Final Crisis Week Day 3 – Tie-Ins
Before I go on to write a bit more about Final Crisis itself (though after pillock’s perfect review - written without having read a single panel of the comic – I doubt any more on the subject need be said ) I thought I’d talk a little about the weird way in which DC have used the Final Crisis branding.
DC really need to get their marketing of these ‘big events’ sorted out. It’s already been noted all over the internet that they slapped the phrase ‘Batman RIP’ on random Bat-comics, with little thought as to what, if any, connection they had with Morrison’s story (usually less than none at all), which understandably led to people being annoyed at DC for mis-selling bad fill-in issues of Nightwing, but which for some reason also led them to be angry at Grant Morrison, for reasons that I cannot fathom.
However, DC didn’t learn from this (partly because the two events were so close together), and I’m sure part of the dislike of Final Crisis among those who think it should be ‘an event comic’ comes from the bizarre way in which they’ve dealt with the series.
When the tie-ins were first announced, I thought it might even almost be like 52 all over again – Johns and Rucka writing bits of a much bigger, interconnected story. The impression was certainly given by DC marketing (though, commendably, not by Morrison himself) that the various miniseries and specials were part of the story.
Rucka’s tie-ins actually played fair with this. They might not have been especially good comics, but they fitted in relatively well with the story Morrison was telling – both Resist and Revelations (that title *still* annoys me) told relatively self-contained stories set in Rucka’s own little corner of the DCU, but ones that built on characters and events from the main series. The problem comes with the other tie-ins.
I believe Brad Meltzer’s Requiem thing was drivel, but that’s what you’d expect from Meltzer. You’d expect a *little* better from Geoff Johns, who’s actually been growing as a comic writer. But Johns’ Final Crisis stories have, as far as I can tell, nothing to do with the series at all. Rogues Revenge was a three-part Flash villains miniseries which didn’t have any connection with the main narrative, and seemed to be a project Johns had come up with himself that had been slapped with the Final Crisis label at the last minute, and was also not very good . Rage Of The Red Lanterns didn’t have even the tenuous connections that Rogues Revenge had, being merely a prelude to this year’s big crossover, and was appalingly bad.
The only one of Johns’ tie-ins to be any good, Legion Of Three Worlds, also seemed to have the most to do with the actual storyline, featuring as it does multiversal hijinks and providing an explanation as to where Superman was for issues four and five. It also seemed clearly positioned to be the ‘traditional’ crossover for those who don’t like experimental or different storytelling – you just want thousands of superheroes drawn by George Perez? Okay, here you go…
So of course, the one tie-in of Johns’ that actually tied in was the one that was hit by scheduling problems so badly that only two issues have come out even though the main series has finished…
None of this would normally have been a problem, except that there were three other tie-in issues, those written by Grant Morrison, and at least two of those (the Superman Beyond ones) were *absolutely* necessary to understand the story, and the other one (Submit) provided some useful background. And these started coming out *after* many readers had already decided ‘the tie-ins are rubbish and nothing to do with the main story’.
Now, you or I, being discerning readers, would have picked those up *anyway*, because they were written by the writer of the main series, so they would be more likely to be relevant. And also because they were written by Grant Morrison and (in two cases) drawn by Doug Mahnke, and so therefore likely to be good. And also also because 3D Superman. I’m assuming here that if you’re reading this you pay some attention to the creative teams of the comics (if any) you read, and that they factor into your purchasing decisions.
The problem is that the two big comic companies don’t like discerning readers. They particularly don’t like readers who base their purchasing decisions on creative teams rather than on branding. So for sixty-plus years they’ve been training readers to pay attention to the brand names, not the writers or artists, and a large portion of the customer base now thinks in that way – it doesn’t matter who’s writing or drawing X-Men, you buy it because it’s X-Men. This is not a bad thing – those people get some enjoyment from their comics, and they’re still buying what they like – they just like ‘X-Men’ more than they like ‘Chris Claremont’ (or whoever’s writing X-Men these days).
