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Final Crisis and also how to fix DC Comics
Posts
Oh, come on.
This
was just one instance of you being randomly aggro at a post that was not directed at you in any way, shape or form. You act like you've got a giant chip on your shoulder that you're just waiting for someone to brush off, and despite my efforts to engage you at a chilled-out, reasonable level you just can't resist throwing in shit like "you are for attacking me for not thinking it was the pinnacle of the written word" or "wipe his dick off your chin" - which, I mean, come the fuck on, dude.
A) The wipe his dick off your chin wasn't directed at you in any way. I assume you know how the quote system works, considering you've used it so effectively in your last post.
Oh yeah... look at me, claiming Morrison has an ego. I'm so itching for everyone to tell me what a huge cock I am. Oh, and lets look further...
Man, I am such a dick!
You're right... I've been a ginormous cock who totally deserved all this hate because I didn't love Final Crisis.
Well, you know, I read things besides what's addressed just directly to me.
I think muinn has said some stuff that falls into the realm of dickish. Everyone else has been discussing with you, not attacking you. If you feel attacked, that might be a good time to pull back and, I dunno, grab a beer or something.
Yeah he might have. He is a bit of a bastard.
In Final Crisis I'm bombarded with stuff like a guy called The Tattoed Man, some place called Bludhaven (which instantly turns me off just because of its name), and a hundred other minor or obscure characters I've never heard of. The problem is I don't care about any of these people, and the comic spends no time making me care about them. It's just assumed that I already do.
For someone who is totally steeped in the history, characters, and minutiae of the DCU, I would imagine the experience is quite different. You get to see snippets of what's happening in lots of different places and you don't need any setup for it.
I had much the same feeling with Infinite Crisis except worse, because it was less an issue of not being familiar with characters and more about needing to know about all kinds of different events in the DCU which occur/occured outside of IC's pages.
One one hand, it's great for hardcore DC fans to have stuff like this that really plays to their extensive knowledge, but I think it's a big mistake for DC's business. Reason being, big "event" comics tend to attract people who might not otherwise be big DC readers. They are opportunities for DC to grab readers' interest and get them hooked. So I think it's a mistake to be so alienating to new readers with events like this.
To me, the model for what an 'event' comic should be is Infinity Gauntlet. You read Infinity Gauntlet 1-6 and get a complete story with a beginning, middle, and end. You might never have heard of Thanos or Adam Warlock before, but they're handled in a way that you don't need to have. Meanwhile most of the rest of the characters will be familiar to any casual comics fan even if you don't read many Marvel comics. But the key thing is that it's a complete story. There were other things you could read that tied in, such as Thanos Quest or the various 'Infinity Gauntlet Tie-In' issues but they were in no way necessary.
Even Infinity Crusade, which crossed over into all kinds of other comics, was at least explicit in telling you what to read. At the end of each issue it would say "To be continued in ____ #XX!".
With Final Crisis there are several off-shoot titles, but their relevance is unclear, and even if you do read them how they relate to the main series is questionable at best (Superman Beyond takes place in the blink of an eye - so where was Superman all those issues of FC?).
This all says nothing of the issues I have with Final Crisis' storytelling.
Is that in response to my post? If so it's a misunderstanding of it. You seem to be implying that anyone who reads comics reads all comics.
Not for a while. It's now just a bombed-out husk after Infinite Crisis.
Nightwing has been operating out of New York since OYL
I don't think that's necessarily true at all. I read DC One Million and really enjoyed it. I think Infinity Gauntlet can be enjoyed by someone who isn't all that familiar with the Marvel U. I liked Identity Crisis. I even liked Zero Hour.
I think it's very possible to tell a complete compelling story that involves unfamiliar characters, but in Final Crisis I think the problem is the combination of overwhelming numbers of unknowns with the quick-cut "channel surfing" style. You either already know about these characters and their situations, and care about them, or you don't.
