Well, the moment has arrived.  After 52 weeks of Countdown-hell (barring the ones with Superboyman Prime) Final Crisis #1 hit the stands this week.

As I’ve mentioned before, I was a bit dubious about this series.  Although I love Morrison’s writing (still got Batman RIP and All Star Superman to read - good week to be a Morrison fan), the New Gods don’t really do anything for me.  Secret Invasion got off to such a strong start, that I was really wondering if Final Crisis was going to match up.

And it does.  But in a different way.

Whereas Secret Invasion got a lot of punch from its big shock moments (the old Marvel heroes, Skrull reveals etc), Morrison and Jones deliver just a strong piece of storytelling.  Issue 1 is a setup issue for the rest of the tale.   It doesn’t rely in a lot of huge shocks (bar one, which was guessed some months ago online), and instead you get a feeling that something big is coming.   Metron delivering fire to man in prehistoric times, Darkseid converting human children using the Anti-Life equation, the GL’s investigating Orion’s death.   There’s a lot of plot threads here, and from it all I got a real sense of foreboding.  That something really bad is going to happen (which we know, it does.  The Day Evil Won and all that).

The amusing thing for me though, is how Countdown seems to have been rendered pointless.  Plot details are either very different to the events of Countdown, or there was another mini-series between them that we somehow missed.    Ok, so the New Gods are now reborn.  Hence Darkseid and Metron running around.  That’s been well established as a Final Crisis plot point, so fair enough.   Orion is now dead under mysterious circumstances.   The implication being that this is nothing to do with his fight with Darkseid at the end of Countdown.

We’re also told that Earth-51 is now gone.  It was fine (albeit having had a rough few weeks and now overrun by Furries) when we last saw it.  And its Monitor has gone from “Monitoring the Monitors” to being exiled for his failure.  What’s happened there?   We’ve also got another suspicious Monitor.  Is this meant to be the same Solomon from Countdown, or another of the Monitors?

I will say though, I love the depiction of the Monitors here.  So much better than anything that happened in Countdown.   Here they’re shown as truely living apart from the Multiverse, although they’re becoming increasingly contaminated by their dealings with its residents.  The Multiverse Machine/Orrery is a brilliant visual.

I enjoyed this issue a lot more than I thought I would.   The rebirth of the New Gods is an interesting idea, revamping them and showing them infiltrating Earth culture right from the start.  It’ll be interesting to see where this goes from here, but I’m looking forward to the next issue.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 13:23 and is filed under Comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.