Tag Archives: Final Crisis

Delays and Reprints

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This week’s DC Direct Channel newsletter has an incredibly long list of books that have been delayed for various reasons. Most of the list is made up of trades and hardcovers, which are all being pushed back one week “due to adjustments being made in DC’s manufacturing and production schedules.” It also includes most of the Final Crisis line-up.

Flash-related titles that have been postponed include:

Title Original Rescheduled Difference
Final Crisis: Rogues’ Revenge (reprint) August 13 August 20 1 week
Final Crisis: Rogues’ Revenge August 20 August 27 1 week
Final Crisis September 17 October 1 2 weeks
Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds September 17 October 1 2 weeks
Final Crisis: Rogues’ Revenge September 17 October 15 4 weeks

Most of the delays in monthly titles are are offered with no explanation, though the reprints of Final Crisis: Requiem and Rogues’ Revenge are blamed on “an error.” The books were supposed to ship last week, but instead they’re arriving in stores today.

In better news, the trade paperback Flash: Rogue War is going back to press for a second printing.

Why Do I Buy Certain Comics?

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The Weekly Crisis recently invited 5 comics bloggers to write about why they buy the comics that they do, then turned it over to ask the readership the same question. This is an extended version of my response to that post.

For most of my comics-reading life, I’ve followed characters. I’d pick up The New Teen Titans and stick with it. I’d follow that to Flash (and that to Justice League Europe), Hawk and Dove, Deathstroke, Nightwing, etc.

Sometimes I would pick up a new book for the concept. I’d take a look at, say, Darkstars in the early 1990s, and think, “Hey, that sounds cool!” Or Planetary back in 1999, or Welcome to Tranquility last fall (yeah, in trades).

I’ve also tended to stick with the universe I know best — DC — and stand-alone titles. The Marvel books I’ve read tend to be either creator-owned (Groo the Wanderer when it was published at Epic), licensed (Transformers when I was younger), or off in their own little corner (Alias, The Twelve). Same with WildStorm — while I eventually tracked down some Stormwatch and Authority trades, mostly I read Planetary, which was off doing its own thing.

For a long time, I read most of the big events at DC. Partly it was because everyone was in them (and I was reading a lot more super-heroes back then), and partly it was because, if Big Changes were afoot, I wanted to see what happened. Though I drew the line at tie-in issues of series I didn’t read, unless they specifically crossed over with a book I was reading. (The one exception: DC One Million. I read almost all of those tie-ins because I wanted to see what DC did with the ideas.) Eventually I got tired of the endless crossovers of the 1990s, and stopped. Until Infinite Crisis, which looked interesting, but annoyed me even more in the end.

These days, I find myself following writers. Astonishing X-Men was far from my first comic, but it was my first X-Men comic — not counting the crossover with New Teen Titans back in the 1980s — and I picked it up because it was Joss Whedon. I’ll check out almost anything mystical written by Bill Willingham. Neil Gaiman’s name got me to pick up his Eternals miniseries, and you can bet I’ll pick up his Batman story next year. And I’m beginning to get to that point with Jay Faerber — Noble Causes, Firebirds and Dynamo 5 are hard to beat, and I resisted picking up Gemini, but finally gave in.

Like some of the respondents, I also have trouble letting go. I kept reading various incarnations of Titans for over a decade (everything from “Titans Hunt” to Infinite Crisis, minus the Jurgens series) even though I no longer really liked the book — just occasional stories. I kept hoping it would get better, but after being bitten over and over, I finally wised up and walked away.

I’ve gotten much better at only reading the stuff I actually like lately (Countdown to Final Crisis excepted; it was research material). I dropped Fell after a few issues because, as good as it was, it just disturbed the heck out of me. I gave Shadowpact and Jack of Fables a shot, but neither really grabbed me the way Fables did. I even came close to dropping Flash with the 2006 relaunch, though I decided to give it a chance. Once I picked it up, I stuck with it because the writers were clearly learning on the job (and you could see that they were learning from issue to issue), and then actually liked the next writer’s arc — not where it went, but how it was presented.

Looking at books I’ve started reading recently: Continue reading →

Final Crisis Theory of Impenetrability

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Three issues into Final Crisis, there’s a large contingent of people who feel that the book is “impenetrable,” and that it requires an encyclopedic knowledge of the DC Universe in order to understand it. I disagree. In fact, I think up to a point, knowledge of DC actually makes it harder to understand it.

From what I’ve read, the biggest complaints seem to be coming from people who know quite a bit about the DC universe and are annoyed that they don’t know the background on, say, Frankenstein (as he fits into the DCU), or Anthro, or Libra, etc. On the other hand, people who aren’t totally immersed in DC history assume they’re not going to recognize everyone, and are more willing to go with the flow.

Certainly, the book is steeped in the DC Universe. But for the most part, the characters’ back-stories don’t seem to be necessary to understand what’s going on in this story.

Example 1: The prologue in the first issue was set in pre-history, in which Metron of the New Gods filled the Prometheus role and gave fire to humans. A cavemen battle featured DC characters Anthro and Vandal Savage. A lot of people complained that if they hadn’t recognized the characters, they’d be lost. Well, no, not really — they’d just see a battle among cavemen, which gets the main idea across quite nicely.

Example 2: Frankenstein and S.H.A.D.E. figure prominently in the opening scenes of issue three. If you haven’t read Seven Soldiers: Frankenstein, you might wonder what the heck Frankenstein’s monster is doing working for an F.B.I.-like agency. On the other hand, the scene would still work if it were a random F.B.I. or S.H.A.D.E. agent. The back-story on the character isn’t necessary to understand his role here.

