Final Crisis #6

Writer: Grant Morrison
Artist: Carlos Pacheco, Marco Rudy, & others
Colors: Alex Sinclair, Pete Pantazis
Publisher: DC

SPOILER ALERT

Let me start by warning you that this review contains a few spoilers. I ordinarily would refrain from going into any great detail about the storyline of a comic I am reviewing, but there are some things I feel I need to say about this book that just cannot be said without revealing certain key events. If you have yet to read Final Crisis #6, you may want to skip this review until you have done so. With that said, what follows is my take on the latest installment of DC's "Final" Crisis event.

The title of the issue is "How to Murder the Earth", but it might as well be "How to Murder a Mega-Event." I am not generally a harsh critic of any comic - I tend to read things that I am at least marginally sure I will like, and I avoid or skim over the rest. I want to like Final Crisis. I mean I REALLY want to like Final Crisis. The DC Universe deperately needs to get its continuity act together, and I expected Grant Morrison would somehow do that while telling another epic tale. Maybe he will manage to do that with the final issue, but it certainly doesn't look like events are moving in that direction.

So what have we got this issue? Well, let's look at some of the highlights. Darkseid kills the goshdarn Batman. Wait? Darkseid kills the goshdarn Batm---? Huh? So this is what I have been waiting for since the end of Batman R.I.P.? This is the final fate of the Dark Knight? The Omega Sanction (which, as far as I can remember, is a specific Omega Beam that places the target in a sentient subspace trap - am I wrong?) hardly seems a fitting end for the Caped Crusader, who had previously held the title of Only Super-hero to Ever Dodge Darkseid's Omega Effect. Maybe I was expecting too much, but I am more than a little disappointed to see that Batman only appeared in five pages (twelve panels total), which included a double-page shot of his demise and a full page splash at the end. He deserves better...

The rest of the book is interesting, but not enough to actually make me feel good about the overall product. There is a two-page sequence of Superman arriving and letting loose on everything in sight with his heat vision that felt as though it deserved more attention, given that it was a "hey, the Big Gun has arrived" kind of moment. There's more of Metron's cryptic dialogue, Checkmate's ultimate backup plan is revealed, and the Flashes are off and running. Supergirl fought Mary Marvel for a few panels - an event that in and of itself should have been more epic than it proved to be. Still, it all seemed to fall flat.

Maybe the problem was that it is too epic. There are enough cosmic-level battles and events in this issue to fill a year's worth of comics, and the fact that they are all compressed into one comic book just seems to diminish the events and the characters. Some of the one-on-one battles in this comic would be headline events in any other format. Within the pages of the Mega-Event, however, the clash of titans has no more impact than a fender-bender. As much as I admire Grant Morrison's work, this event has thus far failed to ignite the grandeur that these characters and this storyline should convey. We still have an issue to go, so maybe Morrison will surprise me. We'll see...