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

Coming to DC in 2009: All-Star Gandhi, All-Star Joan of Arc

All-Star Superman #1-9
Written by Grant Morrison
Drawn by Frank Quitely

I don’t mean to be crass or anything, but if the American standard of trade suddenly shifted from dollars to blowjobs, I’d still pay twice as much as the cover price for All-Star Superman, and I’d still pray for it to come out more than once every three months. This is not my roundabout way of sexually propositioning any of the fine folks at Plan 9 Comics; I’d say the same thing if the store was co-owned by Chris Claremont, P. Diddy and Anna Nicole Smith’s corpse (too soon?). All-Star Superman is that good. It doesn’t have to be blowjobs. Our currency could suddenly be read on the Wall Street ticker as “$1=Five fights picked with Chuck Norris” and I’d still beg for the privilege of paying $2.99 for each issue.
I’m going to try and get the objective facts about plot and art out of the way now so that I might then continue singing the praises of Morrison and Quitely unhindered.
I don’t know if this is Frank Quitely’s best work ever; I must shamefully admit to not having seen everything he’s ever drawn, and his work on New X-Men was pretty breathtaking. That said, just about every panel in all nine issues published in the past two years has been nothing short of beautiful. He took a bit of time to find his footing in the first issue, but by issue two, the hesitant shading and the age lines on Superman’s face were gone. I think Max Fleischer would have fallen in love with this story based on Quitely’s cartoony, yet very human, style alone.
Another thing. It pains me to say this as a holder of a Bachelor of Arts in English, but too often, today’s comics are—well—too full of words. Cough cough Bendis cough cough Loeb cough cough. Exposition and dialogue go on for days and the art suffers for having to crowd in underneath all the word balloons, and trust me, I’m self-aware enough to know just from looking at what you’re reading this very moment that if I were lucky enough to write comics for a living, I’d be making the same mistake.
Grant Morrison, as a semi-divine entity, is not encumbered by this same mortal propensity. The economy of his words and Quitely’s pictures is simply perfect. Who’s your favorite film director? It doesn’t matter. They couldn’t do a better job of cutting individual moments together into a cohesive, spectacular story than the All-Star Scots (Morrison and Quitely both hail from Glasgow).
As for the story, it’s very similar to the art—simple, iconic, unforgettable. Due to Lex Luthor’s machinations, Superman has absorbed too much solar energy. He’s going to die. In the meantime, he has to use his newly-enhanced powers to set things right (while he can) on his adopted home planet, and with his own personal life, which has for so long come second to him after safeguarding the planet.
He reveals his true feelings for Lois Lane, and invents a serum that lets her duplicate his powers for a day. He travels back in time to defeat a four-dimensional monster, and gets the chance to make peace with his dead father. When a piece of “dark kryptonite” turns him into an Evil Superman, Jimmy Olsen has to save the day—one last great adventure with “Superman’s Pal.” As Clark Kent, he interviews Lex Luthor, who I’m happy to say has never been written as more of an arrogant madman than in this comic. Luthor brags of his own greatness and superiority to “The Alien,” sitting on Death Row for his plan to tamper with the Sun that has (or will, anyway) cost Superman his life. In the middle of a deadly prison riot, Clark saves Lex’s life, twice, and he doesn’t even notice. That’s one of my favorite Easter eggs in the whole series—the half-dozen times that his bumbling, oafish Clark Kent persona saves a person’s life without the other person noticing.
The only misstep—if you can call it that—so far has been making the Planet Bizarro story two issues long, where everything else was pretty much a one-shot, all in a definite order, but leaving no minor conflict unresolved for more than thirty pages at a time.
Morrison and Quitely have called All-Star Superman their “love letter to America,” and honestly, I don’t know if we deserve such a beautiful tribute. It’s slated to end with issue #12, as a sort of “Twelve Labors of Superman” epic. And for those of you who are worried and confused, no, Superman isn’t “really” going to die again—not in continuity. The point of the All-Star line is to tell iconic stories that transcend continuity and attract new readers based on characterization and storytelling, not interconnected plot points and alternate realities and dystopian futures.
Speaking of futures, though, I wouldn’t fear for Clark’s health too much. For one thing, in issue #6 he travels back in time with the “Superman Squad,” a team of time-traveling Supermen from the future, so he at least has to have an heir before he dies, right? And for those of you who remember Morrison’s story DC One Million, the return of Solaris, the Tyrant Sun, has been hinted at twice now… somehow, I think Superman will pull through. Am I any less anxious to see issues 10, 11 and 12 hit the stands, though? Not at all. I’m as psyched as I was when issue #2 was a week away. Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, I am proud to present you with Fermented Media’s first Single Malt Scotch Rating for a comic book series.

