In thinking about the stuff Tucker Stone and I have been discussing in the comment thread here and the things Tim O’Neil is saying here, I laid out a few things in my own head in terms of where I stand on Batman: R.I.P. and Final Crisis. I thought writing them down would help clarify where I’m coming from on all this.

1) There’s “Batman: R.I.P.” the multi-title crossover Batman event and Batman: R.I.P. the Grant Morrison/Tony Daniel comic. Similarly, there’s “Final Crisis” the multi-miniseries DC Universe event and Final Crisis the Grant Morrison et al comic.

2) The sense that I get is that Morrison was barely involved with the planning of the wider R.I.P. event, if he was involved at all; it was a creation of editorial and the direction to the other titles involved was just “there’s some bad guys called the Black Glove, and eventually Batman disappears–go to town.” On the flipside, Morrison and his friend and sounding board Geoff Johns are writing virtually all of the Final Crisis event, so their involvement is obviously more extensive.

3) I think that the R.I.P. event was badly mismanaged as an event, with tie-ins that actively contradict the main storyline and each other. I’m not as grumpy about the way the main storyline apparently continues through two post-R.I.P. Batman issues and into the main Final Crisis comic, because I already planned to read all of that regardless and have been enjoying it thus far. However, I again think that this was a case of event mismanagement–it should have been made clear to readers far in advance how the story would proceed.

4) I don’t think the Final Crisis event has been as much of a mess, at least in terms of getting all the story ducks in a row. Some of the tie-in minis seem to have little to do with the central New Gods storyline, but they haven’t contradicted it, either. Obviously there are scheduling problems, but the main problems with this event stem less from stuff that’s going on within the Final Crisis umbrella and more with the stuff that’s going on outside it. Right now, its relationship to the rest of the line is impossible to ascertain. And there are also a lot of questions about the planned follow-through–all this “Faces of Evil”/”Origins and Omens” business afterwards. It probably shouldn’t take a multi-month, multi-event program to explain the status quo of your shared universe, not just after your big blockbuster but at any time.

5) That stuff being said, ultimately I couldn’t care less about any of that, either as a critic or as a consumer. That’s because, as both a critic and a consumer, I’m under no obligation to follow DC’s preferred method of following these stories. I’m quite happy to limit my involvement to those titles I choose to follow and evaluate their stories on their own terms. (One of the nice things about the tie-ins being so peripheral is that it makes such a decision even easier than it usually is, which for me is pretty dang easy.)

6) I’ve really, really been enjoying the Batman R.I.P. and Final Crisis comics proper. To the extent that they are confusing, I think those are deliberate storytelling choices, and I’ve gotten a lot out of them.

7) On a fundamental level I have no problem with event comics being demanding, because I simply do not believe event comics, or any kind of popular art, must be simplistic to be viewed as successful.

[ 7.5) For what it’s worth, I think you put yourself in an awkward position as a critic when your criticism is basically a thought experiment where you purport to speak for the needs of an audience you acknowledge to be slow, or at least slower than yourself, and interested in uninteresting things.]

8) But that doesn’t mean I don’t recognize that Batman R.I.P. event has been a head-scratching mess, the Final Crisis event less so but still pretty perplexing. They really should have been easier to follow.

9) The point is that there’s an important distinction to be made between the confusion that stems from Morrison’s scripting of the stories proper, which for me is fair game as a critic, and the confusion that stems from DC corporate/editorial/marketing’s handling of the events surrounding those stories, which seems to me like a separate and unrelated concern.

10) Even when you get right down to brass tacks and talk strictly about the stories, my attitude is to err in favor of the stories I enjoy the most. If Final Crisis contradicts Countdown to Final Crisis, if the Joker in Morrison’s Batman: R.I.P. is different than the Joker in Paul Dini’s Batman: R.I.P. tie-in, I’m going to ignore the latter, weaker story information in favor of the former, stronger story information.

11) Moreover, this is made possible because nothing in Batman: R.I.P. or Final Crisis proper forces the incorporation or acknowledgement of those weaker stories. It’s a different matter when the basic character or plot points of a story stem directly from some external source–that’s how most of Marvel now operates vis a vis their events, so that unless a creative team on an individual series comes up with a particularly clever write-around for the circumstances dictated by the event, you really do need to incorporate other comics into your reading of the comic at hand.

12) The point I really want to make is that we have far more autonomy as readers than most of the event-comics commentary (a term I prefer to criticism in this case given how much more than writing and art is being discussed) I’m seeing lately would let on.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 30th, 2008 at 10:28 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.