David Price posted his thoughts on Final Crisis on his blog and something caught my eye. He wrote:
This read like Morrison playing in the DC sandbox. Which is cool for a special story (JLA: Earth-2 is one of my favorite Grant Morrison stories), but not an event that’s shaping your universe.
Before this quote, he wrote about the voice of the book and how successful or unsuccessful Morrison was in accurately capturing the voice of his characters. I can understand what he was saying even if I think the only place where that may have been an issue was with Superman and Batman.
Looking at David’s thoughts on events that are shaping universes, I realized that how I’m reading a lot of the mainstream comics are different than probably most people are. While Final Crisis may not fit neatly into the greater DC universe, I really don’t care. I’m seeing it as an event of the Morrison-verse and I’m fitting it into where it is among Morrison’s work, not where it is in relation to Nightwing or Supergirl. In my mind, Final Crisis is an extension of the stories in Seven Soldiers rather than the recent JLA or JSA books.
Similarly, House of M, Civil War, World War Hulk and Secret Invasion aren’t Marvel stories. They’re Avengers stories; more specifically they’re Post-Disassembled stories which are very, very different than traditional Avenger stories. For me, keeping the scope of them smaller than Marvel tries to makes them a bit less expansive and a bit easier to digest.
Maybe it’s to help me justify to myself how and why I read these but I’ve found that by separating the series from the larger picture, I’ve been able to enjoy them a bit more (except for Civil War.) I may be actually one of the few people who think that House of M is Bendis’s strongest straightforward Avengers story that just happens to guest-star the X-Men.
Like David, I’ve read my fair share of universe shaping stories and understand how they should work and why they should be important. But I’ve also got a lot of issues of meaningless crossover stories as well (Atlantis Attacks, anyone?) that amounted to nothing in the end and are now just trivia answers.