But that kind of brand loyalty relies on consistency – and normally that’s what you get. If you buy a Superman comic, it might be a good or a bad one, but it’ll be recognisably a Superman comic, of the kind that people who like Superman comics would recognise as such. If you break that consistency – if you have a brand that is plastered over multiple unrelated titles – then those who continue reading will take an all-or-nothing approach and drop *all* the tie-ins. And then wonder why they don’t understand the last issue.
This is not a failure of the comics as comics (and I’m sure even Rogues Revenge and Rage Of The Red Lanterns appealed to fans of Johns’ Flash and Green Lantern work, which I am not), and is certainly not the fault of any of the creators involved. The blame for that lies squarely with DC editorial (as does the blame for the whole Countdown fiasco which put people off FC before it started).
Tomorrow, I’ll talk more about the actual comics…
Hey now Riddler, Penguin, Joker, Better run and hide!
Okay, so the title has absolutely nothing to do with the content, but in these Final Crisis/Batman RIP posts I’ve been using consecutive lines from Batman by Jan & Dean as titles, and I refuse to let Grant Morrison not putting in a scene of Batvillains running away stop me.
Anyway, Final Crisis #6, publisher DC Comics, writer Grant Morrison, artists Hugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble & Grubb…
Firstly, it is, of course, great. I can understand why Jog doesn’t like it, but to me it’s just about as good as superhero comics get, and Kevin Church has accurately summed up most of the complaints people have had about it on message boards.
There are a couple of complaints that *do* have more substance, of course. First is the art – up to now the various people helping Jones with this have done what I consider a relatively good job of blending with his work. Not perfect, but good. But here, for the first time we have some outright sloppiness – which looks like the fault of the inker, but is really the fault of the unrealistic schedule that these comics were originally put on.
A potentially bigger problem is the colouring on Shilo Norman, which some people are seeing as him being coloured ‘white’ (actually his skin tone looks more like the Japanese heroes in the same panel than anything else). My friend Chris Hilker, in an email to which I’ve not got round to replying (so I hope he’s reading this) suggested that the ‘error’ was actually a sign of Shilo taking on a Godly aspect, being something like a halo or spotlight. I’m not 100% convinced that was the *intention*, but it fits with the story, and I like it, so I’m accepting that.
On the other hand, for every art problem, there’s a simply phenomenal page like Talky Tawny (am I the only one who wants a Morrison-written Talky Tawny series?) saying “Do your worst, gentlemen”. That page is just gorgeous, and makes me wish there’d been the opportunity to put this out on a realistic schedule. All the art teams on this, in fact, do great work when they can – just look at the scene with Batman and Darkseid, or the double-page spread just before Superman’s return.
Even at its worst, though, the art does a competent job of telling the story, which is what I’m buying this for, and which is just getting better. All those people who’ve criticised this for being ‘a bit like Rock Of Ages‘ are comprehensively missing the point. All Morrison’s DCU work in the last couple of years (since the end of Seven Soldiers) has been about making the ‘ultimate’ versions of characters and stories. Not in the Marvel sense, but… actually, in some ways it is like the Marvel sense of the word.
What Morrison did with All-Star Superman (and slightly less successfully with his Batman run, though that’s not completed yet thankfully – as he’s confirmed in recent interviews – and an incomplete Morrison work is never an easy thing to judge) is essentially to throw in every single thing anyone ever loved about the character and make the whole thing make sense. If you gave All-Star Superman to anyone who’d read a Superman comic, ever, they would recognise it. I bet you could convince a *lot* of non-fans that they’d read it when they were a kid. It is, in many ways, the quintessential Superman comic.
And in the same way, Final Crisis is the quintessential superhero crossover – even as, just like with All-Star Superman, Morrison uses it to do other things as well. So all the plot elements here – multiverses collapsing, a war between gods, red skies, heroes turned bad and villains saving the day, a hero who can never use their powers ever again, dramatic deaths and returns from the dead, races with death himself, Superman cradling a dead body in his arms (evoking both the cover of Crisis On Infinite Earths 7 and Batman Dies At Dawn, two stories which have hugely influenced the last few months’ worth of stories), all these are things we have seen time and again in superhero comics over the years.
