It's Not the Size of the World You Build, It's How You Use It

Final Crisis 6 came out this week, and it feels as though it's slipping back into the same concerns I had when the series started. There's so much going on, so many storylines each getting a page at a time before they disappear and perhaps reappear for one more page this issue, that it's not pleasurable to read. I applaud Morrison for his ambition, but he's so built up in telling this complex story of interwoven events and their effect on the world that the small stories, the little pieces of life that make a tale worth reading, end up getting lost.

The apocalyptic world-changing events going on in Final Crisis are most interesting to me when they're shown in-depth through the eyes of the characters experiencing them, as in some of the tie-in books DC's put out. Some of which Morrison wrote, including one-shots like “Resist” and “Submit”, others including Geoff Johns' Rogues Revenge and Greg Rucka's Revelations. I'm not saying these books have floored me, but I am saying I enjoyed them more than the central title, which I have to feel is not the goal DC is setting when it puts these books out. Same for Marvel's last two big events, Civil War and Secret Invasion. The tie-ins running in Marvel's regular books always had more time to focus on the issues the event was created to focus on but never had the time to discuss because it's throwing information at you the entire time. It's like reading Final Crisis or Secret Invasion is akin to reading about the history of World War II in a chapter in a high school history textbook, whereas the tie-ins are like watching Band of Brothers or reading Catch-22 (these are generous comparisons not meant to actually compare on quality, merely on scope of story). You need the background in the first to appreciate the second, but there's no way you can actually get a deep, interesting story from the textbook.

This'll be cross-posted over at www.holdreset.com, which will get a real update before the end of the month. I swear.