Newsarama interview with Grant Morrison re: Final Crisis #1
Grant Morrison is out doing damage control for that underwhelming kickoff to Final Crisis in an interview with Newsarama.
The most striking thing to me was Morrison’s apparent irritation that some readers have dared to notice countless glaring inconsistencies between Final Crisis and the full calendar year of $2.99-and-over marketing that led up to it.
Highlights:
• Morrison believes everyone should read Jack Kirby’s Fourth World books. Jean-Claude Van Doom didn’t think so. After reading Countdown, Death of the New Gods and now Final Crisis #1, I’m inclined to side with JCVD on this one.
• He apparently planted the seeds for this idea of the New Gods using Earth as the building blocks for a new Fifth World ten years ago when writing JLA.
• The Metron we saw in FC #1 was not a new Metron. He just looked different because that’s how Morrison wanted him to look.
• Final Crisis was already mapped out before Countdown was even conceived. Morrison was asked to be a part of writing Countdown but turned it down from 52 fatigue. He just asked that Countdown leave off where Final Crisis needed to pick up.
“Obviously, I would have preferred it if the New Gods hadn’t been spotlighted at all, let alone quite so intensively before I got a chance to bring them back but I don’t run DC and don’t make the decisions as to how and where the characters are deployed,” he said.
I would agree that dedicating much of the weekly series and an 8-part monthly series to the death of characters whose death is supposed to be surprising in Final Crisis #1 did kind of disrupt some potential appeal of the first issue.
• On the three deaths of Orion: “Although I’ve tried to avoid contradicting much of the twists and turns of that book as I can with the current Final Crisis scripts, the truth is, we were too far down the road of our own book to reflect everything that went on in Countdown, hence the disconnects that online commentators, sadly, seem to find more fascinating than the stories themselves.”
Morrison is correct that online commentators, including yours truly, have a problem with the disconnects. When you’re sold a franchise based on its adherence to continuity, glaring continuity problems do affect satisfaction. And when you’re being sold multiple titles on a weekly basis on the premise that they are important to ongoing storylines, it does hurt customer goodwill when you find out how irrelevant those issues were.
• “Why didn’t Superman recount his experiences from DOTNG ? Because those experiences hadn’t been thought up or written when I completed Final Crisis #1.”
Morrison seems offended at questions regarding the various inconsistencies based on the rationale that Final Crisis #1 was written before Countdown. While it’s obviously not his fault that Countdown made his Final Crisis #1 look contradictory, readers (and by extension, Newsarama) aren’t exactly being unreasonable for noticing these things.
“To reiterate, hopefully for the last time, when we started work on Final Crisis, J.G. and I had no idea what was going to happen in Countdown or Death Of The New Gods because neither of those books existed at that point.”
• “The way I see it readers can choose to spend the rest of the year fixating on the plot quirks of a series which has ended, or they can breathe a sight of relief, settle back and enjoy the shiny new DC universe status quo we’re setting up in the pages of Final Crisis and its satellite books.”
In other words, scour continuity for clues, but if you find anything in continuity that contradicts what Morrison is doing, just ignore it, you uptight geek.
• Be prepared for as many references to the End Times as there are cultures and mythologies with their own takes on it.
• Morrison says the Martian Manhunter execution scene “was very much about calling time on expectations and letting our readers know up front that the rules have changed.” That sounds good on paper, but what changing the rules led to was ultimately an empty scene and a wasted death — so poorly executed that most of the FC reviews I’ve read suspect that he’s not really dead. So what changing the rules led to was either an impact-free death of a major character or the complete giveaway of a surprise. Chalk one up for The Rules.
• Darkseid’s fall in DC Universe #0 involved a fall backwards in time.
• Apparently some of the most important events of Final Crisis will not happen in Final Crisis. Morrison says “the major plot strand” of Final Crisis occurs in the pages of Final Crisis: Superman Beyond, which comes out in the month between FC 3 and FC 4.
• Final Crisis #2 continues “the cosmic murder investigation” of Who is Killing the New Gods.
• I could not have been more wrong when I congratulated DC for finally killing off Jack Kirby as Best Trend of 2007.
The original Fourth World Series is crap? Congratulating DC for killing off Jack Kirby??
You young fellers and your crazy ideas.
I think you’re onto something with the age thing, Fortress Keeper, and I was thinking about that as I wrote this. I think most of us here at Doomkopf just came from a generation where there was nothing special about Jack Kirby. I’m not going to try to speak for anyone else, but I am capable of understanding and respecting his very significant place in history without having any desire to read any more of his stuff or have his very dated works and ideas continue to permeate new stories. I think people who grew up with him are blind to how much of their fondness for his work is sentimental in nature.
