Tag Archives: Grant Morrison

Trade Contents Confirmed: Mercury Falling and The Human Race

The newsletter DC Comics Direct Channel #914 identifies the contents of the upcoming Flash Presents: Mercury Falling and Flash: The Human Race trade paperbacks.

May 2009: Flash Presents: Mercury Falling (Todd Dezago, Ethan Van Sciver) will collect Impulse #62-67. That covers the 5-issue story arc itself as well as the one-issue epilogue guest-starring the Justice League, Justice Society and Young Justice.

June 2009: Flash: The Human Race (Grant Morrison, Mark Millar, Paul Ryan, Pop Mhan) will collect Flash v.2 #136-141 and a story from Secret Origins #50. The Flash issues cover both “The Human Race” and “The Black Flash.”

The Secret Origins story is undoubtedly the retelling of the classic “Flash of Two Worlds,” (Flash v.1 #123) in which Grant Morrison figured out how to incorporate the parallel-world story into a single-world setting. Unless I’ve forgotten something, this volume and Flash: Emergency Stop will cover all of Grant Morrison’s Flash solo work.

It also lists the Final Crisis hardcover coming out in June, along with the Final Crisis Companion trade paperback, which includes all the FC one-shots (including Superman: Beyond, which started as a one-shot that just got too long.) No word yet on when Final Crisis: Rogues’ Revenge will be collected, but there are supposed to be more summer 2009 announcements later this week.

Speed Reading: Kolins, Johns, Morrison

IGN is running an interview, the Geoff Johns Marathon, in which the writer talks about just about everything he’s working on, including Flash: Rebirth (via trmnlvlctyyy at Comic Bloc). Among other things, he writes:

Right now I’m looking at the Flash with Rebirth, and I want to see how I can make this mythology even bigger. It’s already huge. The Flash has an awesome base, so cracking it open even more has been an incredible challenge.

and

The Flash has always been my favorite character since I was a kid. And it’s fun to get back to writing Wally West. I wrote him for five years. To get back to him and then write Barry Allen. Like I said earlier, I get to take what I’ve learned over the last several years writing comics and apply it to the Flash. Because I started writing the Flash almost when I started writing comics, and now I get to look at everything I’ve done to this point and see how I can apply that onto my original work on the character. I want to continue to elevate my writing, and hopefully I’ll achieve that.

Newsarama interviews artist Scott Kolins on Faces of Evil: Grundy, which reunites him with Flash and Final Crisis: Rogues’ Revenge collaborator Geoff Johns.

Finally, MTV’s Splash Page wonders why Grant Morrison can’t talk about a Flash movie, given the number of NDAs he’s signed in connection with various film projects. [Edit: Since the original page has vanished, I’m attaching a quote from the Google cache so you can have a little context. Thanks, Rockin’ Rich.]

“Yeah, that’s the kind of thing I can’t talk about,” Morrison said. “Yes, I have talked to them. I’m deeply involved in those discussions. I know what’s going down with all of that, and it’s actually really exciting. But beyond that, I can’t say anything. I wish I could tell you. I’m sure announcements will probably be made at some point, but I can’t say anything.”

“The Human Race” Finishes Collecting the Morrison/Millar Run


More Flash news from Collected Editions: Fall 2009 will also see the release of the trade paperback, Flash: The Human Race. No doubt this will collect Flash #136-141, containing “The Human Race” (Grant Morrison & Mark Millar, with art by Paul Ryan & John Nyberg) and “The Black Flash,” (Mark Millar with art by Pop Mhan & Chris Ivy), rounding out the Morrison/Millar run on The Flash starts with January’s release of The Flash: Emergency Stop.

Frankly, I’m surprised they went with “The Human Race” as the title. I think “The Black Flash” is a more well-remembered (and well-regarded) story, particularly given the character’s recent appearances in The Flash: The Fastest Man Alive — Full Throttle.

Now if DC will just start filling in some of the missing stories from the Mark Waid/Brian Augustyn run…

Update: Amazon now shows a release date of June 9, 2009.

Review: Final Crisis #4

After two and a half months, it’s finally here: the next chapter of DC’s major event for the year. The wait wouldn’t have been so bad if the tie-in one-shots, Submit, Superman: Beyond, Resist and Rage of the Red Lanterns had come out between issues #3 and #4, as originally described — or if Rogues Revenge and Legion of Three Worlds had stayed on schedule. As it is, there’s been a generally sense of frustration associated with the series.

So the question is: Is this issue worth the wait? Is it good enough to overshadow the real-world context?

I’d say the answer is yes.

All the threads being set up through the first three issues come together. We see what the villains have been planning. For the most part, they’ve already achieved what they set out to do: dominate the Earth. They only need to wipe out the few pockets of resistance, and achieve one more goal: the reincarnation of Darkseid himself.

