Final Crisis and Countdown: A Continuity Calamity.
The comics Internet was abuzz after Final Crisis #1 came out about glaring continuity errors in the book. Scenes involving the New God Orion didn’t jive with what came before in Countdown or Death of the New Gods.
Grant Morrison, writer of Final Crisis, spoke to Newsarama to address some of these issues. Unfortunately, instead of putting these fires out, he added gasoline to the flames.
Again, bear in mind that Countdown only finished last month so Final Crisis was already well underway long before Countdown and although I’ve tried to avoid contradicting much of the twists and turns of that book as I can with the current Final Crisis scripts, the truth is, we were too far down the road of our own book to reflect everything that went on in Countdown, hence the disconnects that online commentators, sadly, seem to find more fascinating than the stories themselves.
This is Morrison’s reply when Newsarama asked him about the continuity error question. I can’t get a read on the last 16 words. Is this Morrison being passive aggressive or or just being dismissive of the fans concerns?
But regardless, this doesn’t mean that the fans complaints aren’t valid in this case. DC was using continuity to sell both Countdown and Death of the New Gods. Not only did DC have Jimmy Olsen exhibit powers that fans fondly remember from the Silver Age, they even renamed the series to Countdown to Final Crisis to let fans know that, well, the series counts down to Final Crisis.
This means that this Grant Morrison statement really is kind of inflamatory:
What mattered to me was what had already been written, drawn or plotted in Final Crisis. The Guardians didn’t call 1011 when Lightray and the other gods died in Countdown because, again, Final Crisis was already underway before Countdown came out.
Why didn’t Superman recount his experiences from DOTNG ? Because those experiences hadn’t been thought up or written when I completed Final Crisis #1. If there was only me involved, Orion would have been the first dead New God we saw in a DC comic, starting off the chain of events that we see in Final Crisis. As it is, the best I can do is suggest that the somewhat contradictory depictions of Orion and Darkseid’s last-last-last battle that we witnessed in Countdown and DOTNG recently were apocryphal attempts to describe an indescribable cosmic event.
To reiterate, hopefully for the last time, when we started work on Final Crisis, J.G. and I had no idea what was going to happen in Countdown or Death Of The New Gods because neither of those books existed at that point. The Countdown writers were later asked to ‘seed’ material from Final Crisisand in some cases, probably due to the pressure of filling the pages of a weekly book, that seeding amounted to entire plotlines veering off in directions I had never envisaged, anticipated or planned for in Final Crisis.
The way I see it readers can choose to spend the rest of the year fixating on the plot quirks of a series which has ended, or they can breathe a sight of relief, settle back and enjoy the shiny new DC universe status quo we’re setting up in the pages of Final Crisis and its satellite books. I’m sure both of these paths to enlightenment will find adherents of different temperaments.
Essentially, he’s saying “don’t worry that the continuity doesn’t jibe, just sit back and enjoy what I’m working on.” This would maybe hold more water if maybe he offered to refund the $156 dollars fans spent on the lackluster Countdown, because, really, even though DC marketed that series as being absolutely vital to understanding Final Crisis, it wasn’t. So, it was essentially false advertising. I wonder if a class action lawsuit would actually work in this case.
Morrison seems to be claiming a mea culpa for the continuity glitches here, saying this:
when Countdown was originally being discussed, it was just a case of me saying ‘Here’s issue 1 of Final Crisis and a rough breakdown of the following six issues. As long as you guys leave things off where Final Crisis begins, we‘ll be fine.’
Of course, this makes it seem that he had very little or no contact with DC Editorial during the actual writing of Final Crisis, but he did give them the full issue number one, so, in theory this whole mess should have been avoided.
This leads me to believe that editor Eddie Berganza should take his name off of Final Crisis. Or at the very least, make sure he has Countdown editor Mike Carlin’s correct extension. The job of a comic book editor is murky and mysterious and seems to change depending either on who you ask or from editor to editor. But communicating with the editor of your lead in series and making sure this continuity glitch didn’t happen should have been part of the job.
Because DC is trying to build one grand, sweeping epic with this thing, going all the way back to Crisis on Infinite Earths. So, in essence, Final Crisis is just the continuation of what began in that series and continued in Identity Crisis, Infinite Crisis, 52, Seven Soldiers, Countdown, and many more ancilliary series.
Morrison uses the word “disconnect” in his mea culpa, and this is a good term to describe this mess up. Because, the mismatched continuity creates a disconnect for the reader. Readers who expected Countdown to Final Crisis to flow seamlessly into Final Crisis, because, well, it was supposed to, were taken out of the sweeping, overall story DC was trying to present us.
Fans get a bad rap for being overly touchy with continuity glitches. But when you market in continuity to sell your series, you must keep a close eye on it in cases like this. It’s like having a baby. It’s all well and good if you want to play with it, but you do have to feed it too.