In his Shiny review of ‘Dark Avengers’ last week, Mark Clapham alluded to a theory that reading the synopsis of some comics can be as entertaining as reading the comics themselves. Or, rather more pessimistically, that reading some comics is about as entertaining as reading the synopsis of that comic.
With something like ‘Secret Invasion’, Marvel’s big ‘event’ comic of 2008, you have one of the great current comic writers, Brian Bendis, basically taking a back seat to the ‘events’ in the book. The early stages weren’t about dialogue or pacing or any of the other cool stuff that Bendis was doing… ‘Secret Invasion’ boiled down to a simple list of who was a Skrull and who wasn’t. The latter stages boiled down to who won a series of fights. Oh, and it took a year to work through that.
Like Mark, my suspicion is that a lot of these event comics (and their readers) are far more interested in the destination than the journey. Making comics this way, a series boils down into a list of changes to the status of characters – who died, who was the traitor in the team, which teams changed line up, which new characters were introduced, what developments there were in the running story.
There are a lot of things that are a danger to comics, and most are very well-charted – Mark’s come up with a new one, I think, and it’s far more insidious than the steady rise in either the price of comics or the average age of their readers. If the value in a comic is simply a set of outcomes, you only have to read a wiki summary, not the actual comics. And that just saves everyone time and money. Comics companies would kill to know how to get people to read comics online… turns out it’s happening already, and the trick was to cut out the middleman: the comic itself.
I’ve not, for example, read any of the ‘New Krypton’ series, but I know what happened because I’ve read the write ups on Newsarama. I suspect, based on the creators, that I’ve missed out on some very nice art and some perfectly competent, if workmanlike, writing. I dropped into the Johns/Frank run of ‘Superman’ during the Brainiac story and liked it, but not enough to keep buying. I’ve read enough Geoff Johns to work out where it was going (a task helped because his stories tend to culminate in ‘and now… there’s an army of them and at least one of them’s an evil version of Superman!’). In the end, ‘New Krypton’ is a story that’s about the destination rather than the pleasure of the journey, and I can find out all the ‘outcomes’ without spending any money.
I appreciate good comics art and iconic characters as much as the next person, but I’m a reader, first and foremost. I’m far more likely to stay loyal to a comic book writer than an artist or a character (or a ‘universe’). One of those writers is Grant Morrison. Now, it’s easy enough to dismiss the people who describe his comics as ‘incomprehensible’ as common or garden comments-thread-dullards because they don’t even notice when they’re being spoonfed the information they say isn’t there. Perhaps a more constructive way to categorise them is as fans who are obsessed with outcomes. They don’t want to watch the game, they just want to know the final score. Judged as a set of outcomes, ‘Batman RIP’ – say – doesn’t work. Spoilers: Batman’s death was ambiguous and Dr Hurt’s identity was ambiguous. Commence the fanboy whinging. (Morrison’s already worked out that, though. The central villainy of ‘Final Crisis’ is perhaps the most telling and the most cheeky. Darkseid turns the human race into a group of anonymous people incapable of seeing anything but the worst in everything, a process that drags all the most idealistic with it. The whole world has been turned into the comments section of any given fanboy website).
When compared with the two previous Crises, ‘Final Crisis’ has a pretty feeble set of ‘outcomes’, only a couple of things with wider continuity implications. Oh, Mr Terrific and Hawkman probably die in the last issue, but might not. Darkseid died again. Batman died again, but didn’t. The outcomes might be comparatively small beer on the universal scale, but the iconic stuff is better than ever. The Green Lantern Corps taking out a vampire Superman with a Kryptonite stake? The final stronghold of the heroes being a mashed together JLA Watchtower, Titans Tower, Fortress of Solitude and (I think) Batcave? Superman literally drawing the light from his own body to defeat the darkness? The Flashes outrunning death? A once in a lifetime (until Geoff Johns does it again next year) meeting of all the Supermans? That’s just on five pages of the final issue. But it’s also undercut. Morrison’s always been playful, and here he has a big splash page of Superman and his imitators (sorry, ‘multiversal analogues’) like Captain Marvel, Apollo and Supreme – but then doesn’t just slip Captain Carrot in there, he foregrounds him. Just about any other writer who asked us to see the Martian Manhunter or Orion’s deaths as significant while resurrecting Barry Allen’s Flash on a facing page would be doing it because they were a bit thick, Morrison’s doing it for reasons that can best be described as ‘poetic’.
‘Final Crisis’, like Russell T Davies’ ‘Doctor Who’, takes a lot of the ‘business’ of the story for granted and lets us imagine it rather than feeling the need to show it. Unlike ‘Secret Invasion’, the great big battle scenes with characters from all over the DCU teaming up for the first time aren’t explicated over a whole issue – we see a splash page, perhaps a couple of insert panels, then someone tells us what happened. While ‘Final Crisis’ takes this to extremes, all the information you need is there if you know where to look. It certainly demands a re-read, and then a bit of a think, but… well, that’s good, isn’t it?
Morrison’s favourite comic book conceit – that time itself in the comics universe works like comics panels, with each moment a discrete iconic tableau mounted in meta-time (Superman actually declared ‘I’m in a self-assembling hyperstory’ at one point) – is taken to its logical, narrative and poetic extremes. ‘Final Crisis’ is more like the Elgin marbles than it is like a traditional comic book. The battles are more like great oil paintings of a battle than a war movie.
‘Final Crisis’ is an ironic commentary on event comics, but it’s so much more than that – it ends with an affirmation of light over dark, of heroism over cynicism. As the comic itself tells us, it’s a cave painting – a depiction of battle that uses sympathetic magic to instill heroic values and power in those who see them. And it’s also a time capsule from the future of some parallel universe (like, you know, the one sent off in the story itself). ‘Final Crisis’ is great. In an era of movies based on comics from decades ago and comics desperate to be the big movie of next year, Morrison’s just shown us what the summer blockbusters from the 2040s are going to look like. Not all the fanboys like it now, but their grandkids are going to love it.
