Travis Hedge Coke
Patricia Highsmash
Five Ways to Read Final Crisis III:
Danny the Avenue
by Travis Hedge Coke
We’ve got miracle plays to play
We’ve got parts to perform Hearts to warm
Kings and things to take by storm
As we go along our way
– Magic to Do, from Pippin
by Stephen Schwartz
I love my profession it’s a joy and that the world needs our profession, the moment, because it’s such a sad place.
– Danny La Rue
In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast.
-Quentin Crisp
It can be hard to decide what should be the prologue to Final Crisis. Read every Crisis? Recommend Seven Soldiers of Victory, since that has plot threads and a few characters continuing here?
In Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol (with Richard Case and others), Danny the Street – named for Danny La Rue – is a queer, sentient, self-populating street. By the end of that run, Danny expands to Danny the World, and in other runs, like the one written by Keith Giffen, Danny can be reduced to, or expand from, Danny the Brick.
A brick is hard to grapple with, when it holds the weight of a world, and a world is too big to be tenable, sometimes.
An avenue is only a broad street.
One tactic we can take to more easily grapple with a comic which seems to defy annotating with seven potential allusions in every panel even though the panels probably only actually reference five things, not seven, is to reach for nine allusions and if there is not a ninth, to make it up.
Final Crisis will never be as complex as the anxious among us wish, nor as simple and direct as enthusiasts sometimes insist to convince the anxious to give it another shot. If the comic really turns you off, you can simply quit it. No life will be spared or preserved solely on the basis of if you have given Final Crisis enough chances that it finally begins to satisfy you. You can stop.
But, if you want to take it on, and to really take it on, you may as well go all the way. Big big and go home. An important part of Final Crisis is that no one will ever be caught up. The hyper-narratives of the DC Comics multiverse will continue to grow and seed and twist and refract. There will always be fresh avenues and old roads and side streets you did not know about or momentarily forgot. Intersections are transitive. The best way to find your way is to find your own way.
Monitor knows and sees all, and it breaks Monitor. Monitor, who is a many-minded, many-bodied being, the biggest lifeform anyone has ever encountered, inside which, all reality and realities lie, creates story, awareness, and life out of little more than cracks on the wall, floaters in the eye. Monitor divides up into a culture of Monitors and they fret and fight and love and cry because life is too complex to hold all at once, too tightly.
Nix Uotan is a Monitor on an Earth in a universe in a multiverse in Monitor, a part of which is Nix Uotan.
New Gods are outside our Earth, inside some of us. Simultaneously. Concurrently.
In Final Crisis, we are shown that rather than simply, “so above, so below,” existences can occur at above and below, below in above, above in below. A New God of Escape can be a physical entity, a cosmic giant, and a drive inside any of us, a feeling, a sense, an accomplishment.
Everyone and every thing in Final Crisis is a complex of ideas. A collection of evocations. And, inside of us, the audience, impressions. Darkseid or Orion are as much ideas as they are people, and Batman and Mary Marvel are people and they are convocations of ideas. A New God can be inside a human being, as the New God of Sadism, Desaad, is inside Mary Marvel, the same way that Mary Marvel can embody the defining traits of old gods – Selena, Minerva – and of spirits, forces, storied people – Hippolyta, Ariadne, Zephyrus – worth noting that, pre-publication, one of the matrons of Mary Marvel was to be Sappho, and knowing that, of course, a sapphic radiance paints itself back over every instance of Mary Marvel and colors interpretation. In choosing Zephyrus, they still chose an explicitly queer god, and a male god, as a patron.
Story overlaps story, waves on waves, and in a permanent shifting of ocean waters and silt we lose any singular or specific thread to the seas.
Minerva, also a god of war, an evocation of war, as the New God, Orion, as Martian Manhunter, Mars, and for our purposes, Batman and Ultraman, but, unlike them, Minerva represents and evokes defensive war, strategy, protection, a sponsor of art, strategy, and trade.
All of Mary’s traditional matronage are spirits Darkseid’s conquest would want squashed and Desaad’s perverse humiliation would want distanced.
“Female and male, with silvery rays you shine, and now full-orbed, now tending to decline. Mother of ages, fruit-producing Mene (Moon), whose amber orb makes night’s reflected noon.”
– Orphic Hymn #9
Selene, a hermaphroditic goddess (see Mene/Men, or Greek Selene as Phrygian Mene), deification of the Moon and etymologically tied to light, is in automatic contrast to the gloom Darkseid brings.
We can take Final Crisis holistically and elliptically.
