Lower Decks

As someone who has spent a great deal of the past four years reading comic books, and writing about them, 2009 is turning into a brand new day. Sorry, comic book reference. Suffice it to say, my comics experience is changing once again, and I cannot think of a better way for it to happen than to have Grant Morrison there with his cosmic concept of ‘Final Crisis.’

Before I started this column last September, I wrote a weekly comics column at Paperback Reader called ‘The Quarter Bin’ (and in its final months, simply ‘Weekly,’ which in addition to being incredibly accurate was also an homage to what had still at that point been the recent pleasure of reading ‘52’ in so many increments) that chronicled every comic I read from roughly the summer of 2006 to last summer. It seemed like a natural extension of a habit I’d reacquired in 2005, after an original fan period of 1993 to 1999, which only really covered the period in which I had been able to indulge a long-term obsession, which is a funny word to use now, because what this column is really trying to say is, I think I’m coming to another break point, and it’s not really a matter of the economy or another strange twist of comic shop availability, but rather, and DC has done such an excellent job of punctuating this, things have just…changed.

I’m not talking change like Batman going away again and people fighting over the iconic cowl. The company found this a convenient enough time to cancel a bunch long-running titles, ‘Robin’ and ‘Nightwing,’ which I’ve been following since ’93 and ’96, respectively, at the same time as a pruning of other books I’ve been reading, creator turnovers, and yes, the conclusion of ‘Final Crisis.’ If you remember my QB 50 column from the end of last year (oh, and hey, now you know what ‘QB’ stands for), there’s been a lot a change already. I can’t rule out the possibility of a QB 50 for 2009, but it’ll certainly look different (even ‘The Twelve’ from over at Marvel has undergone such an erratic scheduling hiccup recently that I haven’t read a new issue since last fall, and can’t be guaranteed more than a few of the four issues that remain, if indeed any). I’m talking change like I moved from one end of the country to the other (like I did at the end of 2007, by the way) and no longer have quite the same access to old friends like I used to. Nothing personal, nothing has really changed between us. It’s just, well, not the same.

That’s exactly the point Morrison tries to make in ‘Final Crisis.’ I’ve read enough Internet reactions to know that it was probably missed by a lot of its readers. Fact is (Flash Fact), Grant Morrison is not your typical comic book writer. He’s not even your typical writer, period. If there’s one thing you can absolutely be sure of when you’re reading him, it’s that he knew what he was thinking when he was writing. He’s the writer who puts thought into overdrive, his own and hopefully his reader’s, but he doesn’t pose his stories in such a way that leads the reader to thinking, or has overtly reached a point already. No, he’s simply assumed that a story doesn’t have to be simple, doesn’t have to have been written a thousand times, or maybe it’s a story that has. He’s a writer who assumes that everything that can be done to make something fresh should be done. Let’s just say the dude ain’t lazy.

When it came to calling this particular story “Final Crisis,” he was making the biggest assumption of them all. The obvious one was, well hey howdy, no one’s ever going to write another Crisis again. That’s the thing I want to write about in this column, the main point I want to make. What exactly makes ‘Final Crisis’ the “Final Crisis.”

When ‘Crisis on Infinite Earths’ was originally conceived, it was meant to make sense of the multiple worlds of superheroes in DC, the acquired properties and different ages that had become jumbled up, and for a time, it seemed to have done its job. Then ‘Infinite Crisis’ came around and reopened the can of worms, reintroducing DC to the multiverse, a concise reality of 52 identical (or nearly so) Earths.

All Grant meant to say with ‘Final Crisis’ is that history isn’t really all that complicated. All the mumbo jumbo really isn’t so tough to swallow. In the final issue, 52 Supermen (or as many as were finally assembled) simply come together, a unification rather than affliction of differences for a common purpose. Heck, Grant dares the reader to believe that Lex Luthor with hardly much explanation other than the fact that it seems necessary can work side-by-side with Superman (which is to say, “our” Superman). Sure, as I memorably recall, such an occurrence has happened at least once before (another reason why ‘Final Night’ is a favorite of mine, because it did go to some length to explore all the reasons why it happened), but that’s not really the point. Defeating Darkseid one more time isn’t really the point. Whether Bruce Wayne’s Batman is gone forever or will some day return isn’t really the point.

Superheroes, for all the cinematic respect they get these days, aren’t really taken all that seriously. Yet that’s exactly what Grant does in ‘Final Crisis,’ not because it’s a Crisis, a crisis, Final or final, but because in this reality that Grant is writing in, they’re real, and they mean something, and their actions mean something, not just to serve the purpose of a story, but they mean something to each other, as superhero to superhero, or superhero to supervillain (it shouldn’t be forgotten that in the first issue of the series, Martian Manhunter is sacrificed to make such a point, not just to be killed off for sensation’s sake), or even superhero to whatever kind of character happens along the way (the Monitors, though they’ve rarely meant anything substantial in DC other than as characters in a Crisis, are one good example of how that works in the story).

This isn’t ‘Watchmen.’ The world Grant writes about is pretty sure of itself, even in such crisis. It doesn’t need reassurance or to be torn apart (though it certainly is) or backstories to be explored (perhaps because it’s a “Final Crisis” Grant may be permitted to indulge in the assumption that most of these characters are known, though he certainly threads a lot of individual narratives of minor characters along the way) to build its own myth. ‘Final Crisis’ is a “Final Crisis” because it tells of a conclusion to an age where superheroes, and their world, don’t fully understand the nature of their reality, that it is, finally, one of many. It is a “Final Crisis” because it destroys the myth of the finite nature of possibilities. If its reader doesn’t agree with Grant, that’s okay, because plenty of writers don’t either. Plenty of writers write exactly what’s been written before, in almost the exact way those stories were written. All Grant Morrison and ‘Final Crisis’ are here to suggest is that it doesn’t always have to be that way.

I have yet to sit down and read ‘Final Crisis’ from the first issue to the last, straight through. I don’t know how well the whole story really works together, only how the experience has worked out and what the last issue left me with. But I suspect it holds up, and will continue to for some time. I suspect that it becomes a classic.

All I ever ask from comics is that they leave me with some favorable impression, and sometimes, that’s gotten away from me. I don’t regret the time I’ve put into them, but I do sometimes wish I could just see them as something special, something meaningful, and not just something that I do on a regular basis. When something like ‘Final Crisis’ comes around, I don’t mind using it as a reminder, no matter the circumstances, that the best of them are timeless. Maybe they were originally meant to be something a little more disposable. But that’s not what they’ve become. Now, they’re a window into possibilities.