Morrison is neither so stupid nor so modest as to not know that his own big superhero epics of the past need to be thrown into the mix too, and so they are, but the Rock Of Ages parallels are just another of the many, many echoes here.
But it’s the execution of the thing that’s so impressive. Darkseid (and I *can’t* be the only one who’s noticed how much this manifestation of the Dark God of Anti-Life looks like John McCain, can I?) fixing all the continuity fuckups caused by the execrable Countdown (and the Death Of The New Gods series) in one sentence, and doing it in a way that it feels like an organic part of the story and also thematically fits with Morrison’s other work (AND is maybe another shout-out to the Mindless Ones, and the ‘prismatic age’ theory). The way that the whole thing’s a love story, with almost every character in this issue having their own romantic subplot, from the mature married love of Hourman and Liberty Belle to the soap opera of the Super Young Team to the BDSM-tinged relationship of Black Canary and Green Arrow. Pretty much everyone in the story is motivated by getting back to someone they love, which makes sense if, as seems likely, the whole story is a cosmic ‘resonance’ from Nix Uotan being cast out of the world of the monitors.
For someone who’s regarded as a Big Idea man, and who’s pouring every Big Idea he’s ever had into this story – ideas about the superhero genre, the way you can tell stories in comics, the nature of reality, and more – what’s impressive is how well delineated every character is. No character gets more than a handful of panels and a couple of lines of dialogue, but you still get an understanding of who Black Canary, Talky Tawny, Batman, Lex Luthor, Supergirl and so on are – understandings that you often couldn’t get from their comics.
Final Crisis isn’t a perfect comic – far from it. It fails at quite a lot of what it’s trying to do, as at least half of Morrison’s work does. But it fails in interesting ways, and what it’s trying for is also interesting. Even at its worst, its faults are trying too hard, overestimating its audience, and having too much imagination, which are faults I can’t bring myself to judge too harshly. And at its best this is a comic that actually makes a big cosmic Everything Will Change Forever crossover something worth reading for the first time since… well, ever.
He’s Known As Batman, With Robin The Boy Wonder By His Side…
I’m at a disadvantage with this post, because even though I am in the US at the moment, my comic shop isn’t. So everything I am writing right now could be completely contradicted by today’s issue of Batman, and I won’t know for a week or so…
One aspect of Batman’s life that has been left out of Morrison’s “Everything really happened” take on Batman is Jason Todd. Unless I’m forgetting a brief appearance in one of the Resurrection Of Ra’s Al-Ghul crossovers, there has been no mention of Jason Todd in Morrison’s run on the title at all.
Except… there sort of has…
You see, there are three ‘Jason Todds’ in Batman, and have been for a few years now.
One is the character that is currently running around with no narrative purpose, whose very existence in one panel of a comic requires, out of necessity, the whole comic to be perverted into a rationalisation of the most pointless returns from the dead in comic history, and who has no fixed characterisation. This character is an utterly pointless waste of ink, and an example of the artistic bankruptcy of a superhero comics medium that is obsessed with ‘things being like they were when I was 12, but more badass’.
The second is the character that existed from 1988 to 2005, and is still what most comics fans think of first when they think ‘Jason Todd’. The martyr. Good soldier. He Died So That Others Might Live. Young boy at the height of his powers, struck down by the Joker. An illustration of what happens when Batman Goes Too Far and Lets Others Get Hurt. A character that was more interesting in death than he is now in life, Jasonthegoodsoldier was still, unfortunately, just a symbol for everything that was wrong with Batman comics from the moment Dark Knight issue 1 came out…
But there used to be another Jason Todd. One that we in the Silent 73 remember…
This Jason Todd was, as bobsy put it, “a Robin for the burgeoning Dark Age – troubled, angry, rebellious and a natural brawler”. While his intentions were usually good, he was brattish, spoiled, a criminal before becoming Robin (at least in the post-Crisis retconned origin of the character). He would even kill when he thought it necessary for the greater good.
In short, wasn’t he just a slightly more mature Damien?
