Thursday, January 29, 2009

Final Crisis #7

No annotations needed for Final Crisis #7 from the Legion perspective. We get a couple of panels of Starman and a page or two of the new Miracle Machine (which, honestly, looks steampunk of all things).

But FC#7 also showed the irrelevance of "Legion of Three Worlds" to the Final Crisis storyline. It's not even complete yet, while the main story is over. Was the whole purpose of L3W to get the Miracle Machine to Superman? Here's Grant Morrison at Newsarama with the intended reading order:

NRAMA: Speaking of Superman Beyond – how does the timeline work between Beyond, Final Crisis and Legion of 3 Worlds?

GM: The Monitrix Zillo Valla recruits Superman’s help in Final Crisis #3 which leads into Superman Beyond #1 and 2, both of which happen in the space between Lois’ final heartbeats. He returns to save her in Beyond #2, only to be contacted by the Legion of Super-Heroes to deal with an emergency in the 31st Century – as seen in Legion of 3 Worlds #1. Normally, the Legion is able to return him to his own time an instant after he left, so naturally he feels secure quitting Earth after saving Lois. After his encounter with Superboy Prime in LO3W, however, he returns late to Final Crisis #6, to find time has crashed, Darkseid rules the world and Batman is dead. Oops.

Fortunately, he brings with him the means to save us all.

Over at Tim Callahan's "When Worlds Collide" at CBR, he fits the Legion into the whole Final Crisis story thusly:
Everything written by Morrison matters, and everything written by everyone else does not (with the possible exception of "Legion of 3 Worlds," but while that series may turn out to be an excellent addition to your library of awesome comics, it seems that all you really need to know about Superman's adventures in the 31st century is that he was indeed sent there during the middle of "Final Crisis" -- which conveniently removes him from the action, a point I'll discuss below -- and that Brainiac 5 showed him the Miracle Machine before sending him back, but that scene is included in "Final Crisis" #6 anyway)...

...And Morrison emphasized the centrality of Superman not just by showing his multiversal doppelgangers, but by removing him from "Final Crisis" during the middle of the series. The world fell into darkness so quickly -- the anti-life spawned so many Justifiers -- because Superman was not around. Batman was captured, Wonder Woman tainted, and Superman absent. But it was Superman who mattered most. The first DC superhero. The symbol of hope. The sun god. The light in the darkness.

Thus, L3W is a Final Crisis crossover because it explains where Superman is and why he's there during Final Crisis, not because it has great relevance directly to the story other than the Miracle Machine. (Though how can you return late from the future, no matter how long the L3W battle takes?)

So it's nearly certain that we'll see Bart Allen come out of the lightning rod. And Johns has said that the events of this miniseries (whenever the last three issues come out - come on, we had one in August and one in October, with one more in February; what is this, a quarterly book?) will ripple through his other books, which I guess mean Flash and GL.

6 comments:

Eric TF Bat said...

What I'm wondering is: since the whole Final Crisis mess has proved that DC's current set of managers simply can't handle the basics of their job, ie putting out 22 pages of sequential art every 31 days, regardless of the number of people they hire or the money they spend... surely that means the Board should be sacking people for incompetence and restructuring the company so it has goals it can achieve... right? Or why not?

Terence Chua said...

Michael, are you doing a wrap up on the threeboot series?

Anonymous said...

wrap up! BAH! has shooter ever READ a legion comic? BAH!

he was SO much better when he was fourteen.

BAH!

Anonymous said...

ONLY surpassed in crapitude by PERHAPS:

the fortress lad story ('we all live in a yellow rocket ship, a yellow, rocket ship, a.... wait, is that YOUR tummy rumbling?')

the 5YL naltor dreamers story ('baseball, for some reason...')

BAH!

even doctor mayavale at least gives us the warm impure tinglings of nostalgia and ditko's improbable anatomy.

BAH!

the ONLY good thing i can say about LSHv5n50 is that shooter at fifty-seven resisted his newfound fondness for making up hip future teen slang.

BAH!

had he contorted any more rigorously in his efforts to prove that HIS lyle is straight, straight, gloriously straight, he might have caused himself an injury.

a painful, painful injury.

BAH!

must stop before i intimate how i REALLY feel...

Patrick C said...

Did Shooter even write #50? It was credited to "Justin Thyme" which while an obvious pseudonym doesn't mean it was Shooter. I definitely don't think it read like any of his other issues.

Anonymous said...

"Though how can you return late from the future, no matter how long the L3W battle takes?"

As Grant said, Superman was supposed to arrive at the same time he left, but time was all screwed up so he "missed".

Also, I suspect there may be one other way that LoTW ties in with Final Crisis. My guess is that it's Barry Allen in the lightning rod, and that he emerges running backwards in time. Barry doesn't know how he came back, but we may find out by the end of this series.