Final Crisis #6 (of 7) (DC – Morrison / Jones / Pacheco / Merino)
As the entire world turns against them, the last of Earth’s Super Heroes must face the unstoppable power of the Gods of Apokolips for the final time. Supergirl vs. Mary Marvel! Superman vs. Darkseid! The fate of the Flash! And the incredible return of the New Gods! The End of Days has come and the ultimate war between good and evil will at last be decided on the battlefield of a broken world!
And as the skies bleed, as the walls between universes crumble and fall, the ultimate threat to life makes its presence felt as an evil beyond imagining arrives to claim its prize. Mandrakk the Dark Monitor is coming and the DC Multiverse will never be the same again!
It’s almost as if this is the anti-cross-over event of the year, because there are very few, if any, main DC titles seem to even be reflecting Grant Morrison’s vision of the DC apocalypse.
I’ve been collecting a long time, I’ve been to the DC Nation panels, I was around when the original Crisis happened… hell, I remember the Super Powers limited series. Is it just me, or does anyone else thinks this smells of bad fish?
Let’s start at the top, Grant Morrison (while one of the best and most unique story-tellers of the day) has written so many obscure plot twists and easter eggs into this narrative that unless you are totally up on your Jack Kirby New Gods Mythology and have memorized his Seven Soldiers series, you’ll miss whole pieces. Grant Morrison believes that every reader, from the middle schooler to the middle-ager, is up on every detail. And the truth of it is, if you are then Final Crisis comes into focus and becomes brilliant… if you aren’t (like 95% of the readership) it’s just messed up.
Let me speak to my batman-lovin’, geek-brethren who collected all of R.I.P. and it’s related issues, on behalf of everyone who loves comics, I apologize. You collected and fought through yet another highly-publicized, highly-detailed, over-hyped Grant Morrison story to come to the same final moment and same conclusion that someone who didn’t read any of the R.I.P. story did. Batman died while shooting Darkseid with a special New-God-killer bullet. huh?… yeah… that’s right. Batman got hit with Omega beams with a gun in his hand and his scorched body is carried away by Superman. What did this have to with anything from R.I.P.? That’s right… nothing at all. Dan Didio must grin every time he thinks about that.
Now, is Batman really dead? nah… the tell-tale signs all point to Batman being trapped in Omega Sanction Death trap. What’s the Omega Sanction you ask? You mean you don’t know what that is? Hey, join the club, I had to wiki it because I don’t have a level 10 Darkseid lore skill. Apparently the Omega Sanction is one of Darkseid’s powers that traps the victim in a series of alternate universes, each one worse than the last… hmmmm… sounds a lot like R.I.P.! Boy, I hope that whole series was not simply in Bat’s mind or worse yet, alternate reality story.
Morrison tries to add minutia-level details to his plot to create this idea that his big cross-over is truly about humanity and that in the face of total oblivion it’s the small details that matter. Not that I necessarily disagree with the sentiment, but it falls on deaf ears and eyes. When Checkmate is revealing their end-game scenario involving inter-dimensional travel, who really cares if two wanna-be members of Japan’s Super Young Team haven’t told each other they like them?
The art in this issue is a bit sporadic. The art teams have been shuffled around and you get some discrepancy within this issue. The action / battle scene are very solid but then the dramatic stills are less than impressive.
Then there is the fact that the other DC titles… Action, Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, JSA, JLA don’t reflect what is happening here at all. This is truly Grant Morrison’s little playground and it seems no one else in invited. Or possibly all the DC fans have been trapped by the Omega Sanction? 🙂
Grade: C for constantly bizarre