I also think it's possible to tell a "universe-altering" story without focusing very much on past continuity. DC's obsession with its own continuity and the constant rewriting of it is one of the big things that turns me off of DC. How many times has Superman's origin been rewritten? Was he Superboy or not? The multiverse stuff I find equally unattractive because now we're keeping track and rewriting and retconning continuities from not just one Earth but 52(?) of them. Superman One, Superman Two, Superman Three, ugg. Earth-2 vs. Earth-Two, I mean really? I wish they'd just leave that crap alone and focus on telling a good story.
i think the problem actually comes when people do like comics and read comics but maybe not a lot of dc comics, or maybe even just not obscure dc comics.
if that's your position, then you can't help but feel like you should know these characters. it's hard to silence the voice at the back of your head telling you "hey...hey, this guy is from something and you don't know what". but i really think final crisis is written in such a way that an understanding of any specific character's history is somewhat secondary to the archetype they represent in the realms of Story. it's just hard to accept that when pretty much all other event comics aren't written like that.
to take an example, you say that you really enjoyed dc one million. i would wager you weren't as frustrated by not knowing the complete histories of the various "future" characters, many of whom have roughly as much (or as little, as the case may be) screen time as characters in final crisis. it's the opposite of the subconcious response to final crisis, in a way. because you know they're "new" characters, you're keyed in to everything they do and say because you're building their character in your mind as you read. you don't worry about how the team got together or whether or not knowing that will impact your enjoyment and understanding of the story because you know that information doesn't really exist and you trust the author to provide whatever knowledge you need to get through ("Man. Have no fear. Here is knowledge.")
on the flip side, in final crisis you go into it already knowing that pretty much every character has a published history. this, as i said, leads to the opposite subconscious reaction where you think that because the information is out there, it must be directly relevant to understanding the story. it is not. i think perhaps that if, like the people i've seen other posters talk about, you simply viewed every character you couldn't immediately identify as a "new" character and simply absorb their place and meaning in the larger story, it might become a more enjoyable reading experience.
it's not fun to read something and feel like you don't understand it, and that's not the feeling i believe morrison wanted readers to come away with, but i think the very way comic events have been written in the past trained many comic readers to...hmm...i don't want to say "not understand" the story style because i think it is very understandable, but perhaps not immediately embrace change (to swipe a phrase from marvel) in regards to how events are written.
serious question- when you say they do nothing effective to combat his voice, do you mean other than when superman cancels out the vibrations of darkseid's voice by singing the counter-vibrations at the end of issue 7? i don't think anyone really realized the mechanics behind anti-life before then.
Wait, what? The Anti-Life Equation is pretty well established in DC lore; it's been there right since the beginning of the Fourth World books, and it was established there and then that it's a real, existing universal force for control and dominance that Darkseid seeks to harness. The reason the New Gods spend so much time on Earth is that Darkseid believes the missing key to the equation exists inside human brains (and it does - Sonny Sumo has a piece of the equation, and he is able to order Darkseid's troopers around). It also has been used outside of stuff directly connected to the Fourth World; I seem to recall that several DC characters with will-domination powers (like the Pied Piper) were revealed to be unwittingly using little bits of the equation.
There were like, thirty years of comics all about how horrible it would be if Darkseid got the complete equation; the only thing FC did was say that he did, and here's what happens.
stuff like "heh final crisis was so dumb because it was so complicated! not like secret invasion where a skrull died, am I right?"
and it goes both ways, I'm tired of these dumb comic book guy style jokes, because they aren't funny, and they make the person saying them look like a petty little shit
There was no prelude to Dan's appearance in Final Crisis, and you really didn't need to know anything about him beyond the fact that he's a retired detective.
I think most of us just used our knowledge of his role in the Superman cartoons to fill in the blanks.
Also, sooooorrryyy geebs.
https://twitter.com/Hooraydiation
i didn't read countdown, but i don't actually think he was.
that was dan turpin. he's actually one of the (many many many) jack kirby characters around whom final crisis revolves. basically, he was a metropolis cop who got mixed up in some fourth world jazz. eventually he transfers to gotham. he's kind of laid low really since the kirby days.
the first place i ever encountered him, in fact, was on the bruce timm superman animated series. he's a minor character for a few episodes (and has a crazy-ass death-by-darkseid moment. spoilers!)
I would bet ten dollars that you didn't
I'm still working my way through the Animated universe... starting with Batman. My point was though that, I think I might have into FC with negative feelings because I thought I was missing some huge piece. I think that might have colored my feelings on it from the get-go, which makes it 1/2 my OCD need to know everything about a character for some reason, and 1/2 the way the story was told.