Oddly, I haven’t seen anyone complaining (yet) that they needed to pick up a Cave Carson showcase in order to understand the scene in which they discover a petroglyph.

I believe it was Bruce Timm who explained that on the Justice League cartoon, they made an effort to use existing characters from DC’s stable whenever possible. In one episode they needed a sniper. They could have just had a random sniper, but they looked through DC’s roster and decided to use Deadshot. Was Deadshot’s background necessary to understand the resulting episode? Not at all.

In a lot of these cases, what readers are missing isn’t a critical piece of the story — it’s bonus material. And again, it’s the people who have a solid but not thorough knowledge of DC who feel left out, because they know, say, JLA backward and forward, but not Kamandi, or they’ve memorized everything Geoff Johns has ever written, but didn’t read Seven Soldiers. So they feel like they should know the back-story.

As an experiment, I handed the first issue to my wife, whose familiarity with the DC Universe mainly comes from the animated Justice League. She had some questions, certainly, but she was able to understand most of what was going on.

Working up the scale, you eventually get to the readers who do recognize almost everything, and then the key issue becomes: what attitude do they take toward the parts they don’t know? Are they frustrating? Or are they puzzles to solve?

As for myself, admittedly I do have a strong grounding in the DCU, having read a lot of their comics over the past two decades. But there were still characters I didn’t recognize, like Dan Turpin and Sonny Sumo. Heck, I missed the fact that the evil caveman in the prologue was Vandal Savage, which enhances a later scene (when Libra mentions that the world has been waiting a long time for Vandal Savage to make good on his threats to conquer it*). Even so, these gaps in my DC knowledge didn’t prevent me from figuring out what was going on, because I thought, oh, these must be new characters. Picking up the details through sites like Final Crisis Annotations certainly enhanced the experience, but I didn’t feel that my initial reading had suffered at all.

So in short, here’s my theory (well, really it’s just a hypothesis) on how readers react to Final Crisis:

  • Minimal DC knowledge: Accepts gaps in knowledge, goes with what they do know and what’s on the page, and follows the book.
  • Medium DC knowledge: Gaps in knowledge are infuriating, feels the book is impenetrable.
  • Extensive DC knowledge: Follows the book, then gets involved in discussions afterward to see what they missed.

*I prefer the take given by some story I can’t remember, in which Vandal Savage says, “From time to time, I have chosen to rule the world.” It makes him more menacing, to think that for the most part he isn’t really trying, and when he has put the effort in, he’s succeeded.

The Day Evil Won

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Final Crisis was released today, and the Anti-Life Equation hit the Internet.

Meanwhile, the Comic Bloc website and forums are offline. A domain parking page loads instead.

Coincidence? Or casualty?

(Seriously, just before I started a round of forum reading, I joked with my wife, “Well, Final Crisis came out. Time to see if the Internet’s broken.” It wouldn’t surprise me if the server got overloaded again.)

This Week (Aug 6): The Wild Wests

This week we have the first collected edition from the current Flash relaunch, featuring Mark Waid’s brief return to the title. Several Flashes also appear in Final Crisis.

Flash: The Wild Wests

Wally West returns to active duty as the Flash — with the addition of his two children — in this amazing hardcover collecting The Flash #231-237, guest-starring the Justice League! What’s his dark, dark family secret — the one that’s helping him keep the peace in Keystone? This volume also includes “The Fast Life,” by Mark Waid, John Rogers and Doug Braithwaite — the compelling tale of the West family’s life on a Flash-friendly alien world.

Written by Mark Waid, John Rogers and Keith Champagne; Art by Daniel Acuña, Freddie Williams II and Doug Braithwaite; Cover by Acuña.

Notes: It’s odd that this would be the first Flash collection to come out in hardcover (not counting the archive editions), given how many people disliked the direction the series took. (Personally, I wasn’t wowed by it, but I enjoyed it well enough, and it led into Tom Peyer’s run, which I’ve really liked.)

This was originally scheduled for last week, but pushed back. Oddly enough, I saw a copy at Freddie Williams II’s table in Artist’s Alley the weekend before the original release date.

Final Crisis of 7

Batman missing in action! Superman immobilized! Green Lantern on trial for his life!

A shadow is falling across Earth’s super heroes — and now it’s Wonder Woman’s turn to face the Evil Gods!

What bizarre warning from beyond awaits Frankenstein, The Question and the agents of S.H.A.D.E. in the shadows of the Dark Side Club? What grim fate lies in store for The Human Flame? What happens when the Anti-Life Equation hits the internet? Can the Fastest Men Alive outrun The Black Racer — Death himself? And who are the Justifiers?

The answers are all here as the unstoppable rise of evil continues in FINAL CRISIS by Grant Morrison and J.G. Jones.

Notes: We all saw what happened at the end of the last issue. It seemed obvious from the cliffhanger, but just in case, the three fans who read the B&W preview at Comic-Con have assured us that yes, Barry Allen does appear in this issue. And then there’s the four-page preview released yesterday…

Edit: Either I misread the release date, or Tangent: Superman’s Reign has been rescheduled. It’s actually coming out August 20.

J.G. Jones is the Flash

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According to CBR’s coverage of the J.G. Jones Spotlight panel at Comic-Con, the artist used himself as the reference for the iconic Flash cover on Final Crisis :

Finally, who did Jones use for photo reference for the Flash image on the cover of “Final Crisis” ? “I used me!” But self-reliance has its price, Jones revealed, because the posing process slows things down. “I have to pose, take a shot, look at it, pose, take a shot, look at it…” Fortunately for readers, Jones’s patience tends to pay off.