Not the Beastmaster RIP

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:

1. 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).

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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. 

13. 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.

14. 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.

Comments

[Andrew Hickey]

I disagree with your assessment of Final Crisis, and I'm very sad that you've decided to give up the blog, but if it means you'll actually write the book about Morrison, and that I therefore will get to *read* your book about Morrison, I'm all for it.

[Kevin J. Maroney]

-this isn't implying stories, it's summarizing them

That's true on a literal level within issue 7 as well--significant chunks of the narrative are capsule descriptions of what might have been interesting scenes, or even storylines, told as flatly as possible to characters we don't know or care about.

It's hard to read this without thinking "Boy, he ran out of pages fast"--but even that doesn't account for the more severe structural problems you so well enumerated--the four different ultimate defeats of Darkseid, the completely unnecessary resurrection of Barry Allen, and the rehash of what should have been the ending of Superman Beyond. There's frantic, there's compressed, and then there's just plain collapse--and this is just plain collapse.

[Zom]

Well, I'm not particularly sad that you're giving up blogging as you haven't really been doing it the whole time I've been paying proper attention to the blogosphere. As long as I get to read the occasional post and well thought out comment I'll be happy.

Just write the bloody book, eh, Mark! I *WILL* be sad if you don't do that

[Jog]

You're wrong Marc, Micah Ian Wright meant the world to me!!

No, I did the same thing, actually... I don't ever remember when. Paying mind to some flavor of longevity... I can barely even remember when I used to post seven days a week (I think being a student possibly played a role!)...

Wonderful post to finish one... I'll always keep an eye out, of course... very few leave forever.

[Jeff R.]

I have to believe that the four ultimate defeats of Darkseid was a deliberate copy of Crisis on Infinite Earths #12, in which the Anti-Monitor was finally destroyed four times...

(The Aquaman panel might also be reference to that issue, which spend an entire page killing off Mera in action barely related to the main plot.)

Anyhow, I'll keep an eye out for the book, and check around here occasionally (especially when Treme starts, I guess)

[Mick]

I wish at times Morrison would require different aesthetics from his artists. More space could be used, for instance, if some scenes were made like 40's books (a bunch of little panels where entire seven trades happens), in other moments something a Kirby-ish Chris Ware would do (for instance, to set up more properly Superman's singing) and so on. The sense of lack of proper transition between "channels" made it appear all too random (without the sense of storytelling you'd get from someone like Quitely or artists under Moore's strict leash).

[plok]

Another promise to buy the book, here.

Great post, wonderfully acute as always...and as Jog said, a fitting end-point, but I think you may've screwed up my plans to write a review of Final Crisis without having read it! Yesterday, such a shocking notion...today, old hat.

Curse you, Marc!

Will keep checking in monthly, of course.

[Zak]

I'm a big fan of Final Crisis, had a great time reading it, but found it to be a huge disappointment in comparison to what it really felt like it was meant to be.

This is a fantastic, good spirited explanation of why that is. Thanks for the writing

[Sean Witzke]

Sad to see you go, Mark. Great piece to go out on. And I also will buy the hell out of that book.

[Tucker Stone]

What an excellent piece of anaylsis that was. Fine work Marc, and I look forward to wherever your writing takes you next.

[Garth Wallace]

Final Crisis #7 read like the movie trailer for Final Crisis #7.

I'll miss your blog posts (as few and far between as they've been), but I'm looking forward to your book!

[RAB]

It's rare indeed that someone can leave on such a perfectly realized high note.

Some essayists have the gift of not only delivering new insights but also helping people understand what they didn't know they already thought -- "so that's why this work meant so much to me" or "now I get why that book left me cold" -- as if you're reading or watching with us rather than at us. This post epitomizes the best of what's been present in your writing all this time.

This was one of the first blogs featuring serious comics analysis I ever read, possibly the very first. Well done.

[plok]

"I gave that hu-man those words...!"

RAB says what I wish I had said. True, true, true, all of it. How many times have I referenced "This Man, This Metaphor!"...how many times have I exploded into a room proclaiming "Lo, Derrida, Thou Facest THOR!"

Man oh man.

