And if you go back and look at FC #1, there are really very few cuts and scene changes. The book starts with seven pages of Anthro, then moves to Dan Turpin for almost the entire rest of the issue, with the exception of a few pages of Green Lantern stuff, a few pages of Nix Uotan being exiled, and the Anthro/Kamandi scene. If anything, Morrison shows a lot of restraint in avoiding midpage scene changes, aside from Turpin’s narration starting on the last page of the Anthro/Vandal Savage confrontation and the match cut from the Alpha Lanterns sealing Earth to the representation of Earth in the multiversal orrery.

Speaking of The Wire, for another perspective on the artist’s responsibility to the audience, see David Simon’s comments early on in this roundtable discussion. Spoilers commence only after the moderator mentions watching all 60 hours of the series in three weeks.

By and large, it’s the more intelligent, more widely-read, and more literate-minded reviewers who are loving it to pieces. Okay, that’s usually a good indicator.

HOWEVER.

What I’ve also noticed is that almost every reviewer who glows about it … is talking, invariably, about the IDEAS. About the THEMES. Which are, I grant you, an important factor (and are criminally underrepresented in most mainstream comics – if they’re considered at all).

But where FINAL CRISIS fails for me – and for many people – is in its STORYTELLING. Its ability (or lack) to convey a compelling and comprehensible story, in a single read, to the average reader.

Reading a story over and over again to notice the subtleties – to see where the clues are first laid, to note the different ways in which the relevant themes have been seeded in parallel arcs, etc – that’s fine. That’s what a second or third or fourth reading SHOULD unearth.

But if the average reader doesn’t know who these characters are – because they haven’t read issues X, Y, and Z of a Kirby comic that was published 30 years ago, and the current author hasn’t bothered to introduce them (or what their status quo was before the plot begins) – then that author has on some level failed.

The shorthand that the series is only comprehensible to readers who have a PhD in “DCU” isn’t completely wrong. Whether it’s who Barry Allen is and why it’s a big deal that he’s back; the fact that characters called New Gods have been around in certain forms, recently died, and why it’s a big deal that they’ve been inhabiting new bodies; what a “Kamandi” or a “Nix Uotan” is… These are all things that in a successful story should be (re)introduced to the audience, instead of just assuming prior knowledge.

And I understand that Grant structured his comic with sharp “jump cuts” between scenes because he intended it be jarring. And that’s a laudable experiment of form. But the actual effect – for me, and for many – is that the individual scenes lack the emotional content they should carry (shock, despair, fright) entirely BECAUSE the jump cuts never give us the chance to connect to the characters as human beings. (I’d be charitable and say that we might be able to sustain our initial emotional connections with these characters if read in a single sitting. But that would require letting the story start with the characters in small moments, and only then having the jump cuts start when the action explodes.)

Understand, I’m not asking for dumb comics. I’m not asking for comics to spoon-feed its audience. But I am suggesting that while the themes and ideas which Grant are playing with are indeed interesting, there are certain requirements of *basic storytelling* that are arguably complete or partial failures.

I think that Grant is a fascinating creator who goes places no one else does. Places no one else even knows exist until he takes us there. But one also gets the sense that the ideas in his head don’t always make it to the page. (Often, that’s partly the fault of the artist. But not always.)

And I think that a second, or third, or fourth read of a text is where you should be getting the SUBtext. Where you should get the METAtext. I think that the first read should always be comprehensible to the vast majority of your audience … and I don’t think it’s going too far to suggest that if it’s not, the author hasn’t fully done his job.

I want to like this comic. I really do. But honestly – if it weren’t for the Final Crisis Annotations page, I’d be as lost as everyone else.