While fans have generally disliked the character of Damien, the crucial issue 666 (the most important issue so far of Morrison’s run on Batman, which I’m still praying will continue post-Battle For The Cowl, as Rich Johnston suggests it will) shows the same character traits, but in a far more disciplined, resourceful adult Damien:
I spent my first three years as Batman making the job easy for myself. Turning the city itself into a weapon. The victory is in the preparation…I knew I’d never be as good as my dad or Dick Grayson, but I promised I wouldn’t leave Gotham without a Batman. So I specialised in cheating.
Morrison essentially has taken the character of Jason Todd out of the 80s comics and brought him back under a pseudonym. Making him Batman’s biological son is just icing on the cake. Remember, Jason Todd (pre-Crisis) was the son (adoptive, but also, it was hinted, biological), of Nocturna, a villain who had a love-hate relationship with both Batman and Bruce Wayne. Just like Damian with Talia…
Morrison has, intentionally or otherwise, spotted that Batman really needs a Jason Todd figure. Tim Drake is an adequate Robin, but he’d make a lousy Batman – Batman needs an heir as conflicted as himself who will ‘carry on the fight’ when Batman is gone, and he needs a sidekick who will argue with him to provide some kind of narrative tension.
So he’s done the ultimate Silent 73 trick – he’s made it so Jason never died. He’s just called Damien, but otherwise he’s the same character, with the same narrative purpose. So bringing in Jason thedeadmartyr goodsoldiergoodsoldier or the new, pointless version would just confuse matters. He’s got a character who serves the same narrative purpose for which the original was created, and who could be a fascinating source of future Batman stories were it not for the fact that (as with so many of Morrison’s other ideas) no-one else seems to get the point of the character.
Tomorrow – more on this whole FinalRIPsis storyplex, if I can get to the computer.
He’s Known As Bruce Wayne By Day, Wealthy Socialite…
So, I’ve been promising to write about Grant Morrison’s Batman run for quite a while, and the things I have to say have just been getting longer and longer. And then the first of the Last Rites issues comes out and it becomes apparent that the whole story has just been leading to Batman’s part in Final Crisis and everything becomes even longer. So consider this the first of a series of posts that may well continue at least until Final Crisis has finished, looking both at the Bat-books post Infinite Crisis and at Final Crisis – as well as looking at some other comics that have relevance to these.
Before we start, I just want to echo amypoodle’s post on Final Crisis. I think these comics are *great*, some of the best superhero comics ever written, and if you don’t agree you are, objectively, wrong. I can prove it. I have graphs.
I do think, though, that Morrison’s Batman has been less successful than Final Crisis – partly because of the artists (who, with the exception of the always-wonderful J.H. Williams III, have ranged from the competent to the incompetent, never touching ‘good’), and partly because, as my friend Tilt put it a while back “It’s like if the Beatles made Sgt Pepper, but only after ten years of everyone making Their Satanic Majesties Request“. The Batman-facing-the-worst-foe-ever-and-getting-broken-by-it storyline is one we’ve seen so many times before that even though Morrison’s doing it better than anyone else, the story still sagged a little in the middle just because of its similarity to other stories (roughly the couple of issues before the appearance of Bat-Mite, when everything went all Morrison). Having said that, it’s still the best run on Batman I’ve ever read, by a very long way.
I want to look at every aspect of these stories, and also as far as possible at what the creative process was and to what extent these works have been shaped by editorial diktat rather than the ideas of the writer. I think that any honest assessment of these comics has to take those factors into account, bearing in mind the widespread rumours of disagreement between Morrison and the editorial teams he has been working with, and the extraordinarily non-committal statements those editors have made (along with Morrison’s virtual absence from any publicity for his recent work – odd, given that he is one of the most publicly visible comic creators).
One of the standard phrases that comes into pretty much every internet critique of Morrison’s run on Batman is ‘except for the editorially-mandated Resurrection of Ra’s Al-Ghul crossover’. I must have read that phrase at least twenty times, and yet nobody writing it has explained why Resurrection should be left out of consideration when considering Morrison’s run. I think that the phrase is actually code for “You got other writers to mix with the sacred Morrison! Blasphemy!” – even when the people writing this then go on to damn the rest of Morrison’s run with a variety of types of faint praise.