And now I go to rent Wire DVDs. You've convinced me. Sorry, something in my eye...

See you soon! Sort of.

[David]

Great review Marc, as always! Of all the chat Final Crisis has generated (some of it idiotic, some of it wonderful), this post has best articulated why I found the book so frustrating.

Also, this bit...

"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..."

Gets right to the heart of why Morrison's post ASS/Seven Soldiers work has been kinda disappointing to me.* That said, I did love those two Batman issues, the second part of Superman Beyond, the sketch book (!), etc. Maybe I just wish these projects stood on their own? If they'd interconnected like the various parts of Seven Soldiers, then that'd be something, but as it is I'm not sure they add up all that well.

I'm sad to hear that you're not going to be blogging here anymore, but I'm sure whatever writing you do next will be amazing.** And if you write that book on Morrison then WOW! Count me in!

*Frustratingly engaging, occasionally brilliant, and far more interesting than most anything else coming out in a spandex wrapper, but still a bit of a let down.

**I'd ramble on about how big an influence your blog has been on mine, but I'm not sure anyone needs to hear it!

[Greg Morrow]

what does Barry Allen do that Wally West couldn't do on his own?

Barry Allen is better than Wally West, because, A., he doesn't have to struggle to be a hero, it comes naturally to him; B., he's a scientist who thinks his way through his enemies' plots, using SCIENCE; C. I was twelve when I started reading Barry Allen Flash comics.

[Marc]

Wow, thanks everybody. I'm glad you liked the piece and I'm flattered to hear the kind words about this blog. Blogs can't exist in a vacuum and I'm indebted to all of you for the high quality of discussion at your own sites.

Plok--how many times have you burst into a room screaming "Lo, Derrida, Thou Facest THOR!"???

Zom, Sean, I am thinking of starting a new blog called I AM NOT MARK WITH A K. :)

[Matthew J. Brady]

I'll miss you Marc, but I'll repeat the assertion that this is an excellent way to go out. Good luck on the book; you could probably write one on The Wire as well. Speaking of which, I still have yet to watch season five, which would be why I didn't show up in the comments of your posts for that season. When I get around to watching the DVDs, I'm sure I'll be perusing all your writings and enjoying the analysis.

[Joe Iglesias]

Just wanted to add to the chorus of praise. Thanks for blogging as long as you have, and I look forward to whatever else you'll write, wherever I see it.

[David Golding]

Thanks for all the lovely posts, and thanks for convincing me to watch The Wire! Now: the world needs your Morrison book. Good luck!

[Kevin J. Maroney]

After reading this post, I came across Morrison's "Final Crisis Exit Interview" on Newsrama. Alas, it looks like a very high percentage of the things Morrison did that I found unsatisfying were, in fact, deliberate.

On the other hand, I really should try reading Morrison's own contributions to FC in the order he intended them to be read--I think that reading Superman Beyond #2 around the time of FC #3, instead just before #7, would improve both works significantly.

[Chris Miller]

You not only have penetrating insights to offer, you also obviously had a great deal more patience than I did to so methodically analyze this issue in the process of offering them.

FC had such potential, yet turned out to be such a crashing disappointment.

"Cascading anticlimaxes"... what an absolutely brilliant way of summing the whole thing up.

[Marc Singer]

Thanks, Chris.

Kevin, I don't know how deliberate they were--I read a lot of that interview as Morrison attempting to save face by claiming his missteps were actually deliberate choices or "pointed comments." (God save us from any more superhero crossovers with pointed comments on modern comics!) If he speaks the truth, I think that makes Final Crisis even worse: simple mistakes become acts of self-sabotage.

I mean, if he's worried that nobody else will use Mister Miracle or the Super Young Team, writing them out of their own story is a great way to insure that.

[Jones, one of the Jones boys]

Sorry to hear the hiatus becoming official, but glad to read your thoughts on FC. Oy, what a mess.

[Craig Fischer]

I haven't read a single panel of FC--I'm not interested in it at all--but I've read all your posts, about FC, THE WIRE, everything. I'll always be interested in what you have to say, Marc, and like everybody else I wish I'd bought your Morrison book yesterday.

And what you said about comics blogging is so painfully true...