The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 463: Final Crisis #3, September 2008

Many superhero event comics focus on the efforts of the human and superhuman communities to stop the end of the world, or the universe, or the multiverse. It's usually a race against time and circumstance to stop a villainous plan that would see the end of everything. But with Final Crisis, the tag line "The Day Evil Won" rings very true, and sets things apart somewhat. This isn't about stopping the end of the world, but about bringing the world back once it's ended. The only other crossover I can think of that does something like this is the Bendis-penned Age of Ultron, but even that series relies on time travel to stop the problem before it starts. No such luck here, even though we've got a few time travelling Flashes on the stage.

So by the end of this issue, a few weeks into the future from where we started with Batman at the end of "R.I.P.," the world has ended, evil has won, and Darkseid has unleashed the anti-life equation on the population of Earth. Superman has been given a chance to save Lois' life, but only if he leaves her bedside, and leaves the problems of the world behind. We'll follow him into the Superman Beyond mini-series next week. Batman, last we saw, was strapped into an Apokaliptian machine. What's become of him is unsure.

This isn't the first time Morrison has played with this idea, and it might be interesting, once FC is done, to go back and re-read his "Rock of Ages" story in JLA, in which he envisions another iteration of the dark New Gods taking over the planet. There's certainly parallels, though I think FC is a bit darker. It's easy, perhaps, to envision what this event would be like at some undetermined future date, but to envision it contemporaneously makes the horror of it much more visceral.

As I noted earlier, I'll be taking a brief break from this read-through. Got to take vacations when you can in this life. And it's a good place to hang from a cliff - Wonder Woman and her Furies are about to attack Flashes West and Allen, anti-life appears to have consumed the planet, and Superman's nowhere (or everywhere) to be seen. Onward.