Rating: Single Malt Scotch.

Two Words: Ninja Man-Bats.

from volume 1, issue 2, early November 2007

Batman #666-669; Annual #26
Written by Grant Morrison (Peter Milligan for the Annual)
Drawn by Andy Kubert, J.H. Williams and David Lopez

I want to preface this review by saying I don’t believe that Grant Morrison can do no wrong: the Seven Soldiers maxi-series was a confusing fever dream when read all together as one story, and I nearly had a seizure after reading the first volume of Invisibles. That said, when you tame that bucking bronco of a mind and get it to write continuity-bound superhero comics, the results are pretty astounding. So far in Morrison’s run, Batman has fought an army of ninja Man-Bats in London, discovered that Talia al Ghul bore him a son named Damian, and crossed paths with two other “Batmen” who seemed to be evil funhouse-mirror fragments of Batman himself.
Now, speaking of fever dreams—Batman #666 is the queen mother of ‘em all. Set ten years in a dystopian future Gotham where the world is really going to hell, Damian al Ghul, the new Batman, is fighting the third “ghost Batman”, who claims to have sold his soul to the Devil for the power to destroy Gotham. Unfortunately for him, Damian sold his soul to the Devil, too—in return for Gotham staying relatively safe in the midst of Hell on Earth. Violence ensues. It’s simple, fun, and kind of messed-up—I wouldn’t give this to a kid under thirteen, let’s say. But I kind of miss the days when one-shot stories were the norm, so this was a nice change.

Not to say the “Club of Heroes” three-parter was anything except completely beautiful. Morrison takes the old, insanely corny “Batmen of Many Nations” stories from the ‘60s—England’s “The Knight,” Italy’s “Centurion,” Argentina’s “el Gaucho,” and so on—and gives us a kind of “Where Are They Now?” reunion encased in a murder mystery.
I’ll say it again, I don’t know the first thing about art, but J.H. Williams’s work in these three issues is absolutely gorgeous. The panels that form bat-shapes and spirals, the shadows and reflections and flashbacks… I wish every story could be told this artfully. Since the Batmen are tracking the one who’s murdering their former financer and their fellow heroes, Williams’s work has a very Hitchcock feel, from what little I know of old Hitchcock films. I’d go so far as to say Williams takes a pretty-good script from Morrison and makes the mood and the tone so inescapable that it becomes a great script. I enjoyed every second of this story and the art, for once with me, made a huge difference.

And then there’s the Batman Annual. I kind of dislike annuals as a rule, because if they were truly necessary for a story, they’d be regular-numbered issues. Sometimes they introduce characters who’ll be important in the future, but by and large they’re fairly irrelevant. In this one, Peter Milligan (who wrote the wonderful X-Force/X-Statix series) tells the story of Ra’s al Ghul’s origin as a young Arabic doctor who sacrificed his true love for immortality. Milligan does an okay job of not making this a completely lame story, and there’s this whole plot to use Damian’s body to reincarnate Ra’s, but of course, nothing of any note really happens, except that Batman finds another Lazarus Pit in Australia which leads to an amusing side story where the Lazarus… er, substance, that green stuff, whatever it is, leeched into the ground and the fruits in that area allowed an old Australian hobo to live past two hundred. I regret buying this issue, but I guess it’s better that it got shoved into an annual and wasn’t made part of the main story. It would’ve just dragged the series down. So, annual aside, Morrison’s Batman is one of the surest bets out there right now.

Rating: Four Whiskey Sours.