Batman RIP, Countdown, and Final Crisis

After now reading these books i have to amend what I have said in the past...

Batman RIP is a decent book, but it doesn't have a clear ending. I liked a lot of the points that people dislike about it, such as Batman of Zur en Ahr, which is an awesome call back and he did well explaining how it happened. People being mad at that call back is silly imo...

Countdown to Final Crisis... Again I don't see why people dislike this book. It's a good story that does maintain a story through out, and while there is the problem that it was promoting Tie-ins it was not necessary to read them like Linkara said...and quite frankly the book is a nice good story... The only real problem with it is that FC has little to do with it and the end feels like a cheat as it seems like all the stories instead of building to a climax go "annnnnd we're done" right before the end.

I actually consider it more important in the overall scope than FC because it's clear that what the writer was doing is pretty much the same thing that Zero Hour did. It was setting up the various futures of the multiverse, putting to bed whether this or that future was the true future of the universe and whatever happened to it.... like the Komandi future.

Final Crisis... on the other hand I didn't like and view it as over hyped for what it did. It was more a story just to kill Batman and set up Blackest Night than it was a Crisis in my opinion.

What they should have done is take Countdown, call that "Final Crisis" or "Future Crisis" or something like that... took Final Crisis and called it "Prelude" to Blackest Night.


I also don't like Batman's scene where he kills Darkseid, because he wouldn't do that. He values all life so unless he somehow takes it to mean that Darkseid is antilife, which he couldn't have (Even if Darkseid uses the antilife equation on everyone he is still Alive and without suicide he still loses), he wouldn't do that. I like the scene, but I wish they could have figured another way to go about doing it.

I agree with you on RIP, though so you know the story is only just now ending in The Return of Bruce Wayne.

Countdown is disliked because it and Death of the New Gods contradicted each other (and other comics) and forced DC to basically sweep the whole thing under the rug because it had been handled so poorly.

Final Crisis I liked a lot. Besides the Legion and Monitor aspects, which were shoehorned in and terrible. The main plot, with Darksied, was very good. It was a good, epic, story (Final Crisis: Revelations was the best part). As for Batman killing Darksied, it worked. Darksied was, literally, the God of Evil. He represented everything evil about the entire universe. Batman dedicated his life to fighting evil in an unwinnable battle. Then there's Darksied. How can he not take the shot? He even points out himself the significance of the event. But, if you must, realize that Batman didn't kill anyone. He fatally wounded the body Darksied was in (Dan Turpin), and poisoned the essence of Darkseid. Superman countered Darksied's vibrations, effectively killing him. So Superman is a murderer, not Batman, but it's one of those things where the killing is forgivable.

Fatally wounded is the same thing as killing...that's the whole "fatally" part.

on another note, now that i have finished reading up to the August 09 for everything save for Batman Confidential and Superman / Batman, got my lists updated and sorted out for what I need to read from this point on (and there is a lot) I've decided with 14 titles all together I could stand to drop one and I've been trying to avoid things that are not cannon... so I'm going to drop Batman Confidential and save myself some agony of getting through any more of that garbage. Some stories are cute and quarky, but for the most part I don't find them interesting or all that good.

I liked RIP, almost straight through. There are several scenes that are simply brilliant; particularly everything revolving around Zur'en'Arh from the hilarity of asking Bat Mite if the talking gargoyles means he's crazy, right up until the Joker's last laugh when Jezzabelle is rescued. That it all ties into the death of Bruce's parents just makes it all work for me.

Final Crisis I appreciate, even if I consider it to be a bit of a mess. There's too many plot threads running all over the place and none of them are really given the time to mature properly. Still, once you put it all together and retell it to yourself, you can see the solid ideas it was created from. The problem is simply that those ideas aren't really presented to the reader very well.

Countdown I don't really care for. It always seemed to be trying to find something to stick and never could quite find its own purpose. It timed itself poorly and even on numerous occasions spoiled things in other comics (Kyle's new costume after losing Ion for example). It's not really terrible, but from what I read, it didn't seem particularly good either.

The problem wasn't that RIP was bad story. it was just convoluted and annoying, and one of those stories that feels like it was meant to be read more as one sitting or as a graphic novel than from month to month. was still torqued that they went out of their way during interviews to say "of course we're not killing Batman" during the story and then essentially do it during Final Crisis. I mean if you were going to gank the guy, i think it would've been better to do so BEFORE the ungodly huge crossover event, and then watch how the whole thing goes down without the Bat-god there to figure it out. but i digress...and often.

Countdown was trash. i went back and reread it, still trash. forget the multitude of pointless tie-ins, and yes, they were pointless. Countdown meandered from one story point to the next and while it had one or two bright spots during it's run, it got quickly bogged down in plots that were built up and then forgotten about almost immediately. Hell the "main plot" in hunting down Ray Palmer and then the multiversal jaunt was just frakking horrid, not to mention Kyle showing up during the crossover and spoiling some of the events from the Sinestro Corps War. Of course there was the conflict between Countdown and DoNG towards the end, and both of those were in conflict with the start of FC, despite being touted as lead-ins to the crossover. last up, was the sheer amount of executive meddling in this book. After 52 hit it off so well, but without DiDio screwing around with, he decided to take a more direct hand with this weekly book... and well... it shows.

Final. Crisis. i just.. ugh. i mean... how, how can a concept so simple as "Darkseid's dying, tries to both rule the multiverse and save his life, or take everything down with him" get so screwed up? my thoughts? having gone off his meds shortly before the end of RIP and raging at DiDio hosing him over by using/killing the New Gods, Morrison wrote Final Crisis. makes sense when it's done that way. the bright side of that mess? we got Rogue's Revenge and Legion of Three Worlds out of it.

whether it killed Turpin or not is not to say it didn't kill Darkseid... whether its through a roundabout method or straight forward he still did it. However when you think about it you could say that you can't "kill" anyone in comics because there is an after life and Darkseid was already dead so Batman didn't see it as killing him.

Also, if you think the plot of Countdown was "Find Ray Palmer" you missed the plot altogether. The plot being Darkseid manipulating Solomon into ignoring the fact that he is getting his hands on the Anti-life equation due to the breaches occurring. Without Final Crisis you are left with the idea that his purpose was to get all the power of the New Gods, but thinking on it it's obvious that that was a distraction...


And perhaps I like RIP due to the fact I did read it all in one go, but I think I'd like it regardless... Memory is a good thing ^.^