Final Crisis 5 of 7 (Morrison/Jones/Pacheco/Merino; DC):
Detective Comics 851: "Last Rites: Last Days of Gotham, 1 of 2" (Denny O'Neill/Guillem March; DC): In which we begin to fill in some of the missing six months between Bruce Wayne's disappearance near the end of RIP and his reappearance in Final Crisis. (Morrison has been quite clear that the Batman of RIP and of Final Crisis are both Bruce Wayne, and we're explicitly told that Bruce Wayne/Batman disappeared for six months, so I'm assuming for the sake of sanity that he disappears for six months, comes back, then gets knocked for a loop again by the New Gods.) The story starts during "No Man's Land", and the great Gotham earthquake, "several years ago." Millicent Mayne, an actress, is refusing an offer of a bag of diamonds from a thug called Gracchus as the earthquake strikes. (O'Neill leave what Gracchus was requesting as an exercise for the reader.) The earthquake saves her from needing to respond. Several years later, when Mayne has become the beloved "Face of Gotham" for all her charity works, Gracchus decides that he's going to fix her face, and he throws acid into it while disguised as Two-Face. This basically brings the wrath of Nightwing and Oracle down on Two-Face, despite having not done what he was accused of. Overall, it's a really interesting issue -- I definitely like the looks of March's art, and the story begins to fill in an interesting gap. Recommended.
(Purely a side note: the publication of DC Universe titles are going to be fascinating to watch over the next few months. It's clear that Batman and possibly Detective may be the first titles to deal with Final Crisis itself -- Wonder Woman still has another four issues of the "Olympian" to go; Superman has nearly a year of "New Krypton" to get through, and heaven only knows what's happening with Green Lantern, but that set of titles is going to go headlong from Final Crisis to prep for Blackest Night. And it's not clear at the moment that Justice League is going to get there at all; they've got to get through pulling the Milestone characters into the DCU first. This month's DC Nation column refers to a hiatus that isn't even occurring for another two months, though I understand why it's in the February 2009 issue -- that is, in fact, when the hiatus for Batman and 'Tec is going to start. Regardless, reading mainline DCU is going to be very confusing, in some ways, for the next year or so.)
I hate Grant Morrison, sometimes.
See, here's the thing: I'd gone along quite happily ignoring Final Crisis, as, it turns out, pretty much the entirety of the DC universe had done to date. Oh, sure, there were a few throw away moments here and there, but nothing I really needed to pay attention to. And then came Batman #682, and all you could do with a lot of it was just sit there and scratch your head if you didn't read Final Crisis, because you really didn't have a strong clue what the heck was going on. So I girded my loins and picked up the previous Final Crisis issues and read the whole goddamn thing. (I will note, however, that he's an equal opportunity irritant. There's a near-throwaway line about "the Batman Psycho merge" that makes absolutely no sense if you didn't read the end of Batman 682.)
The really fascinating thing to note is that at one level, Morrison was definitely true to his word. If you've read his Seven Soldiers of Victory, that's almost all the prolog you need to this series. There's nothing of Identity Crisis, nothing of 52, and the only piece of Countdown hanging around is the weirdness of Mary Marvel. By contrast, we've got Frankenstein and Mister Miracle of the Soldiers playing a major role, Bulleteer whizzing around in the background, and I'm sure that I probably missed references to the others anywhere.
The essential plot of issue 5 is that Hal Jordan gets taken to Oa for trial because the Guardians believe that he attacked John Stewart, and basically all hell breaks loose. Back on earth, Checkmate and Mister Miracle try to fight the good fight with possibly indifferent success, and Dan Turpin seems to lose his fight to Darkseid.
I will say this about Final Crisis. The one line in the whole thing that would have caught me and gotten me to read this series, if one line could have done it, was where the guardians say, "You have 24 hours to save the universe, Lantern Jordan." I mean, seriously. It also gives a possible time frame to the last two issues: however long it's been up to this point, the universe gets mostly saved in 24 hours.
Detective Comics 851: "Last Rites: Last Days of Gotham, 1 of 2" (Denny O'Neill/Guillem March; DC): In which we begin to fill in some of the missing six months between Bruce Wayne's disappearance near the end of RIP and his reappearance in Final Crisis. (Morrison has been quite clear that the Batman of RIP and of Final Crisis are both Bruce Wayne, and we're explicitly told that Bruce Wayne/Batman disappeared for six months, so I'm assuming for the sake of sanity that he disappears for six months, comes back, then gets knocked for a loop again by the New Gods.) The story starts during "No Man's Land", and the great Gotham earthquake, "several years ago." Millicent Mayne, an actress, is refusing an offer of a bag of diamonds from a thug called Gracchus as the earthquake strikes. (O'Neill leave what Gracchus was requesting as an exercise for the reader.) The earthquake saves her from needing to respond. Several years later, when Mayne has become the beloved "Face of Gotham" for all her charity works, Gracchus decides that he's going to fix her face, and he throws acid into it while disguised as Two-Face. This basically brings the wrath of Nightwing and Oracle down on Two-Face, despite having not done what he was accused of. Overall, it's a really interesting issue -- I definitely like the looks of March's art, and the story begins to fill in an interesting gap. Recommended.
(Purely a side note: the publication of DC Universe titles are going to be fascinating to watch over the next few months. It's clear that Batman and possibly Detective may be the first titles to deal with Final Crisis itself -- Wonder Woman still has another four issues of the "Olympian" to go; Superman has nearly a year of "New Krypton" to get through, and heaven only knows what's happening with Green Lantern, but that set of titles is going to go headlong from Final Crisis to prep for Blackest Night. And it's not clear at the moment that Justice League is going to get there at all; they've got to get through pulling the Milestone characters into the DCU first. This month's DC Nation column refers to a hiatus that isn't even occurring for another two months, though I understand why it's in the February 2009 issue -- that is, in fact, when the hiatus for Batman and 'Tec is going to start. Regardless, reading mainline DCU is going to be very confusing, in some ways, for the next year or so.)
Tags: