This week brings us the latest installment of Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis.

The cover image of Supergirl is beautiful, and I’m still enjoying this story immensely. There’s a lot of things going on, and once again we find a DC Universe that has been stripped of its top tier heroes. Superman is refusing to leave Lois’ bedside after the explosion at the Daily Planet, Batman is missing, Hal Jordan is hauled off in chains by the Alpha Lanterns, and Wally’s MIA chasing after Barry, having failed to stop the bullet from killing Orion.

This leads us to a great scene, where Alan Scott realises they need to get prepared, as they don’t have the New Gods to help them out against Darkseid this time. The superhero draft was really well done, despite some obvious art fluffs (Donna and Huntress are in their old outfits - although in Donna’s case that’s a good thing - not too fond of the red stars on her current suit, and Huntress has had a new costume for a couple of years now, so that was a bit of a glaring mistake, but a minor one).

I enjoyed the build up as we slowly discover that this is “The Day Evil Won” leading up to Libra showing his true colours, forcing The Human Flame into his new helmet to become a slave to the Anti-Life Equation, and we see Oracle’s panic as she realises something bad has just been emailed to everyone in the world simultaneously.

And of course, there’s the Flashes. The scene with Jay telling Iris that he’s seen Barry alive was really well done, and I liked Iris’ refusal to believe that Barry had been dead (although Barry himself later confirms that he was dead - anything else would’ve been a continuity nightmare I suspect - although you could easily say the other appearances happened differently on New Earth). Then you’ve got Wally chasing Barry into the future (by about a month - which ties into the realtime gap in the series) only to find out that Darkseid has already one, as they confront the new Female Furies.

There’s still a lot of the story that we’re waiting to see how it ties together, but this issue really gave the feeling that it was just the end of the beginning of the story. With Earth now fallen, the story should really gather pace for the final 4 issues.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 7th, 2008 at 15:42 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.