Infinite Crisis and the lead up to it was pretty much the final straw, for me, for the mainstream and, DC superheroes, in particular. Aside from gratuitous stuff going on (Identity Crisis and similar "shock value" artistry), I just felt like I had read this stuff 20 years before. And, I had. Infinite crisis, especially, just felt like a re-run. I was pretty much divorced from my comic shop and just picked up trades at work (Barnes & Noble). Villains United had been a bit of mostly fun and I liked the Secret Six comic, for the most part (though it did feel a retread of Ostrander's Suicide Squad). Infinite Crisis just felt like Johns reliving his childhood, with less remarkable results (which is the way I felt about a lot of his writing, at this point, though he did some stuff that I quite liked). So, after being underwhelmed by Infinite Crisis I totally ignored the whole mass of the lead into and out of Final Crisis. The look of Darkseid pretty much told me I wasn't likely to respond well. Conservative thinking it may be; but, there it was.

I did tune in for the collections of Morrison's Batman stuff and was mostly enjoying that.

I think the launching of Final Crisis had less to do with the success of Infinite Crisis, successful as it perceivably was and more with the editorial mindset of the company. Those who knew that event programming was a very short-term prospect had been pushed out or voluntarily moved on, from DC, leaving a lot of people who had either instigated the mess of 90s crossovers and speculator feeding, and people who took their cues from tv and movies, which were more and more "hot shotting." Enough time had passed for the lessons of the 90s to be forgotten and we were right back to multiple crossovers, variant and immick covers and the like and a lot of short term thinking to momentarily pop sales. It's systematic of corporate and Wall Street thinking, which dominates all business now, as everything is about the next quarter, not the next 5 or 10 years. It is comics version of the boom and bust cycle in Wall Street.

Now, leaving that all aside, I'm interested to see what went on here, as a wikipedia article tends to miss the nuances.

Still, you kids get off my parallel Earth!

I had never heard of Armageddon 2001. A few minutes research reveals that it was a 1991 event whose plot was a pretext for a series of annuals showing possible "ten years later" futures for a variety of characters. The frame story involved a mystery villain called Monarch, who was supposed to be revealed to be Charlton's Captain Atom gone bad, and returned to the present to ensure that his heel turn came to pass. But the mystery was spoiled by a leak at DC, so TPTB decided to change the ending, making Hawk (of Hawk and Dove) the future Monarch.



This contradicted text in the related Hawk and Dove story, already published, which specifically said that Hawk was definitely not Monarch. So apparently DC tried to fix this in Inifinite Crisis by saying no, it really is Captain Atom that becomes Monarch.

I have zero affection for the Captain Atom character; all his stories were published either long before (Charlton) or after (DC) my collecting days, and if I've seen him in any 80s/90s trades that I've acquired more recently, he did not stick in my head. However, I do have some interest in the more recent version which retcons him into a Doctor Manhattan stand-in, which of course is the reverse of where Doctor Manhattan came from originally.

I really enjoyed COIE , and at the time,  I enjoyed Infinite Crisis but it didn't age well. Infinite Crisis should never have revisited the happy conclusion  of COIE and corrupted the ending. Plus it was too involved with other books and they didn't have a consistent artist for all the books. In fact, they had some fill in artists in the last few books that looked down right amateurish . After re-reading it I couldn't believe I enjoyed it so much the first time around.

And then The Question died during Countdown. it's a Ditko bloodbath! Just wait until we get to Multiversity: Pax Americana...

Interesting, because when I read the JLA 70s post concerning him, I thought, "Ahh, so that's Libra." What makes you think it's not the same character?

Final Crisis #2 “Ticket to Blüdhaven” (August 2008)



Art: J.G. Jones on pencil and ink. Alex Sinclair, colors.

P.1-8: Meet Super Young Team. They’re neither super-young nor super, just young otaku trying to get into a hero-themed Tokyo nightclub, in the company of other otaku dressed like The Spirit and a Samurai Stormtrooper. The SYT long for a Crisis so that they can jump in and prove themselves. 



On TV, a member of old-timer team Big Science Action rants about kids these days, with their loud music and dancing. Megayakuza, a belligerent tunk in an armored exo-skeletoned, challenges calm hero Super Sumo to a duel and loses badly. Kirby's character Sonny Sumo first appeared in Forever People #5, also fighting an exhibition match against a giant robot on that occasion.



Shilo “Mister Miracle” Norman asks Super Sumo to join his new team to combat the forces of Dark Side, which have already won the war in “Heaven” and now secretly have the upper hand on Earth. This is a continuation of the plot of the Seven Soldiers: Mister Miracle mini-series, in which we saw that Mister Miracle can escape from everything, even a black hole or death. (Obviously the conflict between Mister Miracle and Darkseid goes back way further than that Morrison series, though.) The whole Super Young Team full of JLA analogues like Atomic Lantern Boy is a real hoot. I want them to have a series already.


P.9: Nix Uotan works his dead-end job at Big Belly Burger (a restaurant first seen during John Byrne’s Superman run in 1988, and a repeat location on the Arrow TV show) then goes home and draws comic books about Monitors, Captain Atom, and the Nazi Overman of Earth-10. His work colleagues think he’s crazy when he tells them about his dreams of being a Monitor. This is all very similar to the way in which Wally Sage may be Flex Mentallo, stuck in human form due to exposure to Ultraviolet Mentallium. Do you dream of superheroes? Maybe it's because you are one, in another level of reality...



