Or, "The Life Trap."
Spoilers for Final Crisis #7, by Grant Morrison and Doug Mahnke
Grant Morrison loves endings. He's so careful to give each hero his or her bit of business--to make everybody part of the grand finale--that his more sprawling stories pile climax upon climax until they threaten to collapse under their own weight. "World War III," the conclusion of his run on JLA and a precursor to Final Crisis, just barely manages to keep its endings in balance, juggling last-second arrivals and heroic sacrifices and superhuman cavalries, dancing on the edge of complete incoherence so every reader's favorite character can get their due.
In one comic book with a finite set of characters, Morrison managed to pull it off. Against the canvas of a multiverse of worlds that contain effectively infinite reflections of every single DC character, Morrison has too many options, too many stars, and far, far too many endings.
Plenty of the criticisms leveled at Final Crisis have little to nothing to do with the comic itself: snarled schedules, bungled lead-ins, missed opportunities, the ravages of event fatigue. All legitimate concerns (particularly for retailers), but all more or less irrelevant to the quality of the work itself. The problems of Countdown and Death of the New Gods and Batman RIP may be important to understanding Final Crisis the marketing event but they have nothing to do with Final Crisis the story, and thank goodness, because the story has enough problems on its own. Just look at the endings jammed into the final issue:
The Flashes destroy Darkseid with his own Omega beams (an ending that, as Jog says, gets interrupted by a panel of Aquaman wrapping up a plot that hasn't previously appeared anywhere in Final Crisis). This is Darkseid's first defeat this issue (second overall, counting Batman's bullet last issue). Black Canary has rescued Green Arrow from the Justifiers--off-panel between issues--while the Ray forms the protective Metron sigil over the entire planet. Neat idea, one with no apparent effect on the rest of the plot. Nor does Morrison indicate how or even if Canary and Ollie and the other evacuees survive the satellite that's burning up on reentry--the satellite turns up as good as new later in the issue, but the evacuees are nowhere to be seen. Checkmate's Black Gambit fails and shunts a bunch of people off to Kamandi's future (now one of DC's multiple Earths). This apparently splits up the Super Young Team, who, after getting a nice build-up in the early issues, never do much of anything. But at least they appear on-panel! Mister Miracle, after getting a huge build-up in the early issues that built on his huge build-up in Seven Soldiers, once again manages to accomplish absolutely nothing that matters to the main plot. He doesn't even show up in this issue, with the Question merely mentioning him once. Well, technically, mentioning his Motherboxxx once. Hawkman and Hawkgirl destroy the malfunctioning Lord Eye, sacrificing themselves and bringing to a noble end a subplot that began in two panels last issue. Overman is reunited with his apparently dead cousin, concluding a subplot from one of the tie-ins that received little attention in the main series. Luthor completes his face turn by siding with Superman--except the actual moment of his turn is once again occluded by a cutaway, this time to Frankenstein. That "meeting" with Wonder Woman is a cute joke, but it blots out the culmination of a subplot that had been simmering since the first issue. Wonder Woman breaks her possession by Bernadeth--no indication how, we just see her crushing that tusked mask--and chains the disembodied Darkseid, presumably, but not explicitly, purging him from all the possessed humans. This is Darkseid's second defeat this issue, third overall. Darkseid continues to expand anyway, possessing/becoming everyone and everything in the universe (multiverse?) except for one final watchtower. Doesn't look like Wonder Woman chained him all that well. William Moulton Marston would be disappointed! The disembodied/universal Darkseid penetrates the Watchtower and Superman destroys him in two panels through the power of super-singing. This is Darkseid's third defeat this issue, fourth overall. Then Mandrakk appears for the first time in Final Crisis proper to wrap up a plotline that should have already been wrapped up in Superman Beyond 3D. Superman activates the Miracle Machine and uses it to summon Captain Marvel, who was already on his way anyway with an army of alternate-universe Supermen. The Supermen destroy Mandrakk's servant Ultraman while singing a line from Hair. Monitor Nix Uotan shows up and turns a couple of animals into Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew, and the Pax Dei show up, and Uotan summons the new Forever People, who are probably the Super Young Team, which I guess makes Uotan the new Infinite Man, except it doesn't really matter because they all just stand around and watch while the Supermen of Many Worlds burn Mandrakk and the Green Lanterns drive a spike through him. Nix Uotan tells Ultraman's burning corpse that "No one %$%$ with the judge of all evil," which would be scary as shit if the judge of all evil had actually done anything. The superheroes unfreeze the entire human race, which they just froze a couple of pages earlier, because Earth is all better now and apparently balloon sales are way up. The superheroes and Green Lanterns tow the multiple Earths back into position. This requires all the risk and effort of cleaning up after a disastrous party, and conveys about as much excitement. Apokolips is reborn as New Genesis and the dead New Gods of New Genesis reappear looking exactly as they did before they died, meaning that not a damn thing has changed. The Monitors are all absorbed into the Overvoid (or supercontext? Morrison's list of self-quotations grows to include the finale of The Invisibles) and Nix Uotan wakes up in the same mortal body he woke up in back in issue #1. See item 12. We see what happened to Anthro, and what happened to the rocket the Watchtower launched, and what happened to Batman. This one is rather elegant and, even at a mere two pages, not at all rushed, unlike most of the endings above, which are checked off like so many items on a shopping list.