Whenever it snows in the world, it is said that Frau Holle is making her bed. Date: circa 1925
Did Grant Morrison or JG Jones mean to invoke the stories of Frau Holle, with the dialogue, “Ist der… der himmel blutungen… die hölle… ist… ist hier,” Mother Holle who spreads a blanket washed of menstrual blood in the sky, changing seasons, changing time? It is not their fault or responsibility that Holle is Hell and a corruption of Hulda. If we take “die holler” to mean, “the Holle,” there is nothing stopping Frau Holle from being Mother Hell. Mother Hell could, too, meet two daughters, tell them to shake out her blanket and let the feathers fly forthwith to make the winter snows of Earth. The menstrual blood could be a finger pricked to give the excuse not to work any more. Who knows the mysteries of the lazy. The lazy are industrious in crafty ways.
Or, maybe Holle’s time is the Spring, not Winter. In the springtime story, the two sisters do not fluff and dry her laundry, but only spin, and their spinning must be done in time and timeliness. In this story, the daughters are orphans. Their mother is dead. “Empty is your distaff, fine is your thread,” is as good a judgment as those of Nix Uotan, the Judge of All Evil.
Final Crisis is thick with old germanic and norse stories. Odin holds naive command as Uotan. The storm and stress emotionalism, valkyrienne license, dämmerung (morning) and Götterdämmerung (Ragnarök, the Twilight of the Gods). Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle and the Eddas and their permutations across superhero comics come together to maintain a tone and shape navigational signs for FC.
Nix Uotan has to be the Judge of All Evil, because he has to be our guy. Odin has to be our guy in a story about regeneration, twilight, and the Der Ring des Nibelungen. A patriarch as a young man. A god of writing. Odin’s name derives – maybe – from as disparate and intermingled of terms as, frantic, possessed, rage, poetry, seer, divination, and insane.
The final Crisis is not simply the end of the Monitor’s world and Monitor culture/society, but Uotan losing his culture, his homeland, his lover, his life.
Nix Uotan is condemned as the lazy sibling, just as the sister in the Mother Holle stories.
Uotan is framed, he is set up, but he is guilty even in the framing, because there is no obvious framework for his duties beyond doing everything he can. The Monitors deal only in melodrama.
Uotan’s crime is that the universe he is tasked to watch is destroyed, all life on Earth killed, things irrevocably damaged. His duty was, solely, to watch after the sanctity and security of that universe. There appear to be no extenuating circumstances permitted, no leniency for him having been deliberately distracted, kept from his duties.
And, Uotan is framed because he is designed to be framed. His father sets him up, his father corrupts into Mandrakk, because his father is so designed. They are designed and designated. Individual Monitors are bodies and personalities built for narrative roles. Uotan was always going to be framed, to be widowered, to be ejected to an Earth, to relearn responsibility, to relearn to walk and stab and stand on his won.
The monkey at the typewriter who writes reality, the Ape of Toth, is in Final Crisis, sitting exactly where Nix Uotan does in a prison of Darkseid, with the same pose as well as the same placement, because.
Everything can connect. A revelation of Morrison’s comics, overall, isn’t it? A commercial technique deployed to success over the course of their career, the interconnectedness, the repetition of basic concepts, the reuse of terms, of evocations, enriches their shared world comics; their own comixography. Final Crisis is a phase space in which all connectivity is permissible. A pile of Crises. A stack. Like a stack of comics or pages laid up one on another on another on another, between covers in a stack of comics.
The indelible weight of potential meanings and achievable interpretations is the book which contains all stories, which Superman alone cannot lift, which Overman alone cannot read, a book of Monitor-mindedness and Monitor-misunderstanding.
As gravity and gravitas well deeply and densely in the Crisis of Crises, like qabalah allows a specific resonance of meanings for a word or thing, but all those are in gematria, interchangeable, the world of worlds, the orrery of alternate Earths watched after by the Monitors in their growing and groaning addiction to narrative and narrational thrill, can begin to pile in every meaning and overlapping hoped for meanings.
This is because we always act in partial ignorance. A familiar reader of German is going to be unpleased with the absence of an umlaut where one belongs. Holle and Hölle remain distinct. For the rest of us? Some English-speakers do not know what, “six of one, a half-dozen of the other,” even means.
Dark Mary Marvel in her boring black short skirt was coming whether or not she appeared in Final Crisis. She was fitted into FC, it seems, significantly to reframe an a priori idea as possession and manipulation by a god of sadism. Desaad lives inside Mary, dresses her, does her hair, whispers horrible threats, plants devious guilt. A leering old pervert controlling a brilliant young woman.
A Final Crisis lead-in kills off Justeen, and in FC, Mary Marvel is remade as a Justine who looks to us all to be Juliette.
