Patricia Highsmash
Five Ways to Read Final Crisis IV:
The Facts, Ma’am
by Travis Hedge Coke
Let us read for surface content. Let us read only what is explicitly said. Explicitly shown.
Final Crisis is imperfectly constructed and revisions to collected editions over the years owe to the imperfections. Plot-lines were dropped. Plots were added. Page count was planned, fluctuated; potential pages were lost and pages have since been gained.
A very meta comic, Final Crisis is heavy on symbolism, metaphor, emotional truth and plethora of meaning. Ignore that. Let us look at the panels for the physics and figures inside them. Read the words literally and directly as they are shown.
The very first page of Final Crisis #1, shows a character and the dialogue ballon that says, “Man.” This is a man, we are shown, but his name, too, Anthro, means, Man. Page two: “I am Metron,” and we are shown, greeting Man, Metron.
Metron is the only character in this or the next scene to speak with words. The prehistoric people who have a conflict over the next pages speak in exclamation makes, sometimes one, sometimes two, some exclamation marks drawn bigger and redder, one phrase that is not an exclamation, a squiggle mess. Then question marks. Many question marks.
Full English narration brings us from this past time to the present and to Dan Turpin explaining who he is and what he is doing in very direct ways. He speaks in character, but he speaks directly.
And, so, too, does the fallen, dying god he finds lying atop crushed boxes of toy guns. But, the god speaks of things so big and strange it feels like poetry, like it cannot be literal. We do not deal in feelings though. He says what he says. What he says is a series of true things which happened.
“Heaven… cracked and broken.”
“They did not die! He is in you all…”
The god does not just die. The specter of death literally hovers over him, presiding over the moment.
The skies, stormy and reddening are greeted with the declaration: “The weather’s gone nuts.”
Final Crisis is surprisingly direct and prosaic. It says things so directly in its dialogue and the art, beginning with series designer and original penciler, J.G. Jones, communicates in clear, specific figure work and representational art, real, physical, tactile things. Specific bodies, specific events.
Almost every question Final Crisis begins is answered in the next beat.
What is happening to the missing children? Answered panels later.
Why does a gangster desiccate? Answered.
What is Darkseid’s plan for the world? Answered immediately.
Who killed Orion? The central mystery of Final Crisis, if we treat it as a police procedural, is never really in question. Even the how is not that mysterious. And, we are never left much to guess. We are told. We are shown.
Final Crisis is not a murder mystery. It is not a superhero story. A war story. A family story. It is the story of those stories.
“We used to fight in alleys. Guys these days fight in the clouds,” is dialogue with a tone, but it’s dialogue to set us up, the reader. They already know.
In point of fact, we, that reader, saw someone fly just one page before the dialogue.
As Turpin speaks the line to Montoya and she replies, we see him pull his coat in against the rain, his cigarette reduce to one long ash. Brilliant lightning and red rain bother them none.
Final Crisis is careful to parse its information in dialogue and visuals, to double up over itself with care, for clarity. Often our anticipation of something so heady we will never grasp it gets the better of us.
That headiness can make something better, too, but when it generates a fear antagonizing our confidence, what good is that?
Even if we are unfamiliar with Darkseid before reading Final Crisis, is introduction in the first issue catches us up. “Bodies… wear our hard in here,” he tells Dan Turpin, “And, me, I was hurt in a fall.”
The missing children Turpin is investigating?
“I gave them,” says Darkseid, “to Granny.”
“There was a war in heaven, Mister Turpin, and I won.”
The Monitor dialogue is direct it reads parodic. They speak stage directions, they speak like actors on an Elizabethan stage.
“Attentions wander. Uotan, my only obstacle, is gone…” says on Monitor to an offscreen confidant sitting, presumably, right where we are.
We watch as over a series of panels, the wrestler Sonny Sumo is healed by the ping ping ping of Motherboxxx, a cell phone sized device “left after the… cosmic war.”
When a Monitor is embedded in our world, working at a fast food restaurant in Metropolis, we know his coworkers’ opinion of him from their dialogue and wordless gestures, the twirling of a finger near one ear to signify crazy.
The science fiction carts, expensive luxury cars, and frozen treat vans parked outside as the supervillains have their meeting give them as much character as anything they could say or do.