P.10-11: Detective Dick Turpin beats up a man for information on the missing children (whom he already found last issue in the Dark Side Club, but he’s apparently been mind wiped) and finds the fisticuffs oddly arousing; the Dark Side is at work in him.

P.12, 15-19: Superman delivers the eulogy at Martian Manhunter’s funeral on Mars. The Alpha Lanterns disdain the Justice League as local yokels, and they complain that Hal Jordan neglects planets under his jurisdiction other than Earth.

Batman’s autopsy work reveals a bullet-sized hole in Orion’s heart, but there’s no entry or exit wound, and no bullet found. John Stewart finds the bullet embedded in concrete near the murder scene. A scan shows that it’s been there for fifty years, meaning that the bullet was shot through time rather than through space. Clever! Morrison will return to this theme of trans-dimensional sniper rifles during his run on Action Comics, when Superman finds a bullet within his own brain.

An unseen Alpha Lantern assaults John Stewart and his colleague Opto before they can report their findings to the Justice League. Then Alpha Lantern Kraken places Hal Jordan under arrest for that crime. It’s pretty obvious that one or all of the Alpha Lanterns are the real crooks here.

P.13-14: Lex Luthor is still not convinced that he ought to join Libra’s Secret Society, so Libra offers to hurt Superman for Luthor as a gesture of strength. Luthor's skepticism is well founded; those who have read the original Libra story in JLA #111 will recall that Libra’s modus operandi is to ultimately betray his villainous teammates.

P.15-17: Back in the Hall of Justice, Batman sees the ring-shaped imprint which John Stewart’s punch left in Kraken’s hand and realizes that Kraken is the culprit. Kraken is under mind control by Darkseid’s accomplice Granny Goodness but snaps out briefly to bleat a warning before defeating Batman and kidnapping him in a Boom Tube. There’s also a reference to Wonder Woman trying to heal John Stewart with a Purple Ray, the medical treatment given to Steve Trevor back in Wonder Woman #1 (1942).



P.18-20: In Blüdhaven, Detective Turpin meets Reverend Good, an Al Sharpton-looking clergyman we’ve seen on TV in both issues so far. Probably also a reference to Kirby's fake evangelist Glorious Godfrey from Forever People #3, who like Reverend Good is an agent of Dark Side.



He reminds Turpin about the forgotten encounter with the Anti-Life children, and takes Turpin to an Evil Factory where blonde Kamandi and Batman are among the prisoners. All the bad guys talk deferentially to Turpin, because he has Darkseid’s soul within him, blossoming to take over his mind. This is why Turpin was beginning to find torture appealing early in this issue.



The Evil Factory was the base of operations for mad scientists Simyan and Mokkari in Kirby's jimmy Olsen comics. 



P. 21-22: A bomb strikes the Daily Planet building; Lois Kent is found in the rubble. A shapeshifter impersonating Jimmy Olsen gets away. Lois was working on Turpin’s “missing kids” story. The bomb is Libra's way of recruiting Lex Luthor to the Injustice Gang by hurting those that Superman loves, taking him out of the action indefinitely as he cares for them.



P.23-25: Jay Garrick and Wally West zoom to the Twister Strip Club, the former site of the community center where the Silver Age “Flash of Two Worlds” story took place. This symbolizes how modern comics have become over-sexualized. The villains are gone, but Metron’s chair is still there. Libra’s “Bible” is a blank fake. Suddenly Barry Allen comes racing out of Metron’s chair through a time vortex. He’s trying to catch the bullet that is flying back through time to kill Orion, and the Black Racer is hot on his trail.



My Two More Cents: The Orion/Green Lantern/Kraken story gets the most traction in this issue. It's not clear yet where the Darkseid story is going, though it's obviously not going anywhere good for the heroes. Nix Uotan gets just enough story to keep his plate spinning.

Barry Allen died during the original COIE, but he and other deceased Flashes have sometimes recurred, with the explanation that they have been absorbed into the Speed Force and can be revived from there, in part or whole, temporarily or permanently.

The evil city of Blüdhaven has been a fairly recent addition to the DCU, first appearing in 1996. It seems to have more than its share of villainry, and Robin and Batgirl often claim it as their hero turf. It's been toxified by Chemo, nuked by Captain Atom, surrounded by a quarantine wall, and now invaded by the Dark Side. Most stories featuring it appear to end with "and then the city was destroyed," but like the Energizer Bunny, it somehow keeps on going. I guess this is a metaphor for how heroes need to seem to win, yet still need someone to fight tomorrow, or else there is no story. This is the premise of Tom King's 2012 superhero novel A Once Crowded Sky as well.

Super Young Team is a loving jab at fan culture, with young would-be heroes who decorate themselves with images of heroes and victims indiscriminately (see the "Killing Joke" cover on the back of the guy's shirt above) as an expression of their fascination with the world of comic books, except in their universe it's the world of super-celebrities. Morrison will give super-youth culture another spin in Multiversity: The Just, which was already mostly written before Final Crisis ever came out.

I know how you feel, which raises all sorts of questions about art and commerce. Was Morrison just writing a story for his own amusement, to one-up COIE? How important is it for art to be understood by the buying public? Is obscurity self-indulgent? If you and I can't be passionate about a tentpole project like this because it requires too much knowledge of and investment in backstory, who can?