In most stories where a villain tries to take over the world, the story we see is the one about preventing it from happening. What’s different here is that the heroes have lost. The invasion has succeeded, and it’s about trying to throw off the occupation. While the “watchtowers” are scattered around the globe, there’s a sense of the heroes’ forces as the French Resistance from World War II. (This is no doubt enhanced by having the resistance led by the original Green Lantern, who actually fought in World War II.)

Admittedly it covers some of the same ground as the “Rock of Ages” storyline from Grant Morrison’s run on JLA, but Final Crisis is emotionally more devastating than Rock of Ages. It takes place now, with characters and a world as we’re used to seeing them, not in some ten-years-distant future. (Though come to think of it, “Rock of Ages” came out about ten years ago, didn’t it?) And knowing how quickly the world was transformed makes it even worse.

There are a few things that don’t quite work. A lot of the dialogue, particularly the technobabble, the speechifying, and the scene in which two Flashes pause to catch their bearings, is stilted or doesn’t quite make sense. As with the first few issues, transitions between scenes are often abrupt. And some story elements just aren’t given enough space to develop. Much of the issue is devoted to characterization, which personally I don’t mind, but I know many readers are in it for the action and battles, and there’s only a few pages of actual fighting.

Spoilers after the cut: Continue reading

No Black Flash Trade Yet

Contrary to previous reports, it turns out that “The Black Flash” isn’t getting the collected edition treatment just yet. Now that DC’s December solicitations are out, they’ve officially solicited the January 21 release of The Flash: Emergency Stop. It’s confirmed at a $12.95 trade paperback covering Flash vol.2 #130-135 — only half of the Grant Morrison/Mark Millar run.

So what does that include?

  • “Emergency Stop” — Flash vs. the Suit, with a time travel mystery.
  • A one-shot fighting the Mirror Master.
  • A one-shot focusing on Jay Garrick.
  • The third part of the “Three of a Kind” crossover with Green Arrow and Green Lantern.

See also my overview of the whole run.

The surprise here isn’t that it’s only half the run. 6 issues is typical for a collection these days, and since the whole run is 12 issues, that makes it easy to cover the whole thing in two books.

The surprise is that with “Three of a Kind,” they included 1/3 of a 3-part story. At least it should flow reasonably well, since it was told with its own framing sequence, but it’s still an odd choice.

Update: “The Black Flash” will appear in Flash: The Human Race, shipping in June 2009.

Final Crisis Should Have Been a Graphic Novel

I’m beginning to think that Final Crisis should have been an original graphic novel, not a miniseries.

I understand there are many reasons to do a big event as a miniseries. People are more willing to spend $3.50 a month for 7 months than to drop $20-25 all at once. And they’re more willing to pick up a first issue to try it, knowing that if they don’t like it, they don’t have to pay for the rest of the series (while with a book it’s all or nothing). It’s easier to schedule tie-ins. Plus it keeps the hype engine going for longer.

But those are all business reasons. Let’s look at artistic reasons. Specifically this one: it’s clear that Final Crisis will read better all at once than in serialized chapters.

After the contention that the series requires the reader to be a walking encyclopedia of arcane DC knowledge (a claim with which I disagree), the biggest complaint about Final Crisis is that it isn’t clear what’s going on. There’s a sense that you need to have read interviews and annotations just to follow it.

It seems like readers want an inverted pyramid structure to their comics. Establish all the players up front, then jump into the conflict. Which is certainly a valid way to tell a story, except that:

  • It’s not the only way to tell a story.
  • It’s not even what comics readers really want.

Movies and novels frequently tell stories where they give you only pieces of information, bit by bit, and slowly assemble them into a whole so that by the time you get to the end, or three-quarters through, or half-way through, you know what’s going on. Before the sequels soured people’s memories of the first film, The Matrix was massively popular — but it takes a long time before Neo — and the audience — find out what’s really happening.

And really, people don’t want everything spelled out ahead of time. They want to be surprised. They want the rush of a cliffhanger ending. And when you spend an entire issue establishing the situation and players, like in Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds, they complain that it’s all setup, and it’s like “reading a Wikipedia article.”

The problem is trying to mix the story structure Grant Morrison is using for Final Crisis with the serialized format.

A movie can spread out the exposition because it’s a whole work intended to be watched all at once. A novel can get away with it because it’s perceived as a whole work, not as series of connected stories. You can pause reading a novel and know that you can read the next part, which might explain more, anytime you want. When you have to wait a week for the next episode of a TV show, or a month (or two, or more) for the next chapter of a serialized comic, waiting for things to make sense can be a much more frustrating experience.

So doing it as a graphic novel would solve that problem. Have the whole thing come out in one volume. People can sit down, read it at their own pace, and follow the pieces as they come together. They can see how the story works as presented on the page, and then if they want to look deeper into symbolism, see how it connects to 70 years’ worth of shared universe stories, or do a literary analysis, then they can look up the annotations.