Final Crisis

Every once in a while a story comes along that is so bogged down and full of itself that it is almost incomprehensible to the people reading it.  This, my friends, is one of those stories. 

Take the entire DC universe and unite them into one storyline.  No wait, create other universes and unite them as well.  Make the evil be spread out so that everyone is everywhere.  Then create some kind of temporal disturbance so that the world is overrun by baddies instantly.  Now put superman everywhere. 
Now have the flash randomly run around.  Put the Green Lanterns in space moving slowly towards the Earth for the entire series. 


There was some weird thing where Superman, Uberman, and Ultraman go to limbo and do something finding everybook ever written on one sheet of paper and then superman is fighting a vampire somewhere else but it wasn't superman because he was giant and had one red eye and one blue eye.  Then the vampire that was a monitor morphs into some freaking huge vamprie thing.  Then superman writes on his own tombston, "words to instill fear" or some crap and you don't find out until later that the words were "to be continued."

Have I lost you yet.  Good now you know how I feel.  The comic medium can show as well as tell, but thanks to some weird panel layouts, double page layouts, and scenes that don't really lead into one another, the pictures just added to the confusion. 

The writing was horrible.  It was overdrawn prose that was trying to be literary and important.  The dialogue was full of cliches and "edgy" cussing.  The basic plot points, like what was going on was supposed to be a big mystery that they forgot to reveal and then forgot that they didn't reveal so went on as if they did reveal it.  I accidently skipped a page and almost didn't realize it.  The story was that out of whack. 

Overall, I think the book tries too hard.  It wants to be this literary masterpiece that changes everything, and it is obvious that it tries.  It has evil making great strides, it has redemption and sacrifice, and it has characters reborn, but it all feels forced.  Batman shows up just in time to die, after almost not being in the entire rest of the book.  The unstoppable evil just kind of goes away at the end after 52 different versions of Superman show up and fly around in the background (no that is all they did), Frankenstein rides a giant bull dog, and The Green Lanters say their oath falling through space (I think that was supposed to be inspirational or something). 

It was a mess.  Don't buy it.  Read it if you want, but this story has no effect on the DCU with the exception that Batman is a caveman and Barry Allen is alive again.