The Secret of the Wednesday’s Haul

Final Crisis puts all of Grant Morrison’s strengths and weaknesses out there, fully on display and ready to be picked apart.  After three issues, there’s a lethargy in Final Crisis as it strings together a number of scenes and storylines with some rather tenuous connections.  And there are a lot of storylines; Turpin’s descent into evil and the Question’s investigations into what’s going on, the New God’s death and Hal Jordan’s involvement in them, Barry Allen and Libra’s return and the systematic dismisal of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman.  There’s the overarching threat of Darkseid (or Dark Side or whatever he’s being called now) that provides a link in all of the stories but none of the storylines have been given enough space to fully develop into their own stories.  Final Crisis #3 is made up of a number of fascinating scenes but they fail to connect as a whole story so far.

Final Crisis is reading like Morrison’s Seven Soldiers in miniature.  In his Seven Soldiers event, Morrison told a large epic story in small chunks, giving each character their own miniseries and story that never really crossed over with any other.  His Frankenstein never met his Mister Miracle but the approached the same story from multiple angles.  I wonder if that’s what he’s trying to do here, using more recognizable characters.  He’s working his story around different events, locations and characters.  Once again, the threat is grand and the same touching on many characters in their own personal and private settings. 

Most of Grant Morrison’s superhero work has been about twisting the concepts and conceits to produce something new or different.  The two best examples of this are his JLA and his New X-Men runs, where he took old and overworked concepts and played with them.  In both of those books, he took wornout concepts and shook them up, producing works that felt revolutionary while strongly grounded in the past.  In Final Crisis #3, we see Morrison playing around with the idea of huge crossover events as he gives us scenes we expect to see (heroes teaming up, the large gathering of heroes and heroes going under dramatic changes)

But being a Grant Morrison book, things aren’t going to go like you’d maybe expect them to.  The heroes gather under the leadership of Alan Scott but before they can do anything they’ve already lost the battle.  We don’t even see them losing.  We see the gathering as the JSA’s Green Lantern brings an army of superheroes together but we never even see them charging into battle.  We see them together and then we see one of them lose.  When the one loss occurs, that’s when evil wins the day.

This roundabout way of storytelling worked when Morrison had the larger canvas of Seven Soldiers but here in the middle of a seven issue miniseries, it feels rushed and underdeveloped.  Characters are barely developed or used.  They’re introduced to move the larger plot along and then abandoned before much can really be done with them.  Last issue’s return of Barry Allen is left undeveloped here, only providing another cliffhanger ending and setting up the next issue when maybe we’ll find out a purpose to Barry’s story.  The same goes for Hal Jordan’s arrest by the Alpha Lanterns for the murder of Orion.  It’s touched on here but little actually happens that moves that story in any significant way.

By trying to tie together all of these stories, Morrison leaves little time to focus on the characters and why they’re important to this story.  This is an epic story without a personal touch so far.  It’s like a rollercoaster that’s been stripped of the danger of flying off of the tracks; it’s good but lacks any emotional punch.  The characters are given no time to react or to absorb these grand events and neither are we. 

Final Crisis #3
“Know Evil”
Written by: Grant Morrison
Drawn by: JG Jones
Colored by: Alex Sinclair
Lettered by: Rob Leigh