Justine and Juliette are sisters in two long novels of the Marquis de Sade’s, Juliette embracing libertinage and crime to make her fortune and protect herself, and Justine who being so good and kind, cannot, and suffers. The evil space god, Desaad, had a lover and assistant called, Justeen, murdered in The Death of the New Gods, and while not so named, Mary takes the gig. Mary is the Justine gag, given modern dress and less pornification. Which, is saying something, as she is intentionally pornified.
Kalibak, brother of the dead god, Orion, son of Darkseid, who wields a beta club because he will always be second, is given a new body, massive, resembling a tiger, because his family are a family of tigers. They embody the “tiger-force,” the live as tigers. A metaphor, a symbol, given fur and flesh and teeth and claws.
Years ago, I sat and calculated gematria resonances for various principle figures of Final Crisis, after hearing that Grant Morrison might sometimes use those to generate details or connectivity. The calculations were revelatory, but they would be without intent. The point of gematrial resonances is that they give revelation.
A batman is, of course, an adjutant to a military officer, a servant in war. (Time, then, to reread Last Rites, the two issue Batman story in the midst of Final Crisis, in a new butler-centered light.)
In Aleister Crowley’s English gematria, Batman has equivalence with Mars, Khamael, task, yajna, forge, ruach and guard. In Final Crisis, Orion is a god of war who is murdered. J’onn J’onzz, the Martian Manhunter, the last man of Mars, is also murdered, both political kills. Khamael is an angel of war. It is easy to tie Batman to the classical Orion, a hunting and underworld god, but Batman is an American billionaire industrialist descended from crusaders and colonizers. Of course, Batman, is a god of war.
Wonder Woman is equative with Mister Miracle, and like Mister Miracle is the God of Escape and Freedom, of Getting Free, Wonder Woman is the superhero who frees the entire population of Earth from the bondage of Darkseid and the anti-life equation.
Supergirl’s Aurora Aureae (Thelema’s Golden Dawn) to Mary Marvel’s Choronzon (Thelema’s Dweller in the Abyss). Solar Order versus Master Lord (whom, presumably, gods born in).
Dan Turpin: Christus, Child Horus, Eternal Self.
Nix Uotan, our chosen Monitor, our limitless boy, the part of the great author and audience who can walk and work in their creation, has gematrial equivalencies in our chosen, great work, limitless, and wonderful.
Superman, whom Final Crisis will make the real rock, the real center of the DC multiverse, the DC Comics existence? Sun of Life. Treasure. Quantum. Solar Self.
The Question, Renee Montoya – a character created for television, but who has really bloomed in comics (and since, in movies), seemed an odd fit, to many, for being an epicene world’s police and for being onboard an interdimensional boat of alternate Earth Superman types. Good Superman, childlike Superman, not-the-Sentry, Superman-from-Wildstorm, smart Superman, Superman-but-a-demon, and Renee Montoya?
While Renee, the Question who wears a faceless face put on and taken off with chemical clouds finds equivalences in androgynous and strange drugs, she is also, ipsissimus and Friedrich Nietzsche’s Superman, Zarathustra.
The Question is a Superman, too.
Oh, the redefinition we can make if we read Mandrakk in line with Wotan, crucible, crafty; redeemer. Final Crisis, itself, flows so well with hawk-headed lord, foundation, and the knower. Is there any finer arc to FC than in foundation and the knower? Self-assembling hyper-narratives achieved.
We can really dig in. We can see faces in the clouds. We can see resonance between the shadow Darkseid’s fall and suicide cast over reality and the gloom cast onto worlds by the Monitor’s micro-machine, the massive destroyer in Superman Beyond.
We can see the Forever People inside the Super Young Team, those nerdy hip kids from Japan, the Furies in the possessed Wonder Woman and her crew.
New Gods can be resonant in a person, in Final Crisis, without being that person, or even, possessing them, in the conscious-steering sense. A New God is a complex of ideas. We have them inside us. Of course, inside the DC Universe, they have them inside of them. We all have something of Lightray or Lashina in us sometimes. Having High Father inside us does not mean we have to lead a city of gods or carry a shepherd’s stick. High Father is a complex of ideas concentrated principally around maturation. When we mature, when we have to mature, that is High Father.
The Super Young Team are the Forever People because they are nerdy hip kids. All nerdy hip kids are the Forever People. The number of kids in the group, the specific one to one breakdown or who reflects who, that does not matter. The Forever People are not a number of bodies, that is just one way they show up. The Forever People is a spirit.
“There are no dualities,” as Superman Beyond tells us, in the middle of Final Crisis. “Only symmetries.”
