The Gay Comic Geek’s Angry Comic Book Nerd Rant, or what makes a Crisis good?
(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)The Gay Comic Geek was so livid about Final Crisis he felt the need to change his nom de plume to the Angry Comic Book Nerd and share a Valentine rant encouraging viewers to take a dump on copies of it they see on shelves. I wouldn’t recommend doing so as I think your local comic book store may frown on that.
His rant is preceded by a very concise explanation of the previous Crises and their merits. Like myself and many others, he found Final Crisis disjointed and confusing at best and at worst a stinking pile of crap, but he really does his best to sum it all up while amassing a list of unanswered questions.
Noone can deny a number of extremely dynamic moments – but the plot threads were woven too loosely and the ending completely failed to pull them together into any sort of clear picture. I can handle experimental storytelling, but you at least need to pull it together at the end so someone can get a true idea of what happened.
A few interesting quotes from Grant Morrison’s Newsarama Final Crisis Exit Interview, parts 1 and 2
The A was Anthro and the Z was Kamandi. First Boy to Last Boy, with the whole DC Multiverse in between. In the end, as I got really into the story, it changed shape a little and now concludes, as it began, with the First Boy, now an Old Man.
And the Grant Morrison explanation for why I kept thinking I’d missed a chapter as I was reading…
I choose to leave out boring, as I saw it, connective tissue we didn’t really need for this story to work. I choose to leave out long-winded caption-heavy explanations that bring readers ‘up to speed’, even as they send them to sleep. And we left out the line-wide crossover tie-ins that have every detail of backstory spelled out laboriously by writers desperate to get back to their own plotlines. Otherwise, the whole thing is there on the page in word or picture form…and when interestingly-shaped story spaces can be opened out to make room for enthusiastic speculation and debate that adds to the fun. Looking up characters you thought were simply generic cavemen or monsters and finding they have histories you can explore and adventures you can read adds another interactive layer that takes you deeper into the mysteries and complexities of the DC virtual reality.
ummmmm – BIGTIME cop out. Story cheat. Sure he knows the whole story – but the reader is left guessing. When I want to guess, I read a whodunit.
As for why it was a FINAL crisis, it was the Final Crisis of the Monitors as well as the Final Crisis of the Fourth World, but even Morrison seemed doubtful it is really all that final.
the Grant Morrison definitive “reading order”…
FINAL CRISIS # 1- 3
SUPERMAN BEYOND # 1- 2
SUBMIT
FINAL CRISIS # 4 – 5
BATMAN #682 – 683
FINAL CRISIS # 6 – 7
Not to mention FINAL CRISIS: Legion of 3 Worlds which still has 2 more issues but happens (in the future) before Final Crisis #7. My brain hurts. No wonder people are confused.
via GayComicGeek and Newsarama
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02/17/2009 at 2:37 pm
Okay, first let me say I wait for the trades to read most of this stuff. I find it less stressful and more satisfying to enjoy a story from beginning to end without spreading the experience over a period of months. The disadvantage to this is reading and hearing everyone tell me how awful some stories are going to be before I read them.
That said, Infinite Crisis pulled me back into the comic world after an absence of many years. I loved it and thought DC was really heading in a good direction. Now I am starting to wonder….I mean, wtf was Countdown? I read the fourth volume three times, and I still don’t know what happened. And was trying to keep it in continuity with Death of the New Gods just too much trouble? Did they think we wouldn’t notice?! But I digress….
This turned into a rant, which was not my intention…Love it or hate it, I will still read Final Crisis….I am not giving up on DC yet, but they really need to get their act together. At least I still have Green Lantern and the Corps….
02/17/2009 at 3:09 pm
By no means am I advocating giving up on DC (and I’m guessing neither is the “Angry Comic Book Nerd”). Just saying this particular series isn’t up to the usual epic standards. If you want an epic read in trade format – skip the main series and wait for trade of Legion of 3 Worlds – which completely rocks!
I just have issues with Grant Morrison’s tendancy to obfuscate his stories while attempting to over-intellectualize them by keeping certain details to himself, making it necessary to analyze the issue instead of reading it. Which wouldn’t be so bad if we were ever told enough of the missing details to fill in the gaps.
The gaps in this story are not just from cross over issue you might have skipped. Whole sequences he had in mind as part of the story happen off panel and are only mentioned in the most cryptic detail.
Half the content for this is him setting up future series like the Super Young Team.
02/18/2009 at 9:41 am
I just wanted to say that I agree with Comic Book Geek. I didn’t read all the titles, but at times I was so confused with the storyline. I loved the original Crisis miniseries and the Identity Crisis too. Wasn’t too keen on this story arc. At times, it was too much to read. Having these arcs expand across the other titles is too much. I won’t give up on DC or Marvel.