But as I said like, 5 pages ago, I'm going back to give it another try.
but isn't the point not just that the universe says life is pointless, but that it carries on anyway? in other words, it's not "pointless" in a perjorative sense but in the sense that we are not tied to any fixed destination. life is what life makes of itself.
further, it's the anti-life equation for a reason. you're describing the yin-yang forces. it's not a narrative problem, but rather a system of balances. it's expressed quite appropriately in the end of superman beyond, when superman has been projected into his future robot statue body in order to fight the death of all things. superman's purpose is to fight the enemy and the enemy's purpose is to fight superman.
they aren't contradictory concepts, but complementary ones. there is no love without hate, no happiness without sadness, no life without anti-life
you would win that bet
but I ain't honor no contracts
Three things.
1) ^^^^ all of this
2) Also, Fencingsax, the ALE doesn't specifically say that Darkseid is in charge or that life is pointless. It represents the entire concept of the domination of sentient will (to any purpose, not just Darkseid's), and is in fact the sum total of all such domination. Kirby came up with the concept because he fought in WWII and thought the Nazis were the worst thing that had ever existed. When the Mad Hatter makes a mind control hat, he is unwittingly employing Anti-Life. When Hitler turns a city full of bankers and shopkeepers into bloodthirsty killers, that is Anti-Life too. The Equation isn't just a sci-fi symbol for oppression and slavery; in the DCU, Anti-Life is oppression and slavery. But there is a Life Equation too.
3) I just want to pause for a second and appreciate fully how much I love that we can say things like "when superman has been projected into his future robot statue body in order to fight the death of all things"
That's cool, but I don't think it really tells us anything. We could probably find people who'll say that their friends who don't read comics didn't like it. What is the proportion of people who don't read comics who like or don't like Final Crisis? What are their reasons for liking or disliking it? Who knows. All this information disproves is the notion that no one without strong knowledge of DC will enjoy Final Crisis, but that's certainly not an idea I'm putting forward.
Considering this describes a very large part of the comics-buying market...
It's an interesting theory. It probably has some merit, but I think it misses the mark at least in my case. I don't need to know the entire published history of a character, how and why a team got together, or even much of anything about a character at all in order for them to work in a story. It's all about how they're used, and whether the writer puts in the effort to make me care about them. I feel that this wasn't done enough in Final Crisis.
In DC One Million, the future JLA are given a strong introduction, and there is no question as to their relevance to the story. Additionally, they use what we know about the existing JLA to piggyback themselves into instant familiarity. I'm not sure it's a great comparison.
Anyway I don't want to get into too detailed a discussion on this, because that would require me to go through the issues to cite examples etc.. I don't want to do that because I want to reread the series with fresh eyes at some point.
This is for two main reasons and one lesser reason:
1. I like everything else I've read by Morrison - well aside from Superman Beyond I guess*
2. I read issues 4 and I think 5 while blazed and really enjoyed it
3. So I can critique it better
* Was way too Superman worshippy, and way too meta, for my tastes.
so while it may have been superman worshippy, how many other characters would merit such a treatment?
Exactly. And not just resonant, but new. If you look at the stories we all consume from day to day, and strip them down to their most essential elements, most of them are very old indeed - boys & girls, cops & robbers, war & peace, master & servant. I don't think new story-forms get added to the ranks very often. But Superman was part of an entirely new kind of story, about the evolution of human moral and physical potential. "Past & future," maybe. Siegel & Schuster obviously didn't invent that kind of story but they created arguably its most recognizable avatar.
To me that's subject matter for an essay. Not for a Superman comic. A Superman comic about how wonderful Superman is as a character feels very wanky... self-aggrandizing.
Loved it!
By your question, you imply that All-Star Superman was a "comic about how wonderful Superman is as a character" and I don't think it was. Perhaps I should replace the word "character" in that sentence with "enduring human myth", as I was referring to the metafictional aspects of Superman Beyond as per the discussion Servo and I were having.
All-Star Superman was a great Superman comic. It was about Superman, and various adventures he and his supporting cast get into. It wasn't about Superman as myth. It wasn't a story about itself.