sdelmonte | Final Crisis Comes, or Hope Springs Eternal

I should know better. Identity Crisis, for all its pluses at first, turned into a rather depressing and harsh mess. Infinite Crisis, despite some really good bits, never came together as a story. One Year Later was, with only a couple of exceptions, a failure. And the less said about Countdown, the better.

And yet...and yet there is Final Crisis. What's it about? DC isn't saying, other than it's the culmination of all of the above (and also 52, the only really good Big Thing DC has done of late). And that it's going to be BIG. But it's by Grant Morrison, who impresses me far more often than he annoys me these days. It's got art by JG Jones, whose covers for 52 were uniformly amazing. It's got a spinoff by Geoff Johns and George Perez starring Superman and three different version of the Legion of Super-Heroes. It's got a spinoff by Johns and his former partner on The Flash, Scott Kolins, starring the Rogues.

In short, it has the two best writers DC has, with some of the best artists in the field and some of the heroes and villains I want to see most. And the fanboy in me is getting excited. I want to remind him about the earlier failures. I want to remind him about Superboy punching the wall, about the JLA mindwiping Batman, about Dan Didio's painful micromanagement of DC's entire line of comics. I want to remind him that mega-events tend to be bad more often than not...Millennium, Genesis, Last Laugh. I want to make him stop making me spend all that money.

It's not working. Sight unseen, I'm hooked.

Final Crisis launches in two weeks with a special 50 cent prologue written by Morrison and Johns. The story itself begins a month later. Wish me and every DC fanboy out there good luck.