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Final Crisis and also how to fix DC Comics
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Company C was very top heavy with management that was apt to making all of the wrong decisions. The types of guys and gals that could fuck up a two car funeral with ease, despite their best efforts. But they had attained their lofty positions because of a few big successes in the past that were, honestly, no fault of their own. And they all kind of knew it. In order to maintain job security and self importance they became increasingly insular, and oddly, both aggressive and defensive to all outside (and many times internal) influences. This led to an atmosphere that was very conducive to company talent that saw things their way, while all of their best people (myself included) simply fled elsewhere. The talent that stayed behind were great, but they really were just working on products and services that were borne of failure and destined for worse. Eventually, the management of Company C began turning upon their own treasured talent at the first signs of criticism or recession. It was sad to see, and though those of us that left felt sorry for those that stayed behind, we knew it was their own fault.
As I browse through news about DC I get a strong sense of deja vu. Company C never woke up and adjusted their management, and as far as I can tell, DC seems intent on doing the same thing while their market share continues to decline and their product becomes less enjoyable (to the customer at large).
Last time I checked my old Company C had failed to turn a profit in years. It's now just a glorified good ol' boys' network where the select few in brass feed greedily while nothing successful is ever produced, and no strong talent ever comes in. Sounds damn familiar.
let me ask this- did you complain about the new/mighty avengers issues in secret invasion? because a big comics crossover sometimes does need to end up...y'know...crossing over to other titles.
is that a problem endemic to the medium? maybe. but you can hardly claim that final crisis was the first event book where suddenly the tie-ins were really necessary. i mean, isn't that what people have been complaining about for years? that tie-ins weren't relevant to the story? now when they are, people complain about that.
But it seems like I'm trying to kill your sacred cow here, so I'm just going to let it go. We obviously aren't going to come to an agreement on this.
One thing that really annoys me as a reader is crossovers. Sometimes. Using Marvel and Daredevil as an example, I read DD because I love DD. Its my favorite comic period. When I'm reading DD, I don't give a shit about evil skrull invasions or World War Hulk or any of that crap. I love the fact that DD is so pure. (Note to Marvel: Stay the hell away from DD).
On the other hand, I think the Sinestro War is possibly the best "Crossover" that has ever happened, period. It was a crossover between two related books. It didn't spill over into Batman and annoy Batman readers with GL stuff. Not everyone who reads Batman reads GL and it is a good thing that they didn't have to care.
Part of the problem with big crossovers, in general, is that the writers and editors seem to have this false assumption that everyone reads every book their company publishes. It really annoys me when I have to buy issues of books I don't normally read and don't normally care about just to get a piece of the story.
Example: New Krypton. I don't read Supergirl, I think its a terrible book and I hate "teen comics." But I had to get it simply so I could get a couple chapters of a story that I was enjoying in Superman. And that bothers me.
Green Lantern seems to be something of an exception here.
Over all though Final Crisis didn't feel like a Crisis story, it felt like a continuation of Cosmic Odyssey.
no no, i'm all for debate. i just want everyone to enjoy it as much as i did, because i really do think everyone can.
as long as you agree that someday, maybe, you'll consider sitting down and reading it all in one chunk, i'll be happy.
I promise you, I will.
I want to like it, I really do. I love the idea of stories as power. I think, once I'm able to actually get a hold of Superman Beyond 2, and legion of the three worlds 2, I will like it a lot more.
By choppiness, I don't just mean the pacing (e.g. try diagramming the timelines in the final issue, w/ intersecting narration w/o proper indication of who is talking when) but also the way tie-ins connect without sufficient explanation (e.g. how Batman got into the torture device, etc.)
I think that, if it were presented in 1.5 or 2 times the page-space, with a bit more content (so, some things taking 2-3 times as many frames, etc.) it would have been a far, far better presentation of interesting ideas.
no desire...
Is green lantern still good?
Supergirl was terrible before Sterling Gates took over the issue before the New Krypton crossover. He's really turning out great stuff, though. I actually look forward to the book! And he's handling the "who is Superwoman" thing well by addressing the different potential candidates under the mask instead of hinting at anyone possible.
"Teen comics" are my favorite. I love teen superheroes so much. They're cooler than adult superheroes, for the most part
Yes, but so was FC. :P
r...really?
would watching "naked lunch" turn you off movies?
no desire to see movies anymore?
"I can think of two things wrong with that title."
The funny thing is how much it struck me recently how right he is/would be to do such a thing and say such a thing. And that's because I was pondering something on the gaming site I used to play on and realized, "Oh, shit. I killed the site." The whole story I told was focused on the worst-case scenario in the setting and really wrapping up the tales of a lot of my and other peoples' characters. But I'm looking at the page my profile links to as a homepage when I see the rear-cover blurb staring at me, "The End of the Fucking World" (though it was taken from someone else's initial reading). And so when all was said and done and there was a sort of happy ending but still in the motif of being hard and grim and gritty, nothing came out of it. I didn't just kill a lot of characters, I killed our collaborative gaming forum, even extending into the RL, non-gaming area where we'd just shoot the shit. Seriously. No one, or almost no one, uses this incredibly neat site anymore that was well ahead of its time in design. And that's a shame.
