Review: Final Crisis #1-7

Final Crisis #1-7
Written by Grant Morrison, Art by JG Jones, various
DC Comics
32 pgs/ea, FC, $3.99/ea

For those looking for evidence that superhero comics have evolved into a fictional pornography informed by abstract allusions that would make a Kabuki dancer seem positively obtuse in her movements, they need search no further than Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis. Billed as the final chapter in the saga that began in DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths back in the 1980s and continued in 2006’s Infinite Crisis, Final Crisis exhibits some of the same narrative strategies from Morrison’s recent run on Batman; forcibly reconciling decades worth of accrued continuity into a presumably cohesive whole. In this case, Morrison draws heavily upon Jack Kirby’s relatively late contribution to the DC canon, commonly referred to as the Fourth World Saga, and juxtaposes the cosmic promise left unfulfilled in Kirby’s abandoned opus against the convoluted multiverse structure that presumably explains (for example) how Superman could fight in World War II and also be a teenager during any decade that was convenient to the purpose of a given generation of storytellers’ needs.

Despite its heady ambitions, Final Crisis is troubled comics by any standard. Morrison’s tachycardic pacing hums along at about 40 bpms faster than the visual storytelling, creating the sensation that one is reading the story in a side-view mirror (where, as you know, things are bigger than they appear). The story is often hobbled by side references to entire comics that are not these seven that inform its plot movement in crucial ways, like an Eliot poem where the primary source material is drawn not from Milton or Aquinas but a recent issue of the Blue Beetle where Firestorm guest-stars. To the creators’ credit, this is some of the most nicely composed and wrought utter nonsense that money can buy. Morrison does not disappoint when it comes to bringing the mean and scary and artist Jones (getting by with the help of his friends) creates a visual world that is at once erotic and really discomforting. What Final Crisis lacks is not in execution but purpose.

Because, as we all know, the purpose of these giant, multi-line wide crossover is to make an amount of money and, ultimately, that is what Final Crisis is designed to do. Each issue hinges on some impossible unbelievable thing (well, by the DCU standards) actually happening. It’s all the nightmare scenarios, ticked off like a checklist as Morrison decides that the way to write a Crisis to end all Crisises is to just have them all again but all at once. Within the tangle of competing narrative threads, the integrity of the strand that ties them all together is constantly under stress and, in some cases, snaps altogether, only to mystically appear a few pages later. Whatever enjoyment I was able to extract from the jumble (meticulously crafted, aesthetically pleasing but jumble nonetheless), it baffles me how anyone with less than a PhD equivalent in DC continuity, past and present (and future probably wouldn’t hurt either) could even read this in anything but utter confusion and dismay. Maybe that’s Morrison and crew’s way of making superhero comics dangerous again but I think the gravest danger here is boring bored to tears.