DC Assemble! Morrisson says so!

Book: Final Crisis
Pen: Grant Morrison
Pencil: J. G. Jones, Doug Mahnke

Crossover. That word that brings both thrill and dread to the comic book fan. Thrill because it is an occasion to see multiple heroes and villains in the same story. Dread because of the sheer mess it would turn out to be, with hardly anyone getting enough page time.

Marvel does crossovers better because they can still make it palatable for the random reader. DC’s crossovers are bigger events, but is aimed more at the extreme fan. They are years in the making, run  bred.through almost all the individual titles and then culminate in in a story that is always less than the sum of the parts leading to it.

Once Grant Morrison’s run on Batman became acclaimed as a classic while he was doing it, there was only one person who was going to drive Final Crisis. If his propensity to refer to obscure bits from hidden comics of yore were not exasperating enough, he now gets the keys to all of DCs characters. Boy, doesn’t he act like a five-year-old playing with everyone’s toys!

It had to be Darkseid, of course. Honestly, there isn’t another villain who could have created havoc on such a cosmic level. However, the way in which he went about it was quite silly. Then again, I don’t have the benefit of reading a year’s worth of comics in every line to know if that was a necessity. He is going to alter reality and shape a new order. All the heroes in the DC stable have to come together to stop him. And just as a backup why not get the superheroes from alternate universes also, including a black Superman who is also the President of the United States? Ahem!

There is one very interesting character in Final Crisis. He is a detective called Dan Turpin. For a while Morrison teases us with a whodunnit, but then just leaves it. Which is a crying shame as superhero tales told from the POV of an ordinary man tends to resonate more with the non-superheroes who read the books. Instead the book then turns out to be all about Gods, beings more powerful than gods, beings who Monitor gods, lesser-known superheroes, wannabe superheroes, and Batman. Who else could figure it all out? Final Crisis, unfortunately, shows the Batman RIP book for what it actually is – a fraud. It is in Final Crisis that Batman actually goes RIP.

Final Crisis, as an individual book, is not at all recommended. It leaves you baffled, benumbed and bored. I look forward to continuing with Morrison’s Batman journey. Let the others go their separate ways