Those final two pages excepted, every one of the endings is unsatisfying on some level, whether it's Barry Allen's unnecessary return (what does he do that Wally West couldn't do on his own?) or Morrison's decision to build the final issue around a set of characters who have been mostly if not entirely absent from the series thus far. Every element is either incomplete or superfluous; a few manage to be both.
A tabulation of everything that goes wrong in this issue would be as disjoint and frustrating as Final Crisis itself, but one example might crystallize many of its problems. Wedged into three panels, the arrival of the angels of the Pax Dei at the final battle--their first and only appearance in the whole crossover--seems, like so many of the series' narrative convolutions, curiously unmotivated. Doing nothing more than floating around and watching other heroes triumph, the angels of God manage to be slightly less significant than the Zoo Crew. Those wacky animals are also nothing more than witnesses, but I suppose they make some sort of metatextual point about a kinder, gentler DC accepting the odder corners of its rich, weird history--a point that superhero comics have only been making for the past twelve or thirteen years, Morrison's superhero comics for the last twenty.
On second thought, maybe this is a point in the Pax Dei's favor. They have the good grace to symbolize nothing, I hope, being a repeat of only a single story Morrison told back in 2000--"World War III" in fact, where their climactic appearance actually had causes and consequences. Final Crisis is too busy to supply either one.
One of the more common defenses or praises of Morrison's style--one I've made myself many times in reference to other comics--is that he provides readers with just enough information that we can fill in the blanks ourselves, implying more stories than he could ever fit on the page. That implication is in evidence here, too. Final Crisis #7 opens with a genius move, cutting away from last issue's cliffhangers to a brief interlude in an alternate universe where most if not all of DC's prominent heroes are black and Superman just happens to be the President of the United States. It's a great scene, one that captures the current mood of optimism and renewed hope in the face of great adversity. It also implies a longstanding (if previously nonexistent) publication history for these characters, through the simple detail of a reversed color scheme.
President Superman's chest emblem is the same yellow-on-red pattern that Morrison gave to Sunshine Superman, the Afro-sporting hero of a retro-sixties parallel Earth whose first and only prior appearance was back in Animal Man #23. For most of the issue I thought this was supposed to be Sunshine Superman, until the original pops up in the cavalry of Supermen. But that doesn't matter, because in those couple of pages Morrison gives us everything we need to imagine President Superman's fictional history (a quick reference to Vathlo Island, Bronze Age home of all the black Kryptonians) and his publication history. This really could be the Sunshine Superman, shorn of his theatrical Boomer politics of personal affect, given a Hart Schaffner Marx suit and a pragmatic competence that could propel him into the White House.
You see what I'm doing here, right?--and let's drop any pretense that I'm not the one doing it--turning the purely hypothetical transformation of Sunshine Superman into President Superman into a repudiation of the Baby Boomer politics of cultural confrontation and the Boomer politicians who played them to such personal gain and national or international ruin. The generational shift maps perfectly onto the two versions of Sunshine Superman but its presence in this comic is my invention, folks. It's not in Final Crisis at all. Yet every detail that enables this invention, sparks this act of fan fiction, is right there on the page, right down to President Superman's polite, confident assurance that he actually does know what gravitons are and his interest in diplomacy. The contrast with his political predecessor couldn't be clearer; the contrast with his previous self is equally telling. The scene shows Morrison at his best, scattering a handful of perfectly-chosen details that can imply a whole world, a whole history, a whole politics, a whole story.
