i'm not sure about greatness. The story was incoherent.
I cohered it just fine.
Captain Canuck said:
There was too much going on.
It was an event! But there were really just two strands, an event level crisis framed by a metatextual narrative. In the interior story, the Fourth World space gods had fought a war. The good guy gods won and the god of evil was left dying, forced to possess human shells. He knows he's dying and he wants to take the universe with him, and he seems to win. Until the good guys beat him just as nearly everything seems lost. The framing story is about the Monitors who watch the multiverse and how the singularity of Darkseid's will is causing the multiverse to collapse into itself. The two merge together with the rise of the Fifth World. Batman is sent back in time, carrying with him the symbols of Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman, and in doing so, he mythologizes them and embeds the symbols of the superheroic age as the new world mythology in the collective pre-human subconscious. Honestly, I had little trouble following it and I don't think it's because I'm more well versed in the universe than you. It just requires accepting that some of the details are intended to be ambiguous and up to interpretation.
Captain Canuck said:
And Superman fixed the world by cryogenically freezing all the survivors and making a miracle machine to wish the multiverse back into place/
You say that like it's not awesome!
Captain Canuck said:
and who was the dude with the rubix cube? (actually, that was kind of cool, but it would have made more sense if they explained who he was and why he was able to do that).
He's Metron, the True Neutral god. He planted the idea of superhumanity into prehistory with Anthro and the Rubick's Cube scene was this culmination of humanity achieving their potential. At least, that's how I interpreted it.
Captain Canuck said:
I guess all this would have made more sense if i had read countdown to final crisis and more of the fourth world stuff.
Nah. Countdown is the antithesis of Final Crisis. Everything in it contradicts the event and will only confuse you more. In addition, it's one of the worst things ever written. As far as the Fourth World stuff, I haven't read any of Kirby's Fourth World (though I've meant to), and from what I understand, it isn't all that crucial to understanding Morrison's book. If you know that there are space gods and they fought a war, and now they're in human bodies, that's all the primer that's applicable. If anything, the two books that provide lead-in are
52 and
Seven Soldiers.
52 features the birth of the multiverse and
Seven Soldiers features the Dark Side Club, although it's a relatively minor role.
Captain Canuck said:
This is my last final crisis question before going back to talking about Batman: How long have the new gods been on earth? Was the Darkseid club kidnapping superheroes and brainwashing them to make them fight to the death at one point? I seem to remember that.
a while. They showed up roughly analagous to, or right after, Infinite Crisis. So, in vague comic book time, a couple years or so. They appeared in various other books around the time of Countdown, but nothing that really had an impact whatsoever on FC. They seemed to be thrown into books to hype up a sales boost from being an "event tie-in".
Iceshadow said:
Scott Snyder's three issue "Black Mirror" storyline ended today. I thought it was very well done and Jock knocked the art out of the park. Does anyone know if Snyder is staying on Detective, or was this it?
He was announced as being on the book indefinitely, and I haven't heard anything to suggest DC has changed their mind. In all his interviews, he's discussed it as if he has a long term plan in mind.
