WHO DO YOU TRUST???? (Answer: DC's Writers.)

If the exceedingly lengthy posts I did in prior months didn't tip you off to this, I'm a gigantic fan of comic books. And yet, aside from those two and a really crappy impression of a really excellent comic (Sinestro Corps War...and give me a break...I'm trying to develop a way to showcase shit I like without "reviewing" it), I've mostly just stuck to anime on this thing. I'm not sure why, I guess its because everyone I'm friends with is into anime (that's by design), but few people I know are into comic books.

Still, the whole reason this exists is to show all sides of me instead of "filtering" it depending on the friend I'm talking to at the moment. And thus, for just a short bit, I'm going to focus on a comic book story that I'm hyped about for 2008.

Truth to tell, for me its an excellent time to be a comic book fan. All my favorite writers are working on my favorite characters, and mostly, none of them have any intention of leaving. The year has just gotten started and already its shaping up to be one of the best years in comics history...nevertheless, there's one story that stands above the rest as far as what I'm most hyped about: Final Crisis.

Written by the utterly brilliant, utterly insane Grant Morrison, and drawn by the absolutely astouding (okay, I'm about to knock off the adjectives...starting to turn into Stan Lee) JG Jones, who's covers you can see above, I literally screamed and had a fangasm when this was first announced. I shit you not. I became a Grant Morrison fan at the age of 9, when I began reading his JLA series. Full of the best characters in comics (DC's Big Seven, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, and Aquaman) and the biggest ideas (each arc would throw a bigger threat at the team, and the team itself was essentially Morrison's way of interpreting them as greek gods), even when I couldn't fully understand the plot I was still completely able to enjoy the adventure. As I grew older, I realized he leaned towards stories with big, mind-expanding, mind-bending ideas and I've always gravitated towards work like that.

So, imagine my surprise when I learned that my favorite writer in the world was given free reign over DC's next big comic event--where characters are known to die, others can come back to life, and reality itself bends to whatever mind is in charge of said event. At the time I didn't know *anything* as far as what the story would be about, and I was still excited.

As the days tick by and the release date of the first issue comes closer though, we fans have finally had some light shed on the plot of the mysterious Final Crisis. Quoting directly from the writer in a recent interview:

"The first god character Jack Kirby did, really, on that scale, was Galactus in the Marvel U. So for me, it was simple, look at the threat created by one Galactus appearance on Earth and imagine what would happen if an entire pantheon of these guys showed up, all actively evil. Imagine the scale and the power of just one creature capable of inspiring entire religions, then add more, each more cruel, perverse or demonic than the last. That's the set-up.

The Gods are here to destroy everything that we hold dear, everything that has meaning to us, everything that has value for us. They want to utterly crush the human species and reduce us all to slavery and that's as big a threat as it gets. We wanted to do a primal superhero myth that would pit absolute evil against pure good in a way you don't see much of in comics these days so it's the story of the DC universe facing its apocalypse and only Darkseid could cut it as the main villain."

Upon reading that, I had another fangasm. People have dumped so many buckets of grey on things in real life and long ago all that grey bled over into even superhero comics, where you should always be able to tell the heroes from the villains. The idea of just getting a chance to see good and evil go at it in a gigantic battle royale makes me downright ecstatic. And at the same time, its going to be filled with all sorts of big ideas that make my brain want to explode and drool out my ears, as my aunt would say. What's not to like?