A Beautiful Gory Display: Seriously, G.I. Robot!
So Monday came, and the press coverage was nearly nonexistent. That happens, and that’s the one part of this that isn’t Marvel making a stupid decision. This kind of stuff depends on a slow news day to get major ink, and last week didn’t have slow news days. Between the economy and Iran, there wasn’t a lot of interest in Captain America. That’s a reasonable risk, and they can’t reasonably be held responsible for that. But here’s where they blew it. First, the big announcement was the resurrection of the original Captain America. Granted, they got their headlines when they killed him two years ago. Heck, the publisher of Marvel showed up on The Colbert Report to give Stephen Cap’s iconic shield. And when the new Cap debuted nine months after that, they got a little bit of coverage. For the return of the original, nothing. And that was to be expected, slow news day or not. There’s precedent there. Remember the big media furor when Superman died in 1992? Yep. Remember the hubbub when he came back? No, no you don’t. Because there was none. A death is something that interests people even vaguely familiar with the character. A return is business as usual. If retailers had known that would be the content of the press release, by and large they wouldn’t have bothered with Monday shipping.
But it gets worse. The press release was about an entirely different comic. Captain America didn’t come back in the issue released that day. Nope, the return begins in a miniseries that begins next month. Seriously. They expected retailers to alter their schedule and pay extra for early shipping of a comic book that was only tangentially related to the “big announcement”. I can’t determine if that’s incompetence or apathy, but it’s definitely one of them. Or possibly contempt. Whichever one it is, the amount of it is absolutely horrifying.
It’s worth mentioning that, absent of the retailer-screwing, this issue is actually really good. Ed Brubaker is the best writer Marvel has in their stable right now, and he’s been doing an excellent job all along. I think that Marvel editorial forces crossovers and status quo changes down his throat (“Hey Ed, we’re going to need you to kill your main character.”), but he knocks it out of the park every month. Set on the one year anniversary of Cap’s death, he focuses on a variety of major and minor characters, looking back at what that day meant to them. And one of those reminiscences happens during a prison riot, so there’s still plenty of action in what is basically a meditative story. There’s an absolute all-star lineup of artists, with a different one on each vignette. In this extra-sized issue we also get several backup stories, one by Roger Stern, the best Captain America writer of the 80’s, another by Mark Waid, the best Captain America writer of the 90’s. With a gallery of every Captain America cover and a text piece by Cap’s co-creator, Joe Simon, this is really a fantastic book with the most incompetent marketing ever.
Final Crisis (DC) – This lovely hardcover collects the entire Final Crisis miniseries from last year, 
along with a couple of the more important tie-ins. I’ve mentioned this quite a bit, since this is the story where Batman (sort of) dies. So yeah, that’s the kind of thing that come up a lot with me. The thing is, this was an excellent event series, and probably the most misunderstood story in years.
along with a couple of the more important tie-ins. I’ve mentioned this quite a bit, since this is the story where Batman (sort of) dies. So yeah, that’s the kind of thing that come up a lot with me. The thing is, this was an excellent event series, and probably the most misunderstood story in years.Crisis writer Grant Morrison has a reputation for being obtuse and incomprehensible, and I really don’t see it. He’s weird, and he puts a lot of big ideas out there, but if you pay attention, everything you need to understand the story is right there on the page. Nonetheless, whatever he writes, there are always readers who claim it’s too confusing. This criticism seemed to overshadow everything about Final Crisis, with each issue touching off a new round of whining. While it seemed to me that Morrison took great pains to make sure readers were apprised of each new development, people still refused to acknowledge explanations presented within the story.
Now, with the whole series in one package, the story flows much more smoothly. While artist JG Jones does beautiful work, he’s very slow and this caused the series to ship later and later, until Jones had to be replaced on the final issue by Doug Mankhe, who’s ridiculously good but in a completely different way. (The change in art styles is somewhat jarring in the collected edition, but atMahnke’s art actually does fit the tone of the final chapter better.) The delay in the publication schedule may have caused some story points to be forgotten during the wait between issues.
The main point of the story is that all-purpose cosmic villain Darkseid manages to enslave Earth when nobody was watching. Along the way, Green Lantern solves a deicide, the various Flashes race Death, Superman fights a war in Limbo and becomes the guardian of all fiction, Batman shoots a god, and that’s just the beginning. There’s a battalion of Supermen from every reality, Luthor’s rebellion, the death of a Justice League mainstay, a Shakespeare-quoting Frankenstein fighting a mind-controlled army, a contingency plan set in place at the beginning of time, and the greatest fight between humanoid tigers you will ever see.
In short, Final Crisis is everything that’s good about superheroes. It’s a big, insane story with mind-bending concepts, over the top action, and wall-to-wall craziness. It’s a love letter to DC continuity, with obscure references like Darkseid’s hatred of music and appearances of screwball characters like Merryman, the Heckler, and G.I. Robot. But it’s also about scraping the icons down to their core essence. It’s pure genius and unrestrained fun. This is a book where one of the antagonists is a vampire Superman made of anti-matter, after all. They invented the word “awesome” just so we’d have something to describe concepts like that.
Next week, it’s Batman Week as I review all of the rebooted Batman series. So much Batman, you’ll have to sit down and catch your breath!