Now, if you’re going to think of writers to collaborate with Morrison, I would suggest that Dini, Nicieza and Milligan are at least as reasonable a set of choices as Waid, Johns and Rucka – Milligan is a genuinely great comic writer for whom Morrison has expressed admiration in the past, and Dini and Nicieza are both very competent journeymen (much as it pains me to say that about Dini, who I still hold responsible for the execrable Countdown), so I don’t think that this, on its own, removes Resurrection from consideration. But is it ‘editorially mandated’? Was it imposed on Morrison from above?
Now, the main way to tell is just to see if it fits into the larger picture of his run – which I will do when I get to it – but for now I shall stipulate that I can make a good case that it fits with both the larger narrative and themes of Morrison’s run. What does an ‘editorially mandated’ crossover involving Morrison and Dini usually look like?
Well, as we’ve seen recently, what it actually involves is Morrison and Dini writing totally different, mutually incompatible stories, and Dini throwing in one or two lines referencing something that almost-but-not-quite happens in Morrison’s story, and then everyone complaining vociferously about this afterwards. That is clearly not what Resurrection looks like. Some people have complained about aspects of the storytelling, but the fact is, it reads as one story with a beginning, a middle and an end.
It also follows from Morrison’s work in a way that it doesn’t from the others – Dini obviously hated doing the story, having Ra’s effectively destroyed again in the very next issue after the crossover finished. Nicieza and Milligan were brought in just for this story. So if the story came from any of the writers, as opposed to editorial mandate, it must have come from Morrison.
This also fits in with what was said about the storyline in advance of its publication (more than a year ago now – scary how time passes so quickly) – that the original idea of Ra’s coming back was suggested by DiDio to Morrison (presumably to tie in with the character’s increased popularity post-Batman Begins), that Morrison liked the idea and plotted the story, and that only later was it decided to make it a crossover between all the Bat-books.
So to my mind, while that may count as an ‘editorially mandated crossover’ in the sense that it was the editorial team that decided for the story to *be* a crossover rather than a story taking place in only Morrison’s title, it certainly doesn’t seem to me like the storyline, or the effects on the rest of Morrison’s run, were in any way imposed on him. Other things later on may have been (and we’ll know more about that in the inevitable angry interview about how Morrison’s work was fucked around with by editorial after it’s all over – Morrison’s work is *always* fucked around with by editorial in one way or another, and he’s always angry about it) but to my mind, Resurrection is part of Morrison’s Bat-run, and will be discussed as such.
Tomorrow – the Joker.
I’ll be posting about music tonight, but in the meantime, you should go and read pillock on scale…
I Don’t Know Who He Is Behind That Mask, But We Need Him, And We Need Him Now…
I *was* going to write today’s comics post on Dave Sim and Gerhard’s graphic novel Guys, but I’ve been frankly amazed by the interest the general public appears to be showing Batman’s death in the Batman: RIP storyline. I was planning on writing some stuff about that story anyway, but given the fun I’ve had with my week-long Doctor Who post series (the final post of which will be some time around midnight tonight) I thought I’d start today on another week-long series, this time about Batman RIP and Grant Morrison’s Batman work in general.
(This one will have the advantage that I can reread comics on the ‘bus to and from work, rather than rewatch DVDs for two hours every night, thus essentially not seeing my wife for a week).
However, the readership of this blog appears to fall into four categories – comics fans, especially fans of the work of Grant Morrison, Liberal Democrats (both capitalised and otherwise), fans of Doctor Who and fans of melodic, 60s-style pop music (the latter don’t comment as much as the other three groups, but they’re there). Actually, most readers fall into at least two of those groups, but I can’t think of anyone reading this who falls into all four categories.
So for those who *don’t* fall into the comic-reader category, or who do but haven’t been keeping up with Batman, a brief explanation as to what’s been going on, whether Batman is ‘dead’, and what’s happening next. I’ll assume you know what a comic is, what a Batman is and so on, but very little else.
