1 Bourbon, 1 Scotch, 1 Book, Day 5

Final Crisis #6
Writer: Grant Morrison
Artists: JG Jones and everyone who wasn't busy that weekend.

Batman's dead! BAM! Fuck you.

No, seriously. If you hadn't heard about this third-hand from your own grandmother, then you deserve to have it spoiled for you just like all us nerds have had it spoiled, by hearing every writer and editor hint at it for the better part of eighteen months. I bought more than ten issues of, damn their eyes, Countdown. I earned that becowled corpse.

There is no way to really sum this up in chronological order so I'll do it this way...

Premise: The multiverse in general and Earth-1 specifically is turning into a fucked-to-death pile of flaming poo due to Darkseid, a higher-dimensional god of death, existing solely on our plane of existence. Kind of like when your friend who's kinda heavy and doesn't quite know his own strength flops down on your wire-frame futon from Wal-mart and breaks it. Only, y'know, bigger repercussions and all that.

Solutions, enumerated and attempted with varying degrees of failure in this issue...
- The Checkmate (think Super-NATO) organization and Mister Miracle's Japanese super-kids club know a way of shielding minds from Anti-Life.
- Black Canary and the remainder of the Justice League are stuck on the League's satellite base fighting Darkseid's brainwashed Justifier soldiers.
- Lex Luthor and Sivana may or may not have found a way to take control of everyone on the planet who's wearing one of the Justifier brainwashing helmets-- oh, and Luthor tried to kill Libra but he pulled a Ben Kenobi.
- Another branch of Checkmate is-- get this-- planning to retreat to a parallel Earth. Damn. Stealing an idea from Mark Millar? Grant, you have ever-so-slightly shamed all of us. They also invented a "good" version of Brother Eye, this time with a human brain inside it. Oh yeah, that'll end well.
- The Flashes-- all three of them-- have a plan to lure the Black Racer-- aka Death itself-- right to Darkseid's doorstep by running "faster than ever"... you'd think they'd eventually hit some kind of upper limit on that, but no...
- The Green Lanterns are still trying to get into the Earth's atmosphere and their ring's power is starting to drain...
- Metron, the New God of knowledge and being a cryptic fuckstick, is hinting at the new Monitor that he (the Monitor) needs to get involved...
-BATMAN FUCKING SHOT DARKSEID WITH A GUN THAT KILLS GODS. AFTER YELLING "DO I MAKE MYSELF CLEAR?!" LIKE HE'S DARKSEID'S DAD AND THE FUCKER GOT A D IN MATH.
- And yeah, then Darkseid used his "Omega Effect" to kill Batman. And Superman came back from the future just in time to find Bruce's burnt-up body.

Guns don't kill people. BATMAN USES GUNS TO KILL GOD.

I can't believe Marvel has made Captain America's death last so long and it looks like Cap's going to stay dead, uhm, even longer.
But I doubt that DC has it in them.
So, while I'm loving the crap out of this miniseries, and I wish its repercussions would last forever... no dice. This is all going to go back in the box once Grant Morrison's done playing with it and then the editors will think of some new crap next year like Countdown to Total Ultimate War. Or maybe they'll use that Mortal Kombat vs. DC game as a springboard to make Scorpion and Johnny Cage JLA members.
Oh yeah, and a good talking tiger kills an evil talking tiger. I swear to god, I don't even know what's going on anymore.
Rating: Four Whiskey Sours. It's fun, it's pretty, it's Grant Morrison. And like life itself, it is fleeting and delicate, making it all the more beautiful.
Album: Beck- Odelay

Breaking News on CNN: Bendis to be nominated Secretary of WTF

DC.
MARVEL.
WHO SUCKS MORE?

Now that the election's over and America has decided to go for four years of surrender, baby-killing, Islamofascist appeasement, gay marriage, socialism and atheism, we can all relax. But during the election, did you ever feel like, if you just focused on McCain, or Obama, or even Hillary or Ron Paul or Bob Barr or Ralph Nader... if you focused on one of them, and read about them and all the things they want to do for the country, you'd get a good feeling about them. But when you looked at every side of each issue and try to weigh the pros and cons and you started really comparing the candidates and putting them under the microscope, you started to think something like "all of these people are assholes! If I were stuck on a bombed-out Pacific atoll with one of them, a canteen of water and a gun with two bullets, I'd shoot them in the head, shoot a hole in the canteen, lay down and die laughing."
Maybe that's just me.
The point I'm trying to make is, DC and Marvel have always been flawed, are horribly flawed now, and will always be some degree of flawed, even if my Satanic ritual works and I unify both publishers under my throne made from the flayed bones of Chris Claremont and Dan DiDio.
As it stands, Secret Invasion and Final Crisis have both been horribly mismanaged. What to do about it? Act like some asshole who thinks he could've done better, of course.

