I wrote the post that compared Morrison’s current writing style with Marnie Stern’s approach to songwriting, by the way (that sentence sounds way more egocentric than it’s supposed to — sorry!).

It occurs to me that Final Crisis is the most extreme application of this form yet — Batman, Seven Soldiers and 52 all hint at a bigger picture that is just outside of the reader’s perception, but they have clearer focal points for reader identification (Animal Man, Will Magnus, Batman, any one of the Seven Soldiers). So far Final Crisis has taken the decentred madness of Seven Soldiers #1 as its starting point and went nuts from there. I love it, but I can see why it’s not for everyone…

Also: thanks for linking to my posts on The Filth! I’ve officially started to doubt my own sanity wrt that project, so it’s good to know someone’s reading all those dirty little words!

This is errant nonsense though; what, the marketing man told you? To my shame, I stole/read Requiem which was pretty much an abysmal sop, a clip-show – and I like J’Onn; one that added absolutely nothing worthwhile to the series. This insistence on ratifying everything has been killing DC, over the piece, for nearly a decade to the extent I actually wish I knew less about the boring midden that presently is the DC Universe so’s to better enjoy Final Crisis as a comic in its own right. Which I absolutely could – it’s very fastidious in creating an internal logic and introducing all the cast so far.

I’d thought about that just after Countdown ended, how a much tighter book could be put together by selectively editing it down to just a few issues, while including a few pages from the other minis, especially Death of the New Gods, which I thought thematically belonged in Countdown anyway. After all — one basically boiled down to nothing more than rebuilding Kirby’s apocolyptic future, while the othe was about killing off his 4th world. It’s silly they were two separate minis, neither with enough story to fill their pages.

But now that Final Crisis is out and we realize just how little it all mattered, why bother?

I think “Crisis on Infinite Earths”, for all its fluff sometimes, was at least a complete story in and of itself and had iconic moments that made sense. DC killed a major character who’d been around for decades in the first issue, and they did it in two panels (while telling you to read “Requiem” for the send off), whereas Barry Allen and Supergirl both died in CoIE after prolonged battle scenes that gave them the chance to go out as heroes.