Ungoliantschilde

I just noticed, you’ve never written anything big on Final Crisis. For the 10th anniversary, why is it great?

Final Crisis is anything but perfect, by the author’s own admission. It doesn’t quite live up to its ambitions of showing a universe in disarray via narrative decoherence (though I question whether that was him pulling back, or the editors not trusting him and unwittingly making it worse), Batman using a gun makes sense in the larger context of Morrison’s work with the character - Batman turning evil’s tool against itself, as he always does, on the most profound scale against the very embodiment of it as the culmination of his mission - but without that surrounding understanding it feels like a cheap treatment of what should be an incredibly taboo moment for him, and there’re some moments that time has underlined as being in poor taste such as an offhanded comment regarding Supergirl. Not to mention the general failure of everyone around Morrison on just about every level in building up to his comic, complimenting it, and generally making sure everything else surrounding it was playing nicely with it, plus the art troubles (though my vague understanding is that J.G. Jones was going through personal issues that precluded this, which is of course entirely valid). That being said, Final Crisis is the best event comic ever, struck down by a readership understandably expecting a traditional summer crossover and an uncomprehending upper brass (DiDio was making jokes about it sucking the week after it wrapped at conventions; even years later DC itself seems barely comprehending of it, an advertisement for it as a ‘must-read’ grasping to find a descriptor beyond ‘weird’ and finally settling hilariously on “more action than a Jason Statham flick”), and I can’t imagine we’ll ever be so lucky as to see its like again, even as elements within DC seem to be finally wising up to what it has to offer.

What Final Crisis comes down to in what differentiates it from its brethren is this: it doesn’t just want to be a major DC Comics story, it wants to be THE DC Comics story…and just as importantly, it’s Grant Morrison’s idea of what the story of DC Comics is. Even beyond how it hotlinks to everything Morrison’s done for DC before and after, it’s all the stuff - the street level boogleg heroes and villains, cosmic forces, space adventure, detective work, spy-fi, the super-teams of many nations, secret headquarters and ancient forces unleashed and legacy heroes and alternate dimensions all crashing into each other, circling the drain as the god of all that’s wrong tries to drag the entire tapestry into the grave with him. It has to be Darkseid at the front, much as he’d been downgraded: the New Gods are the DCU’s own coherent mythology alongside the Monitors, and he’s the one villain who has reason and ability to fight everyone who still works as a character in his own right. Whether through his anti-life or Mandrakk’s death, they’re the endpoint of the possibility of the life and hope and wonder and potential that Morrison sees superheroes as standing for: Darkseid is the threat inside us all here, “that itch in the back of your skull that wants you to destroy everything, starting with yourself, while Mandraak is the threat without, the predator, the shameless scavenging parasite, the death-impulse, the black hole that blooms where hope dies. And at the tail end of the Bush years (an atmosphere Morrison noted played a tremendous role in his conception of the series) their time was ripe to have the world simply collapse into them.

But even at that end as the villains finally rise up and take the world, executing the closest there is to the embodiment of the shared universe in J’onn and seeing billions give in, there’s still something you can do. The heroes stick together through it all, and they win across all scales by doing the most iconically THEM things they can, their purest and truest acts: the small-time heroes squabble and band together to save the Earth on their own when the rest can’t, the Flash with his family runs so fast he beats even his own metafictionally inescapable death, Green Lantern does something brave and reckless and then alongside his corps believes so hard they banish the darkness, Wonder Woman breaks her chains and frees the world, Batman sneaks around and deduces what no one else can and turns evil’s tools back on itself to defeat the ultimate enemy where even gods can’t by weaponizing his trauma, and Superman flies higher than ever before and beats back the devil to save Lois Lane and, with a procession of capes at his back, believes a happy ending to life. In spite of the narrative breaking down, the ideas and hopes that fuel them are enough to see them through, and that a poor kid in a dead-end job with dreams he’s never understood can realize that deep down, he’s one of the supergods too.

I don’t have a high-minded analysis in me at the moment on its themes, especially given so many of them are a streamlining and hyper-focus of ideas he delved into further elsewhere, especially Flex Mentallo - I’d say check out Rikdad’s notes, whatever Mindlessones has, and any of the other many sets of annotations littering the internet - but underneath all the recapitulations of Morrison’s pet themes and continuity madness, the most primal message of this one really is about as simple and pure as he gets, as a statement on DC and superheroes as a whole. As he put it himself not long after, it’s that “somehow, inevitably, the best in us will triumph over the worst. That in the end, against all the odds…good is stronger than evil.”