Was Final Crisis Part of a Trilogy?

Early 2008. Dan DiDio goes public with the notion that DC's upcoming Final Crisis mega-event will be the third installment of a "Crisis trilogy," the last chapter to the story told in Crisis on Infinite Earths and Infinite Crisis. The earth beneath the feet of many a fanboy begins to quake.

Does this man realize what he's saying???

To those who take epic storytelling structure seriously (to me, at least), the word trilogy carries with it tremendous weight. Though the term is often carelessly thrown out there by ad execs in the entertainment biz who still seek to cash in on Star Wars, it takes more than just the presence of three parts to make a trilogy. Those three parts must work together to convey a single theme or idea. In a story-driven trilogy, each individual chapter resolves its own sub-conflict, but by the end of a trilogy the plot must come full circle to resolve an overarching super-conflict that is carried through the entire series.

This is why the original Star Wars movies are a trilogy, but the Mission: Impossible movies are not. A good rule of thumb in analyzing whether a series is a trilogy is to think about how a fourth chapter, if such a thing is even possible, would relate to the first three. A "Star Wars: Episode VII" would involve a vastly different status quo than its predecessors, while a fourth M:I could fit right into a continuous telling of Ethan Hunt's (yes, that was Tom Cruise's character's name and I didn't have to look it up) adventures.

The trilogy is actually a natural format for storytellers to use, and my Christian faith leads me to believe that there's a spiritual reason why. In my old blog, I wrote the following:

When looking at human history through a Biblical lens, three divisions of time emerge. The first era, spanning the years chronicled by the Old Testament, involves the fall of man in the Garden of Eden and a period of waiting for Christ to come. Man currently lives in the second time period, where Christ has arrived and his work to redeem us from the clutches of sin is ongoing. The third and final stage of human existence will occur when Christ returns and the relationship between God, man, and creation is restored to its rightful state.

So, if people are living in the midst of a real-life trilogy, it makes sense that they would write their stories according to the same structure. Even non-Christians, like George Lucas or the Wachowski brothers, unknowingly divide their stories into three parts that correspond to the stages of God's salvation of humanity.

So you can see what was at stake for me as I read Final Crisis. Sure, I wanted to discover the "final fate" of Batman and witness the "day evil won" and all that. But what really had me on the edge of my seat was waiting to find out whether the series would live up to its billing as trilogy.

Six issues through the seven-part series I was more than ready to write-off DiDio's rantings as more corporate hype. Despite a first issue that had some monitors in it, Final Crisis appeared to have nothing to do with the subject matter of the first two Crises, which were about the structure of the DC Universe and its multiple parallel realities. Issue 7 was going to need to have quite the clutch performance in order to satisfy trilogy hunters like myself.

Surprisingly, that issue really did an impressive job of thematically tying Final Crisis to the first two. If Crisis on Infinite Earths was the story of the creating of a streamlined and redirected DC Universe and Infinite Crisis was an exploration of the consequences of that redirection, then Final Crisis was the realization that the streamlined universe itself still owed its character to all of the crazy and chaotic worlds that came before. This idea is the heart of the series' climax, where the Supermen of many earths join together with an army of angels and the Zoo Crew to confront Mandrakk. It is taken further when Nix Uotan realizes that he and his fellow Monitors must no longer try to impose their logic and order upon a multiverse that thrives both in its seriousness and sillyness.

All of the above would have made a great DC Crisis: Episode III if it stood alone as a theme to the story. But the reality is that Final Crisis had much more packed into its pages, so much so that its conclusion to the CoIE story could be easily missed if you weren't looking for it. Yes, Final Crisis was a follow up to the other Crisis series. But it was also a sequel to Seven Soldiers and the fulfillment of stories started in New Gods comics back in the 70's. Heck, it even works as a modern retelling of the comics that came with the Super Powers figures I played with as a kid. (I'll never forget the awesome ending to my Super Powers book on tape where Batman saved the day by pulling out a mirror and reflecting the Omega Effect back onto Darkseid himself! Sadly, only the first and second books in this series are available on YouTube...)