How humanly puffy and biological Batman becomes as he is in a fistfight with a god is down to J.G. Jones and the colorist, Alex Sinclair. His face becomes etched with lines on lines, simultaneously keeping him in an inexplicable shadow and aging him, giving him new airs of mortality.
Jones’ idiosyncratic, expressive faces give way, as the story turns to being more and more about story, and increasingly storied, to cartoon caricature, as new pencilers come onboard. Our feeling about the tone of scenes, the tone of the world, the frailty or strength of specific people, everything shifts with the emphasis of the visual artists.
The trick is getting caught up in the story and feeling everything and being able to pause ourselves and read for what people are doing or saying. To read dialogue for its intentional and unintentional truths. To read faces and actions for their directives and their consequences.
If questions arise, we can look for answers not in the same panel, but within a page or three. Often this rewards us.
If a mystery is sustained longer than three pages, maybe it is meant to stay a mystery. Even the ultimate fate of Batman, meant to be a mystery cliffhanger, is more or less entirely explained in the final pages of what was published. While it is easier to say “Batman was killed in Final Crisis,” reading Final Crisis makes it clear this was never true, that the comic did not and does not end with that implication at all. The absolute last thing we see in Final Crisis is living Batman; what happened to him.
The trick of it is that, no matter how we try to pare things down to pure facts and real things, intuition, supposition, concern and expectation get in. Every time, every way, they get in.
And, we each of us have a reading speed, in general and in each moment. We read as we understand, and our reading speed can overrun our understanding and our understanding can become truncated or confused by the speed of our read and that is.
That is okeh. That is going to happen. That is. As surely as this string of thats have a context you follow now, but if you were just now skimming or thinking of something else, you might have had to double back to reread a little.
When Mandrakk appears, in this reading, we have no preparation, we do not know (or are choosing to temporarily ignore) Superman Beyond, and he simply appears at the end of all the other stories.
Symbolically, Superman (designed to be the ultimate protector) is met by the primeval, ultimate predation, vengeance and forgiveness at his feet, anti-Superman his thrall, and a representatives of imagine (Captain Marvel, the Green Lantern Corps who wish objects into tactile being) join Superman, talking animals, and angels at an end to all stories, an end-story.
We do not truck with symbols.
These symbols are things. They are people. They are people-things.
It is not metaphor or symbol. These scenes do not represent or imply “the end of all stories.”
They are at The End of All Stories. And, it is a false end.
Mandrakk says, outright, this is where he waits for Superman. Mandrakk says, in declarative sentences what he is.
Superman says in declarative sentences what he is.
Monitors live in story, by story.
Mandrakk says, “Darkness must fall in the end!”
Mandrakk says the end is “all flames and shadows.”
An end is subjective. His end is in a state of flames and shadows. His end is that darkness must fall.
As much as stories can be recorded, the records are not stories. The story is in the reading or viewing, the interpreting of a record or telling. The real telling is in engagement, interpolation.
Stories, like Darkseid’s and Mandrakk’s can overlap in time or place, without being tied together as stories, but from a perspective like Superman’s, Darkseid’s suicide, Mandrakk’s return, the death of Batman, the continuity crisis of Legion of 3 Worlds, and the bombing of the Daily Planet offices are all a narrative, a story.
The corrupted Monitor who became the second Mandrakk is trapped in a story he failed to understand because Monitor-nature is to get too close to stories and misinterpret them. Mandrakk is the second Mandrakk and the first, because he became too caught up in the story of Mandrakk and forgot himself.
Mandrakk, Monitor, Anti-Monitor, Zillo Valla, Nix Uotan, Rox Ogama, and all the other Monitor-peoples are a story Monitor tells themself.
Final Crisis can be about mothers, fathers, lovers, sisters, brothers, friends, colleagues, and opponents. Much of life, and many a story is. Not wanting to lose your lover is.
Batman, Bruce Wayne, creates a better story as part of his way to defeat Darkseid, because Batman understands how they are all narratives, story-strands and story islands and story oceans and storied stories.
We get caught up.
We can talk, here, and elsewhere, of reading the objective facial expressions or specific declarative statements in Final Crisis. Just the facts. But, the facts are that Final Crisis is line art, painted covers, that lines have been altered in different publications, that everything is subjective and the subjectivity is subjective. What we interpret as solid facts or undeniable plain as the nose on your face elements are interpretable and that is why we feel they are obvious fact.
You get caught up.