The Never-Ending Ending
What is the fascination with endings in comic books? It seems we just can’t get enough of them, and big comics companies just can’t stop giving them to us. Whether it’s the Ultimate X-Men or Y: The Last Man or the Final Crisis, it seems that endings are popping up around every corner, only, once we get there, it just shows a new path to a new ending, in a never-ending loop.
I don’t know how far back this trend goes, but let’s look at the most recent example of it. When 52 ended, the big tagline on the cover was, “It All Ends Here!” The very next week, the first issue of Countdown had the tagline reading, “So Begins the End!” One Year Later, the last issue of Countdown featured the tag, “The End!” Now, one week after that, DC Universe #0’s cover exclaims, “The Ending Begins Here!”
Aren’t you getting sick of it all? I know I am. I mean, it’s obvious that none of these were the real ending of anything, so why should we believe that Final Crisis will actually be the last Crisis that DC makes? Who’s to say that five years from now, there won’t be some new miniseries titled, “The Crisis of the Future” or something?
I guess I just don’t get the fascination. It’s like Margaret Atwood once wrote: “So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it’s the hardest to do anything with.”
The never-ending story kid sorta reminds me of you.
I think this really only applies to superhero books. Marvel and DC both seem to love throwing in these catastrophic endgame scenarios into their universes and using the sort of hyperbole that goes along with it – ESPECIALLY DC. No matter how many times we read that “This is the end!” we’re not going to believe it, because we know these characters and their universe are going to persist for as long as DC Comics remains in business.
Again, I think this applies exclusively to superhero books…books like Y: The Last Man and other Vergito books generally have an ending in mind (or at the very least a small, self-contained story that doesn’t bleed into other books) so I’m totally okay with the use of that kind of stuff then.
-M
I agree, Matt. I only mentioned Y: The Last Man in an attempt to be funny.