In the same year end awards where I was thrilled at my flawed prediction that DC was exorcising themselves of Kirby, I also noted how I was sick of creators reliving their childhood in the comics I was buying. The Hall of Doom out in the swamp has no business in the quasi-mature comic books that DC is marketing.
So the joy I experienced with the Death of the New Gods wasn’t just as an iconoclast; dwelling in the past often betrays a lack of new ideas, and I got sick of the attempt at renewing the New Gods’ relevance long before Final Crisis started.
The unfortunate thing about people who came along in my generation is that comics very quickly tread into the shallow art-based excess of the ’90s, and that’s not something I want to revisit. There’s also very little innocence from that era to breed any kind of sentimental attachment. I say it’s unfortunate, but maybe it will mean that by the time my generation becomes the dominant creative generation at the big two publishers, we’ll see stories that are a bit more forward-looking rather than self-serving attempts at recasting oneself among the storywriting greats of childhood.
Well, I’ll admit to sentimentality in regards to something like … oh, I don’t know … Batman & The Outsiders. But I do consider much of Kirby’s DC work – particularly Fourth World & Omac – pretty forward looking and much “bigger picture” in terms of scope than most creators today seem capable of attempting. Chris Sims reprinted Kirby’s text page from OMAC #1, and a lot of it was pretty close to how things are today in the real world – not just comics.
But, I’ll agree to disagree with you on that one. To each his own, I always say.
One thing’s for sure. When I grew up in the ’70s – he said as he creaked in his rocking chair – there was an explosion of new ideas and characters as writers and artists, particularly at Marvel, did as much as they could to break the boundaries of traditional mainstream comic-books. Nowadays, perhaps because that generation of creators wasn’t quite compensated as well as they should have been, there is generally a rehashing of old ideas and re-introductions of old characters in place of genuine creativity in super-hero comics.
If your generation is able to break that pattern and make something new of comics, then I genuinely wish you guys the best.
This just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever to me. Why does it matter when Morrison wrote Final Crisis #1? Why didn’t he re-write it to at least kinda sorta take into account at least something that happened in DEATH OF THE NEW GODS? What a dick. I’ve never liked that guy.
there was plenty of annoying, non-sensical, hard-to-follow stuff in this book, but at least in terms of continuity, it seems that DC editorial–not morrison–dropped the ball on this one.
“This just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever to me. Why does it matter when Morrison wrote Final Crisis #1? Why didn’t he re-write it to at least kinda sorta take into account at least something that happened in DEATH OF THE NEW GODS? What a dick. I’ve never liked that guy.”
I haven’t read the issue and I certainly won’t give Morrison a pass – he’s a good writer in my opinion but he’s not infallible – but I suppose it’s possible that rewriting #1 would involve rewriting the rest of the series, or major chunks of it.
I don’t think Morrison can be completely blamed for this, nor can DC. They’re both to blame. DC hires Morrison to write a specific story, and then proceeds to use other books to either contradict or deploy major plot points early. Likewise, Morrison appears to have simply said “yup, I’ll write it” and ran with it, taking no interest in where the lead-in titles were going and how they were setting up the big event.
I can’t completely blame Morrison for being pissed. We all knew Countdown and it’s related titles was a ridiculously major cock-up, now we know precisely how bad it was. All of this just shows how the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing.
-M
I don’t know—I’m fairly certain that most professional comic book writers have had to, in their careers, rewrite around some fairly major cockups. In fact, I would venture to say that this probably happens regularly enough to be considered “often” by most standards. Those are just the breaks of working in a shared universe. I agree that it isn’t fair to heap all of the blame on Grant Morrison when DC editorial has proven itself so woefully incompetent over the past few years in upholding the integrity of its shared, ongoing continuity. All I’m saying is that Morrison puts this statement out there about how he didn’t know what was going to happen in the other limited series when he wrote his story, and takes this attitude of, “Oh well, fuck it. It’s pointless, since I didn’t write it,” and he tells the readers that they need to stop fixating on trivial quirks. Man, I’m sorry if that doesn’t make him a dick, but I think it does.
DC Editorial’s incompetence doesn’t justify criticizing the readers for daring to pay attention to what happens in the comics they purchase. The “blame readers” attitude is pretty annoying, but I think his hypocrisy is what makes it worse.
I don’t think it would be quite as dickish if he weren’t so in love with the continuity he created and the continuity he respects while simultaneously dismissing any continuity he doesn’t care for.
I agree. I was just trying to point out that, really, DC Editorial is as much to blame as Morrison – if not more so, as they failed to coordinate the event effectively enough that this kind of muck-up doesn’t occur. If nothing else, they should have told Morrison to rewrite. Even if he doesn’t like it and as big a superstar he is, he’s still work for hire and therefore DC is boss.
All of this just goes to show how Final Crisis was fucked from the start. Perhaps they should’ve waited twenty years, like last time.
-M
Perhaps they should have gotten a competent writer, like last time.