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A review by nigellicus
Final Crisis by Don Ho, Tom Nguyen, Norm Rapmund, Drew Geraci, Rodney Ramos, Carlos Pacheco, Christian Alamy, Doug Mahnke, Grant Morrison, Jay Babcock, J.G. Jones, Marco Rudy, Derek Fridolfs, Matthew Clark, Walden Wong, Rob Hunter, Jesús Merino
5.0
Am I required to attempt to break down the plot of this? This doesn't have plot this has, I dunno, multiplots, living sentient narratives slugging it out on the pages and between the pages, it has a black hole hiding under the text distorting structure, it has secret chapters lying adjacent to the other chapters in meta-symbiotic relationships which basically means they're collected elsewhere and you're outta luck if they aren't handy. It's honestly hard to tell if bits of this are disjointed because of the mad flood of ideas from Morrison's brain or because of those missing chapters, probably both. I don't think this was designed to be a self-contained story with a beginning middle and end but that Morrison went with the fundamentally fragmented and incomplete nature of big mega-crossovers and wrote it as a river of stories in a moment of flash flood rushing past furiously, clogged with flotsam and jetsam and to read it is to swim or drown. Any other writer and this would be fanciful apologism, but with Morrison, you never know.
As far as I can tell, there's a plot by evil gods to take over the Earth by infecting and inhabiting human bodies, thereby concealing themselves from superhuman detection until it's too late. There's a murdered god and celestial Monitors watching over an orrery of creation being infected with the stories they're observing and a monster emerging and superhumans turned evil and Superman on a mission to Limbo and more superhumans from all over being collected to resist, prefiguring The Multiverse and trying to make coherent sense of it all is exhausting, it seems to consciously defy coherence, running on comic book physics and comic book narrative rules and comic book logic, distilled to their essence. Go with the flow, or find something a bit calmer to read. There is nothing remotely calm about any of this.
As far as I can tell, there's a plot by evil gods to take over the Earth by infecting and inhabiting human bodies, thereby concealing themselves from superhuman detection until it's too late. There's a murdered god and celestial Monitors watching over an orrery of creation being infected with the stories they're observing and a monster emerging and superhumans turned evil and Superman on a mission to Limbo and more superhumans from all over being collected to resist, prefiguring The Multiverse and trying to make coherent sense of it all is exhausting, it seems to consciously defy coherence, running on comic book physics and comic book narrative rules and comic book logic, distilled to their essence. Go with the flow, or find something a bit calmer to read. There is nothing remotely calm about any of this.