And as soon as President Superman is dragged into the morass of Final Crisis, it disappears. The overabundant endings that trip on each other's lines and jostle each other out of frame, the abandonment of old characters and sudden introduction of new villains and new premises in the final issue of a seven-part series--this isn't implying stories, it's summarizing them.
When it comes to writing these longstanding, corporate-owned, functionally immortal characters, what happens at the end isn't nearly as important as how we get there. The endings are more or less predetermined: Superman wins. Batman wins. The good guys always win. All that matters is how we reach that predetermined end, how we are surprised and scared and delighted along the way, and that's exactly what Morrison's summative supercompressions have begun to exclude. That beautiful first page is a starting point, one that can imply two twinned histories but can also set up a whole world of characters and launch them out into new stories. The cascading anticlimaxes of the rest of the issue are nothing more than a series of brutally abbreviated endpoints, bypassing the pleasure of arrival, cutting out the last places for invention and emotional investment.
And for reader participation, too--for meaningful participation that asks us to think about theme and ethics and setting and future stories instead of asking us to imagine Black Canary and Green Arrow off that burning space station, imagine roles for Barry Allen and the Super Young Team and the Pax Dei and Captain Carrot and His Fucking Zoo Crew that actually amount to something, imagine a pair of stories in which Darkseid's corruption and Mandrakk's hunger were separated and allowed to grow to their own natural lengths and endings. Instead of being asked to clear the desk and clean the gutters, fill in the many loose ends and prune off all the superfluous ones. Instead of being asked to edit Morrison's story for him.
I know many Morrison fans will say--already are saying--this elliptical style is part of Morrison's technique, part of his charm. And they're right, to a point, although mounting any such defense of Final Crisis overlooks the difference between asking readers to ponder an idea or imagine a world or forge an emotional connection, and asking them to clean up a mess.
At the end of Final Crisis #6, Darkseid zaps Batman with the Omega Sanction--"the death that is life!"--apparently destroying him. But we know this will come undone: all that matters is how. The end of Final Crisis #7 reveals how with a beautiful economy, and even if it is a quote of Jack Kirby's Forever People it's still a relief. Because the suspicion, for me as I'm sure for many Morrison fans, was that Morrison was going to quote his own Seven Soldiers: Mister Miracle instead and consign Batman to the Life Trap, dooming him to live an endless cycle of miserable reincarnations, a dharmic version of Hell.
Which he'd just escaped from, in a sense, in "Last Rites," a Batman tie-in that linked Final Crisis up to the inconclusive ending of Batman RIP. (After the narrative pile-up of Final Crisis, a little inconclusivity is looking a lot more appealing now.) Having just seen Batman snap out of not one but two versions of his life story in the last couple of months, I didn't think I could stand watching him bounce in and out of yet another set of repetitions. His torment would have too closely matched my own.
The last two pages of Final Crisis sidestep that trap rather neatly, but the damage had already been done. Final Crisis cribs liberally from Morrison's "Rock of Ages," "World War III," The Invisibles, Flex Mentallo, Seven Soldiers, Animal Man, and a couple others I'm probably forgetting. Morrison's use of Kirby's characters promised some element of interpretation and reinvigoration, even if those new designs never quite materialized and the Fifth World seems no different from the Fourth, but he simply repeats his own prior work. It's a cut-and-paste job that doesn't culminate his favorite themes so much as exhaust them.
It's no secret to anyone who's been reading this blog for a while that Grant Morrison is one of the last writers keeping me interested in monthly comics--and absolutely the last one keeping me interested in writing a comics blog. Three years ago (good lord), Jog offered a persuasive evaluation of why Morrison holds such broad appeal for comics bloggers (although I suspect that appeal is notably less broad at this particular moment). Blogging thrives on the periodic, the recurring, the ongoing, and Morrison has supplied a steady stream of material for as long as there has been a comics blogosphere. But more than that, Jog observed that Morrison straddled the cultures of the comic book and the graphic novel. I would go farther, a lot farther; sometimes it seems like Morrison is the last master of the monthly comic book in an age when all of his peers are padding it out for the trade paperback. Certainly it's not an overstatement to say that Morrison has mastered the pacing and structure of the monthly serial comic and the narrative bounties of the shared continuity. Now, after Final Crisis, I have to acknowledge my nagging fears that he's also become trapped by them.
