I was a bit worried going into this. Following the hiatus, filled by DC with a bunch of tie-in one-shots (some even written by Mozza himself), it was beginning to look like, once Final Crisis picked up again, it would be dependent on knowledge of some of the stuff that had been published in the interim. This very week a title was released called Final Crisis : Submit, which people across the net have been exhorting to “read before you read issue #4!!!!111”

Such things would have made a mockery both of the book’s original promise to be a self-contained miniseries – and also of its status as a “first book on the pile”, something it should be aiming for as a massive event coming out in the same week as Marvel’s massive event. Thankfully, I’m happy to report that the people who’ve said you need to read Submit – or indeed any other tie-in – first are talking bollocks. Hell, you don’t even need to have read the first three issues, really – all of a sudden, those slow and occasionally baffling chapters look more like a prequel than part of the series itself. Issue #4 begins where you suspect the series as a whole should have kicked off – Earth is in the shit, Darkseid is on his way, and the heroes had better do something about it quickly. Despite the apparent jump in time from the closing pages of #3, these facts are conveyed quickly and effectively – to the extent that I gleaned a better understanding of what had happened earlier in the series than I had from actually reading the issues as they came out. And no information from other books is really necessary – the tie-ins embellish, rather than define, the main series.

What we’re left with, then, is an archetypal “turning point” issue, in which the heroes – those who are left – finally band together to make a stand. You’ve seen it all before, of course – but even so, the sequence in which the rebels (as they’ve become) gather over the SubWave Netw… er, sorry, the Unternet… is superbly inspiring, and not just because of the timely reminder of Alan Scott’s status as one of the DCU’s most venerable heroes. But this is a feature of Morrison’s work – it’s so frequently about moments, and for arguably the first time this series, the issue is full of them: Ollie and Dinah’s farewell, the former then immediately showing just why he’s so excellent; mirroring that, the deeply touching reunion of the Allens (and I’ll be hesitant about this, since it’s only consisted of a few pages, but so far Barry’s return is working – maybe because Grant’s giving him most of the best dialogue); the details of the anti-life equation itself, which is driven by the fantastic idea that in order to conquer people, Darkseid has simply shown them “mathematical proof that [he] is the rightful master of everything in existence”. As an invasion plan, you have to say it’s pretty original.

But it’s not all about heroic comebacks just yet. Rather than being a simple progression of good-to-bad-to-good-again, events are fluctuating in different ways, often meeting and crossing in the middle – and so while Alan Scott’s freedom fighters are raising mood and spirits, elsewhere Earth’s conquerors are only making things worse and worse. After all, Darkseid has been an unsettlingly malevolent presence throughout the series, and yet he hasn’t even appeared yet. This threatens to change, however, in a superb closing couple of pages, as the story of Dan Turpin’s attempt to resist becoming the tyrant’s reincarnated form draws to an (apparent) end – an arresting final full-page image by JG Jones portending even worse to come.

It’s just a shame that the visual side of the book in general has turned into such a fiasco. You just can’t put artists on event books like this if there’s a chance they won’t see it through. You wouldn’t put Quitely or Hitch on this - and Jones, as good as he is at crafting pretty and iconic images, isn’t a Quitely or Hitch when it comes to his storytelling. That said, he does provide some beautiful work here - that terrific closing page, the scenes with the two Flashes, not to mention a fourth absolutely stunning cover in a row, perhaps the best of the lot - but it doesn’t feel worth the upheaval of jumping between him and Carlos Pacheco in this issue and for the next couple, before being replaced entirely by Doug Mahnke for the seventh. Pacheco, for his part, is solid enough, but that’s all he is. The series is a whole is very well presented, with a classier look and feel compared to, say, Secret Invasion - but it feels like sacrifices have been made in order to get a flavour du jour artist’s name on the front, and I don’t think it’s paid off.

Still, we’re getting there. Suddenly, Final Crisis looks less like another lumbering DC crossover, and more like an actual event - and one that, pleasingly, remains a valid self-contained tale in and of itself despite all the tie-ins (not that I’d recommend it to a complete DC novice, but neither do you have to be an avid reader of everything up to and including Dan Didio’s self-congratulatory editorials to “get” it). As with Batman RIP, it’s been a bit slow to kick in, but now that the tension levels are rising - he really does foreboding menace well, doesn’t he? - you sense that even better is still to come.

Tags: Carlos Pacheco, Final Crisis, Grant Morrison, JG Jones
Publisher: DC