Watching the Train Wreck of “Final Crisis”
I may as well just get this out of the way up front: in my opinion, Final Crisis #3 is one of the worst comic books I’ve ever read.
Coming into this event season, I had high hopes for DC to regain some of the Infinite Crisis magic, but after three issues (sorry for the delay, but I was away from comic shops and the Internet) the latest and likely not last Crisis has clearly entered the realm of train wreck.
And yet many comics critics posted some largely favorable reviews. "I can’t wait to see what happens next!" said one not atypical reviewer.
Throughout many reviews, the critics looked at writer Grant Morrison’s approach of stringing together flashes of disparate stories into making a larger narrative and praised how new and challenging it is. There didn’t seem to be a single bizarre element he used that couldn’t elicit a glowing remark.
When reading those comments, I immediately recalled this quite-good essay by B.R. Myers on The Atlantic Monthly Web site. Writing about contemporary literary fiction, Myers complains that today’s writers have become obsessed with style at the expense of substance.
We are supposed to have entered a golden age for fiction, he writes, and yet readers don’t pick up literary fiction en masse, or much at all. Myers offers a simple explanation: the books are all self-absorbed fluff, and the nuts and bolts of telling a story have been left by the wayside.
Which brings us back to Final Crisis.