The majority of Final Crisis, if not the ending, focuses almost exclusively on these other things. And a story that casts its net so wide just doesn't look like a Part Three when placed alongside its predecessors which were much more closely linked. There's just too much else going on for it to work. I fear that Blackest Night, which has been billed as the third part of Geoff Johns' Green Lantern trilogy, will suffer the same kind of escalation in scope, as DC seems to be setting it up as the company-wide event for 2009.

For the most accurate preview of Final Crisis, fans should have turned not to DC's marketing giants but to the writer himself. As quoted on Wikipedia from this interview before the series was released, Grant Morrison said:

I wanted to do the biggest crossover there’s ever been... it’s got nods to everything, going back to "Flash of Two Worlds" and the first 'Crisis on Earth-1', 'Earth-2', all that stuff. So there’s little elements of all that...

One cannot fault Morrison for failing to live up to the expectations created by his publisher, because by all indications this is not what he set out to do. Rather than limiting his scope to wrapping up the Crisis storyline, Morrison sought to give the last word on a multitude of elements from DC Comics' past, and this is the standard Final Crisis should be judged by. Call it a sequel, a tribute, or even a conclusion. Just don't let DiDio get away with calling it a trilogy.

Reactions to Reactions to Final Crisis

My thoughts on two recent Final Crisis critiques and analyses I ran across online in the past week:

1. Thom Young at Comics Bulletin praises Final Crisis for its postmodern structure and take on the meaning of symbols. He writes (responding in part to another reviewer on the site):

...Language and symbols have the power to transform reality (or our perception of it, actually), which leads us to being able to conceive of ideas and concepts. It’s a significant distinction because it’s the essential difference between a Modern view of language and a Postmodern view of language (and the primacy of language is the foundation of Postmodernism).

The Modern and Aristotelian view is that ideas and concepts come first and are then expressed through language (which is what Dave stated). The Postmodern view is that language (or symbol system) comes first, which then allows us to organize our perceptions of the world around us--leading to concepts or ideas that otherwise could not exist before the introduction of linguistic structure.

Aside from our difference of opinion regarding the emphasis on words, names, and other symbols in Final Crisis, I agree with Dave’s emphasis on the importance of those aspects of the fifth issue. They are the various paraphrases in that chapter that have branched off from Morrison’s initial theme phrase: The magical power of symbols to structure our perceptions of reality.

There's no doubt that Grant Morrison uses postmodern literary techniques in Final Crisis. The series is often meta-textual and self-aware that it is a comic book. But I disagree with the notion that FC's thesis is one of symbolism's dominance over meaning. Sure, symbols are shown to have much power throughout the story, but that power can always ultimately be traced to some theoretical root source. For instance, Metron's circuit did not spontaneously appear and somehow give birth to the concept of freedom. Its power derived from the fact that Metron, a being on a higher plane, expressed his concept of knowledge to Anthro through it.

It may be that Morrison was actually going for a postmodern take on symbolism, intending for Final Crisis to place the medium over the message. If so, I'd say that the absurdity of such an idea ultimately bore itself out in the text, whether intentionally or not. But if I had to place money on it, I'd venture to say that this is not exactly what the writer had in mind.


2. In his "Permanent Damage" column at Comic Book Resources, Steven Grant rakes Final Crisis over the coals for having an immature view of mythology. To quote:

FINAL CRISIS shares the weakness of its inspiration, Jack Kirby's "Fourth World," and of most comics. It fixates on good and evil, where we're all now very aware, even if we don't admit it, that the concepts are basically nonsense.
...
In a world of moral relativity – and, yes, that is our world, and, really, always has been – we need better terms than those.

While I think Mr. Grant is dead on in his interpretation of what Final Crisis was trying to accomplish, I couldn't disagree more with his opinions on it. One has to wonder why a person so jaded to the notion of good and evil would have even a passing interest in superhero comics, much less want to write about them.