SECRET INVASION: An Eighteen-Month Prologue to Dark Reign or an Eighteen-Month Epilogue to Civil War?
So apparently since Norman Osborne scored the headshot on the Skrulls' Queen, he gets to be protector of the free world now and everyone else gets jack, or jacked. Or brought back to life. Whatever. Typical Bush-era cronyism. Tony Stark's a fugitive (guh?), there are now three groups of Avengers not including the Young Avengers, one of whom may or may not be just plain villains... Hawkeye and Mockingbird are both alive... okay, wait a second.
Bendis brought back Mockingbird because apparently the rationale was the Skrulls needed their hosts alive to take genetic material from them. WHY THE FUCK WAS THERE A PHOENIX SKRULL? OR A GALACTUS SKRULL, OR A CAPTAIN AMERICA SKRULL?
Who's dumber-- Bendis, Leinil Yu, or their editor? Does Bendis even have an editor? I'D HAVE NEVER FUCKING GUESSED, FROM READING HIS SHITTY, LACKLUSTER DIALOGUE!

Seriously. When Nick Fury and the Secret Warriors show up at the end of issue 2 or 3 to save the day, he says something to the effect of "Okay, Commandos! Time to turn this thing around!" Cool, right? Wrong. In any self-respecting action-oriented comic book, that dialogue would be a) IN ALL CAPS, because that indicates yelling instead of speaking softly, without exclamation points, b) red, to further emphasize that he's a war hero and he's shouting an order very loudly to his troops, and

c) TAKING UP HALF THE PAGE. BECAUSE THAT'S HOW YOU SHOW THAT PEOPLE IN COMICS ARE YELLING.


So. Anyway. In addition to this. So now after the final fight, everybody's just back to normal except that Osborne, Doom, Namor and Emma Frost run the world? How do we know there aren't more Skrulls lurking somewhere? Did Reed Richards use his Skrull-identifying gun on everyone on the planet just to make sure? It seems convenient that every Skrull on Earth showed up at the final, fateful battle in NYC. Then again, convenience is the name of the game when it comes to plot threads in comics. We're lucky the Scarlet Witch didn't just show up and say "No More Skrulls" at the end. That may sound like a joke. It's not. We as comics fans should really and truly give thanks to whichever gods each of us worship that Bendis did not resort to that.
So now there's "Dark Reign." Osborne's dark version of the Marvel Illuminati (Osborne, Namor, Dr. Doom, the Hood, Emma Frost and Loki) are going to run things now. I'm a mean, cynical bastard, but it's just really hard to see the last pages of Secret Invasion #8 and think that Bendis saw this same work and thought, "there it is. Here's what I've worked towards for so long, finally realized. Yessir... after three long years, finally, superheroes are fighting supervillains again. Truly I have done something new and different in the medium of sequential art."
Great. To quote Wayne's World, thanks a lot there, Chet. I'm not even going to get into all the Secret Invasion miniseries and tie-ins we all had to decide to buy or not buy in the last eight months, because by now it's pretty much S.O.P. for "events" like this. I'm just hoping that after Dark Reign is over, maybe these people with the superpowers could maybe try to work on fighting actual crime maybe a little bit maybe.

FINAL CRISIS? Or Final Proof That All Reality is Subjective?
Poor Grant Morrison. Every time he has a good idea for an in-continuity story, someone makes him change it because it might actually change the status quo in some way, and everyone else at DC knows you can't do that unless you're Geoff Johns (excuse me, Geoff Fucking Johns, Sir, is how you actually pronounce it) and you're only changing things by creating more characters that Warner Bros. can eventually option for terrible movies.
In Final Crisis, it's yet another ultimate battle between superheroes and Evil Gods from another dimension, only this time their very existence is tearing the fabric of time and space to shreds. Pretty trippy, by which I mean, pretty standard for Grant Morrison. If all you've ever read from DC is stuff Morrison's written, you're fine. Otherwise you may be in trouble. Because except for the Final Crisis miniseries like Submit/Resist, Rogues' Revenge, Legion of 3 Worlds and Revelations, fuckin' nothin' is going on in the DCU that acknowledges what's going on at all. It's as if what Morrison writes is in its own little...
...oh my God.*
Marvel. They knew. They know!
WATSON, COME HERE, I NEED YOU!

*Hermes, Athena, Apollo or the Muses...whoever's listening out of those, really