final Crisis #6 does not fit into that category.

The first few issues were structured like a mystery, presenting various fragments that slowly piece themselves together into a coherent picture. But now that the whole picture has been put together, we’re still only seeing fragments. It’s kind of like watching Cloverfield, except the reason we’re only seeing bits and pieces isn’t because we’re following a single viewpoint, but because we’re following too many.

The weird thing is, as unsatisfying as it is to read (though it does improve the second time through), I’m half-convinced that the fragmentation is intentional. It fits with the disintegrating cover design, and it fits with the theory that theme is more important than plot in this book. And, in fact, it fits with Grant Morrison’s comments about paring a comic down to the bare essentials like dance music. Of course, not everyone likes dance music.

Some specifics, so watch out for spoilers: Continue reading →