One of the things I love most about Grant Morrison's DC superhero work is that, despite his obvious fringe philosophy on a number of subjects, he completely understands and reveres the moral center that has kept the superhero going strong as a genre for the better part of a century. It may be masked behind an avant-garde approach to storytelling, but Morrison sure knows how to tell us a tale where the good guys win.

Comics About Bad Guys

Is it really possible to write a comic about a bad guy? That is to say, one that really engages the reader? That resonates with his or her innermost being and really works at its core as a story?

I don't think that you can.

Stories, and especially those of the superhero variety, are meant to tell us about heroes. We expect them to tell us about heroes, and something isn't quite right when they don't. Hero stories capture our imaginations because they retell to us a story that we're born knowing. This isn't an original concept. You can read all about it in the works of Joseph Campbell or their comic book adaptation, which was given the perplexing title Final Crisis: Superman Beyond 3D. If you've got the right perspective, you can even read about it in the Bible.

Villain stories--that is, stories genuinely centered around villains and their pursuit of evil--just don't do that. In fact, I'd venture to say that villain stories speak to our souls so poorly that they are virtually impossible to write. Or at least to be written by an author who intends to obtain any semblance of an audience.

What then of comics that are about bad guys? For surely, though they're in the minority, plenty of them get produced. How can you explain their existence? Well, first of all, let's toss out the Venom: Lethal Protectors and Doom 2099's that graced the shelves of many a 1990's comic shop. Though I have no idea what the critical reception to titles like these was back in the day, you're not apt to find either one in a longbox labeled "All-Time Classic Comics." Or even still in print for that matter. The short longevity of such fad comics seems to only reinforce my point that evil doesn't capture the heart of the reader like heroism does. Furthermore, as far as I can tell, comics of this genre usually featured plots where the villain star underwent some kind of reform or found himself fighting on the side of good for the bulk of the run.

There are still plenty of comics starring bad guys that earn critical acclaim. Ed Brubaker has two of them going on for Marvel Icon right now in Criminal and Incognito, and DC has its own success with Gail Simone's Secret Six. I actually have enjoyed all of these books (though I eventually dropped Criminal due to high sex content), and they do stand out in a good way from the masses of comics out there about the good guys. But while these titles contain enough surface details to offer up an edgier and more titilating flavor, they're really just another variation on the hero story.

I say this mainly because the protagonists in comics like these aren't really that bad. Sure, they steal and kill for selfish motive, and they'd most certainly be the villains if they appeared in the regular series of Superman or Batman. But it's not like these are comics about Darkseid running around firing Omega Beams on Apokolips. In each of the examples I've mentioned, the main characters really come across as the good guys when compared to the depths of evil they go up against. The low-level thugs and pickpockets in Criminal feel harmless in contrast to the ruthless kingpins who are often after them, and the C-list "villians" of Secret Six take on relatively righteous missions that put them at odds with the likes of Dr. Psycho and Junior--truly the bad of the bad.

The closest I think a "quality" comic has ever gotten to being truly about villainy was Mark Millar's Wanted. There's no denying the irredeemable moral bankruptcy of its characters, and there's no suggestion that they'll get their comeuppance in the end. But most of the plot is moved forward at a time during which the ultimate moral status of the protagonist, Wesley, is still in question. Only in the final pages do we receive confirmation that Wesley has fully embraced a life of villainy. And these final pages are where Wanted stands its greatest chance of creating a disconnect with its reader. I can hardly believe I'm the only one who felt a bit uncomfortable in my own skin when the main character looked right at me through the panel and made fun of the way I was living my life.

(It's probably also worth mentioning that the Wanted movie tones down the outright wickedness of the comic. Not to say that this was a particularly good artistic choice, but there's at least a shred of relevance in the fact that this was the method by which the filmmakers sought to make the story palpable to a mass audience.)

I have no doubt that comics about bad guys will continue to be published for many years to come. At the very least it's a means of marketing a story as "cool," much like an R rating can be for a movie. However, I'll be surprised if a really great one comes along and honestly lives up to the name.