The Multiversity #1 – Review

By: Grant Morrison (story), Ivan Reis (pencils), Joe Prado (inks), Nei Ruffino (colors)

The Story: It’s the Superman-Captain Carrot team-up you’ve all been waiting for.

The Review: At least, it arrives, a project long-touted and already somewhat overhyped. It’s not just the Morrison name, although there’s certainly that; it’s also the fact that he’s working on a project so aligned to his talents and interests, one that sprawls not only over the DCU proper but the entire Multiverse as well. Any good DC fan is sure to be interested in how the Multiverse’s current structure looks now and how it may be used in the future.

Personally, I’m bummed that arbitrary limitation of 52 worlds remains in place, although Thunderer (Earth-7), one of the many featured heroes, refers to them as “fifty-two known worlds,” suggesting unknown ones may pop up later. But even with the cap in place, Morrison has a massive playground to run wild in, using each Earth to site different themes of heroes, almost all of them with a sly wink. Earth-23 is home to an all-black Justice League; Earth-36, where Red Racer and Power Torch (Flash and Green Lantern doppelgangers) are lovers; Earth-11, in which all our favorite characters’ genders are reversed.

Final Crisis # 7 (of 7) – Review

By Grant Morrison (writer) Doug Mahnke (pencils), Tom Nguyen and Cristian Alamy (inks)

The Story: DC’s Final Crisis concludes with Superman saving all of reality by defeating a resurrected Darkseid and an insidious Mandrakk, the Dark Monitor. All the various plot threads coalesce as time and space are restored through Superman utilizing miracle technology from the future. In addition, the status of Batman, who is perhaps the biggest conversation topic of Final Crisis, is visited and his future narrative is formulated.

What’s Good: The way Grant Morrison wrote this installment reads like a flip book whose pages are out of order. Whether or not this is effective is a subjective assessment. Nevertheless, I find it to be enjoyable and rewarding. Don’t get me wrong: this is highly nontraditional story telling, but I am intrigued with the multi-narrative approach that reflected the “real” representation of the broken time line.

Like a great dessert can retroactively make an average meal good, so too the end of this issue’s ability to sweetened the beginning. The dramatic conclusion of the Monitor saga worked really well, as did the final pages, which will no doubt be the most controversial.

What’s Not So Good: There are way too many sub-plots at play here. I would have liked to see more time allotted to the main thrust of the story, rather than peripheral stories involving marginal characters. There’s so much time spent catching the reader up with what has happened previously in the story, a reader could pick up this issue and get all the information needed for the whole series without reading the ones before it. If you’re confused by this issue, then the previous installments won’t clear anything up for you. And if you get all the heavy DC continuity and meta-narrative stuff, than this issue is all you need.

Additionally, changing art teams for this final issue might have been necessary for practical and editorial reasons, but it is nevertheless jarring. It changes the tone and feeling of this series, and for-better-or-for-worse, wrecks whatever momentum was working for FC. Don’t get me wrong, Doug Mahnke draws very well and tells the story clearly. I just would have liked him to be on from the beginning or not at all.

Conclusion: It is hard to sum up this comic because I don’t really know what it was supposed to do. If this issue is meant to be an exercise in experimental comic book creating, using mainstream superheros as a pallet, than this issue is a success. But if this series is meant to impact the modern DC universe and satiate a reader’s appetite for DC superhero stories, than this issue is slightly above being a failure.

I think the biggest setback of this issue (and this series, for that matter) comes when Morrison focuses to much on cool ideas by sacrificing solid story telling. Perhaps the most damming conclusion I’m forced to say about this comic is that it is un-recommendable.

Final Grade: C+

-Rob G