FINALLY, CRISIS

As some sort of cosmic coincidence, it just happens to be "Kirby Day" (on which the King would have been 92 years old) on the day I get around to doing a review of FINAL CRISIS, the book in which Grant Morrison most thoroughly explores the ideas of Jack Kirby's Fourth World.

Since FC is old news, I'm not delving into the work in detail. My chief interest is to examine whether or not Morrison's work is "mythic" in the sense I define literary myths. Steven Grant wrote an essay partly reviewing FINAL CRISIS but also asserting that no pop-cultural story, be it by Kirby or Morrison or Steven Grant, could even be "myth." I then wrote an answering essay in which, frankly, I tore apart Grant's logic as through so much tissue paper, but I admitted at the end of the essay that I couldn't refute Grant's opinion on FC, as I hadn't finished it.

Now I have, and as a literary myth it is-- to say the least-- flawed.

It has virtues, of course. It's largely an adrenaline-pumping thrill-ride, and if the Big Two are financially bound to the concept of doing such mega-crossovers, then it's better than they shoot for wild thrills than static setups in which superheroes See a Lot of Dead People.

But is it mythic? I've defined a work's mythicity as its ability to structure its symbolic elements in a complex, interweaving manner, and in this blog's initial essay I quoted Yeats in this regard, who noted that "mythic narrative... cannot tell one story without telling a hundred others."

Given that the mega-crossovers of Marvel and DC are stories that at least evoke hundreds of previous stories in each company's respective continuities, the mega-crossover sounds like an ideal place where a creator like Morrison-- known for celebrating the "metanarrative" aspects of stories in several of his works, not least being the ANIMAL-MAN series-- should be able to shine.

In practice, FINAL CRISIS merely proves the rule about mega-crossovers: with great numbers of powerhouses come diminishing returns. I'm not one of those fans who insists that the "story" is no good unless it's heavily plotted, for by its nature the mega-crossover has the structure of a vaudeville show, where each performer comes out and does his/her thing before being quickly followed by someone else.

That said, although Morrison uses a structure for FC much like that of his previous (and more aesthetically successful) SEVEN SOLDIERS crossover-project, the choppiness of the various DC superhero segments works against most of the characters really getting across the essence of their mythic "talents." Morrison provided a much better mirror for superhero myths in his JUSTICE LEAGUE run, where even C-list characters like Steel took on greater symbolic significance.

The most interesting thing about FINAL CRISIS is Morrison's elaboration of one of Jack Kirby's key mythic constructs, "the Anti-Life Equation," itself somewhat derivative of the One Ring from Tolkien's LORD OF THE RINGS. Equation and Ring are both explicitly-modern forms of myth insofar as they resemble none of the threats one finds in archaic myth-epics, where the threats to the heroes are generally physical in nature. Only in modern fantasies does one find the idea of using some device to bind all of humanity to one will, which seems a symbolic translation of contemporary human fears about the ease with which human will can be subverted. Morrison's take on such subversion is of course not informed with the same symbolic resonances as Kirby's was, but there's a good deal of interplay between their creative "universes." Thus when Morrison revives Kirby's "Justifiers"-- humans who place themselves in the role of total obedience to The Cause, even without the impetus of anti-life controlling them-- he's more than able to evoke the abnegation of personal will with quite as much horror as Kirby himself essayed.

Thus, even if the whole of FINAL CRISIS is less than the sum of its parts, I do find that some of those parts still make for damned good myth.