“I’d become fascinated by the power and the existence of the Evil-Has-Won narrative and resolved to explore it further in a major DC universe crossover event. I was asked to complete what Dan DiDio was now calling his Crisis trilogy with a wrap-up book to be called Final Crisis.
Dan wanted to use this series as a showcase for Kirby’s New Gods characters, and if I was excited by the idea of having to improvise on that theme, I was even more overjoyed to know that I had access to Darkseid himself, the ultimate supertyrant with his Anti-Life Equation.
As far as I was concerned, the Anti-Life Equation was being rammed down my gullet every day in the papers and on TV, and I was sick of it; sick of being told the world was dying, and it was all because I’d forgot to turn off the bathroom light; sick of Fina(ncia)l Crisis, the War, and the teenage suicide bombers willing to die for the promise of a cheesy afterlife that sounded like a night out with the lap dance girls at Spearmint Rhino.
With J. G. Jones and later Doug Mahnke on art, we set about dramatizing the breakdown of the rational enlightenment story of progress and development as it succumbed to a horror tale of failure, guilt, and submission to blind authority.
I brushed up on the cheerful literature of apocalypse and doomsday, refamiliarizing myself with the various revelations, Ragnaroks, and myths of the end times to construct a thoroughly modern Armageddon in which half the human race was possessed by an evil god who announced his arrival in the form of Anti-Life Equation e-mails and small acts of Cruelty that grow to consume The World.
What would it look like if a comic-book universe died, and what could it tell us about what we were doing to ourselves?
The “final crisis,” as I saw it for a paper universe like DC’s, would be the terminal war between is and isn’t, between the story and the blank page.
What would happen if the void of the page took issue with the quality of material imposed upon it and decided to fight back by spontaneously generating a living concept capable of devouring narrative itself?
A nihilistic cosmic vampire whose only dream was to drain the multiverse dry of story material, then lie bloated beneath a dead sun, dying.
I tried to show the DC universe breaking down into signature gestures, last-gasp strategies that were tried and tested but would this time fail, until finally even the characterizations would fade and the plot become rambling, meaningless, disconnected. Although I lost my nerve a little, I must confess, and it never became disconnected enough.
This, I was trying to say, is what happens when you let bad stories eat good ones. This is what it looked like when you allow the Anti-Life Equation to turn all your dreams to nightmares.
In the end, there was nothing left but darkness and the first superhero, Superman, with a crude wishing machine, the deus ex machina itself, and a single wish powered by the last of his own life force.
He wished for a happy ending, of course.
Final Crisis was a bestseller, but it divided the Internet crowd like Alexander’s sword. One outraged reader even confidently predicted that I would, someday soon, be brought to account for the “evil” I had done. For a comics fan scorned, it seemed, the measure of evil lay not in genocide or child abuse but in continuity details deliberately overlooked by self-important writers, of plot points insufficiently telegraphed, and themes made opaque or ambiguous.
If only one-tenth of the righteous, sputtering wrath of these anonymous zealots could be mustered against the horrors of bigotry or poverty, we might find ourselves overnight in a finer world.
That’ll catch on.
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