If you weren’t already aware, superhero comics – and periodical comics generally – aren’t very popular any more. The very *best* selling titles tend to sell, at most, 100,000 copies or so a month, and even very well-known characters like Batman and Superman sell considerably less than that. Those comics which make a significant amount of money, selling to anyone other than the hardcore obsessive fans, are generally those which sell in ‘trade paperbacks’ – collections containing several issues, usually telling a single story, which are often sold in normal bookshops rather than specialist comics shops.
The problem, though, is that the things that appeal to the 100,000 or so obsessives are not the things that appeal to the general reading public – reading a superhero comic normally requires a great deal of knowledge about previous issues, and often the interest in a particular issue is not in what happens in that story itself, but in how it relates to other issues. The storytelling in superhero comics bears a closer relation to soap opera than to anything else, and unsurprisingly this means that the market for collections of, say, Aquaman comics in trade paperback form is about the same as the market for DVDs of a week or two’s worth of Coronation Street or EastEnders. So just like TV shows, what sells well in serial form is not the same as what sells well in permanent form, and what is critically successful differs from both.
Now, roughly two years ago, DC Comics made one of its increasingly rare clever editorial decisions, and put a writer called Grant Morrison on the main Batman comic (there are several comics every month featuring Batman, as he is a popular character). Grant Morrison is very unusual in that he is relatively popular among superhero comics fans (he is not as popular as some writers, because he’s regarded as ‘weird’ and ‘incomprehensible’ by a section of the readership who are accustomed to having stories spoon-fed to them rather than having to actually pay attention and read between the lines a little), he is also popular among the more sophisticated (as a rule, all exceptions duly noted) readers who buy the collections, he is *also* relatively popular among critics (as he is an actual good writer), and his comics – even his superhero ones – sell very well in collected form for a very long time, while also being popular as serials (his Batman ‘original graphic novel’ (a comic that has only been published in book form rather than as individual issues) Arkham Asylum has remained a consistent best-selling comic for twenty years, selling in the millions over its print history).
Grant Morrison is particularly known as a writer who comes up with very long, intricate plans for his comics, so that even when the individual stories seem like they stand up well on their own, there is often an issue, usually close to the end of his time on a comic, which suddenly throws everything into a new and more interesting light.
There is also a tradition in superhero comics of a superhero apparently ‘dying’, only to come back to life, usually within a year or so. In many cases the ‘death’ is a rather perfunctory story, intended merely to set the scene for the longer story afterwards dealing with the ramifications of the death – see for example the ‘deaths’ of Superman or Captain America.
Grant Morrison has built up to the death of Batman for the best part of two years, but this death issue is still rather in that mode – Morrison has talked about how he has plans for at least another couple of years’ worth of Batman stories to tell, which would presumably include the tale of Batman coming back and so forth. Before that, though, there is a planned break – Morrison is doing two more issues following up the death story, then Denny O’Neill (a writer who wrote many popular Batman stories in the 1970s and edited the title in the 1990s – he created the character of Ra’s Al-Ghul who was the villain in the film Batman Begins, among other things) is doing two issues. Then Neil Gaiman (an extremely popular comic writer who also has written a string of best-selling novels and the film Beowulf) is going to write two more. There will then be a special storyline called “The Battle For The Cowl”, about people trying to take over the job of Batman, and after that we don’t know what will happen.
It was originally planned that Grant Morrison would return after that storyline, but recently there have been rumours that he has fallen out with various people in the DC Comics editorial department over changes to his stories (and other writers are getting annoyed that his stories affect the ones they want to write), so it may well be that the next two issues are the last ones he will do with the character of Batman. If so, that would be a shame, as he has clearly not yet wrapped up his various stories in the way he normally likes to.
One way or another, Batman will be back – next year is his 70th anniversary year, and if Grant Morrison doesn’t come back to the title to finish off his story, someone else will bring him back. Next year, for example, DC Comics have a big storyline involving all their characters in which the villains are Black Lanterns – zombie superheroes given special powers – which will involve a lot of ‘recently dead’ characters. If Batman isn’t back before then, that will almost certainly be used as the excuse to bring him back.
In the meantime, I’m going to enjoy the next few issues, and keep my fingers crossed for Morrison’s return. And now that I’ve explained that, I can start tomorrow with some discussion of the whole huge story Morrison’s been telling…
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