There's a great line from Sandman about stories. "All Bette's stories have happy endings. That's because she knows where to stop. She's realized the real problem with stories -- if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death." Just because the Big Two seemed to have pulled back from the brink they were approaching when I first dropped comics doesn't mean that the end of the horizon has changed away from being a precipice. The stories seem to dance closer and closer to that line all of the time, and in the end the only inevitable tale to tell is the one that ends the story. And really, why are people so intent on the story ending, or even nearing the end?
In the end, the apocalypse story makes for interesting reading if you want death and destruction and action all combined with some element of hope or justice, but that assumes that Good wins. If it doesn't, then you just have action/violence fetish porn with no payoff. And I think Morrison was trying to make that point, or at least seemed to in his online "exit interview" with one of the comic news sites. "Great. You killed the world. Now what?"
It's like DKR. Without the last page and Clark winking to Carrie at the funeral, the story would have been just a giant turd. It would have been Ruins or Marvel's "the end" books--pointless nihilism for the sake of it. Pthbbbht. No thanks.
https://twitter.com/Hooraydiation
You're bitching about needing to buy a tie-in and then saying you liked Infinite Crisis? Really? There were, what, 5 big tie-in's to that event (including Superman: Sacrifice)? 2 of which were pretty much necessary to know what the fuck was going on (OMAC Project and Rann-Thanagar War)?
I wasn't bitching about tie-ins. But you know what, I could have read all of IC without the tie-ins, thanks.
And they enjoyed it! Neither had any difficulty understanding what was going on, barring one of them failing to realize the exiled Monitor was the same character as the fast food worker in issue 2 or 3. So I have trouble understanding why so many people apparently couldn't figure out what was going on.
Really? So you had no trouble understanding what the OMAC's were, why the JLA had fallen apart, why Wonder Woman had killed a guy, what the fuck had happened to magic, why all those random characters were in an entirely different galaxy or even why (or how) nearly every villain on the planet had teamed up?
Infinite Crisis was a FAR bigger clusterfuck than Final Crisis.
you know.. I did wonder why Lex Luthor Jr. showed up in the middle of Infinite Crisis number 7 and suddenly became the bad guy everyone had to band together to beat.
Oh... no... wait... he was in it the whole time, wasn't he? Gee, then what huge event am I thinking of where that happened?
Look Uni, Servo has made the point far better then you ever could, and without the massive chip on his shoulder to boot...
No idea. Aside from Point Blank/Sleeper and Ex Machina, I have no idea what is going on now or went on before with Wildstorm.
i guess he got distracted by other stuff.
When did I ever say he did? You said that Infinite Crisis made more sense, even though you knew less about the DCU back then. I said that Infinite Crisis was a complete clusterfuck, which had a ton of 'Countdown to Infinite Crisis' tie-ins. I (and apparently quite a few others, going by the comments in this thread) thought Final Crisis was perfectly understandable, even if you don't have an extensive knowledge of the DCU. It was really the complete opposite of Infinite Crisis, which was so entrenched in continuity (both the tie-ins and the original Crisis) that there wasn't much room for a good story.
Besides, Morrison originally planned for Superman Beyond to actually happen in the main books but editorial made him turn it into two tie-in issues. So your problem seems to be with them, not Morrison.
The huge thing about FC that I could see in Tie-in wise that hurt it was Death of the New Gods. If it wasn't for Conor on Ifanboy I wouldn't have known that they were all killed off. Even knowing that it was still a bit of a head scratcher.
Over all, FC is a hard read. You really have to sit down and think about it as you read, some people like this and some don't. Morrison was writing for the crowd who does. You can't please everyone all of the time (or any of the time). Some one said it above about projecting the idea of Morrison thinks you're stupid, he doesn't, go onto youtube and watch some interviews of the guy (the one of him and Way from SDCC08 was a really good one, I was in the audience).
Speaking of Death of the New Gods, is that canon?
I thought that was the vampire Monitor...
fuck... I'm just gonna go read it again.
I think the massive IGN one.
there was the evil monitor, who was a vampire in the same sense that all the monitors were vampires (i.e. they live off the life essense of the bleed between universes) but the vampire superman was actually Ultraman, turned to a vampire in order to be the monitor's "first knight of terror" is i believe how he phrased it.
that's all elaborated on in superman beyond 2, though. i was similarly confused before reading that issue.
Except where it conflicts with Final Crisis, yes it is.
And where does that happen? I'm kind of interested in reading DotNG, despite how bad I've heard it is.
This is my understanding of the state of things prior to Final Crisis, based on reading Seven Soldiers:
Have I got this right? If so, is Death of the New Gods actually a prequel to Seven Soliders? Or is it just an unrelated story that ignores Seven Soliders and is in turn ignored by Final Crisis?