At his best, Morrison writes comics that exploit the serial format while still reading as well or better in collected editions--less trade paperbacks than sprawling, multivolume graphic novels. This isn't some distant golden age I'm describing; Morrison hit the jackpot just last fall. Lately, though, with Batman and especially with Final Crisis he seems to have become more interested in the monthly superhero comic as a final narrative format, a neverending story whose installments are not even vaguely self-sufficient, individually or collectively, and the continuity-bound superhero crossover as something still less self-sufficient than that. Final Crisis is so determined to read as a network of interconnecting series that it not only resists collection, it resists any expectations of a whole and relatively self-contained narrative. It cannot tell a complete story in 225 pages without fracturing across a half-dozen tie-ins; it cannot even be so kind as to have Superman re-enter the story from the same spin-off he exited it for.
All this could be forgiven if the series added up to something more than a sheaf of character designs and continuity notes for a story that gets outlined rather than told. My favorite tie-in was probably the Final Crisis Sketchbook, a behind-the-scenes guide filled with Morrison's lightly comedic reinventions of the New Gods and pointlessly detailed, utterly perfect histories of Japanese superheroes. Most of these characters would barely appear in the crossover. Some never would. Only now is it clear: that sketchbook was Final Crisis in its purest form.
It's been over three months since I posted anything here. I meant to, honest, especially after the election. Christy and I worked hard for that one, canvassing in Virginia almost every weekend from Labor Day to Election Day. At the time it seemed like each trip supplied a new reason for confidence--like the first Saturday after the Republicans' smug, spiteful convention, when the line of Obama volunteers spilled out of the office and down the block--but I never got around to writing them up. I wish I had now, not for the blog but for my own personal record.
I realized a while ago that there was no point to blogging about politics on my schedule. If blogging is ideally a daily activity then political blogging is an hourly one, and I could never devote that kind of time to it--especially not last fall, when my time was better spent knocking on doors in Fairfax County. By the time I was done knocking the polls were closed, and anything I could have said about the election was said more powerfully by the crowds crying in Grant Park and dancing in front of the White House.
So politics was out; well, we'll always have comics. One of the nicer things about comics blogging is that you don't really have to do it every day; as long as Tom or Dirk links to your post, it doesn't matter how badly you've let your readership atrophy. But that can be a trap, too. Comics blogs offer a guaranteed (if tiny) audience and absolutely no standards other than the ones you and your chosen peers set for yourselves. Not exactly a recipe for great writing, which makes the great writing it has produced that much more remarkable. But once you fall out of the habit for a while it begins to look a bit too cozy, a bit too comfortable.
The problem is not the subject matter, even when a subject disappoints as deeply as Final Crisis does, severing that last tether to the weekly conversation. The problem is the medium itself. If blogging is daily it is also ephemeral, yet the ephemera cling to life with embarrassing persistence; even the best-kept archives reek with the overripe tang of long-forgotten controversies that never mattered in the first place. (Paul O'Brien thinks comics are boring! Micah Ian Wright lied to me! How could CrossGen fail?) Not long after I started this blog I made an effort, haltingly at first, to purge it of such ephemera, to write only pieces I thought I could be proud of later. I'm still proud of many of them, but the consequence was a blog that rarely updated and still took more effort than a blog should take.
Some folks are able to turn their blogs into part of their professional development or, better yet, make blogging a profession unto itself. More power to them. Writing this blog has been incredibly valuable, as a laboratory for developing ideas and as a motivation to push my style in directions it otherwise wouldn't have taken. But after a while it's time to apply all that work to formats and venues that aren't measured chiefly by their frequency. No matter how much time and energy I sank into it, blogging has always been a hobby for me. Time spent blogging is time not spent writing for some other format that demands better work and offers something more durable in return.
I doubt this will be the end of this site--there will always be some work of exceptional quality or exceptional frustration to tempt me back--but it will be the end of it as a blog. (This only makes official an ending that really started last spring, with the conclusion of the other serial narrative that kept me posting.) There will be updates as other projects come into print, some possibly as early as the end of the year. Some will take a lot longer; I've decided to bite the bullet and write that Morrison book that's been pushing itself into blog form for the last five years.
I'm looking forward to Seaguy 2; I'm looking forward even more to Grant's temporary break from comics and the newer, more self-contained, more original works that I hope will follow.
In the meantime? We'll always have the President.
