What's in the Final Crisis Omnibus
It is hard to find what is in the omnibus edition of Final Crisis, which comics are reprinted, what changes there might be to those comics, but it is apparently impossible to look up what order the comics are collected, in that edition, in. For a comic with fifteen thousand pages, that is just weird. And annoying.
Collecting comics by Grant Morrison, JG Jones, George Pérez, Philip Tan, Len Wein, Greg Rucka, Lee Garbett, et al, there is not one table of contents provided online, anywhere I can see. So, I thought, why not do it here?
And, I did.
DC Universe #0
Let There Be Lightning
The Flash #240-241
Fast Money
Flash Mob
Teen Titans #59-60
Dark Dealings
Time to Kill
Birds of Prey #118
Club Kids
Justice League of America #21
The Gathering Crisis
Batman #676-681
Batman RIP
Midnight in the House of Hurt
Batman in the Underworld
Zur En Arrh
Miracle on Crime Alley
The Thin White Duke of Death
Hearts of Darkness
Batman #702
Batman RIP: The Missing Chapter
Part One: The Hole in Things
Final Crisis #1
DOA: The God of War
Requiem
Caretakers of Mars
Terror Titans
The Basis of Optimism
Making the Cut
Daddy Issues
Shock and Awe
The Great Destroyer
One Second to Midnight
Final Crisis #2
Ticket to Blüdhaven
Rogues’ Revenge
Final Crisis #3
Know Evil
Last Will & Testament: Conversions
Superman Beyond
Legion of 3 Worlds
Final Crisis: Secret Files
Balancing Act!
Revelations
Resist
Submit
Final Crisis #4-5
Darkseid Says
Into Oblivion
Batman #682-683
Batman: Last Rites
The Butler Did It
What the Butler Saw
Final Crisis #6
How to Murder the Earth
Final Crisis #7
New Heaven, New Earth
Superman/Batman #76
The Brave and the Bold
Batman #702
Batman RIP: The Missing Chapter
Part Two: Batman’s Last Case
There you have it!
Personally, I think The Missing Chapter should be put together at the end of the book, as they are two parts of one story and gain strength from being separated from RIP (being the missing part, the missing context), but I understand why DC chose to place the part whose narrative leads into the Final Crisis miniseries before Final Crisis #1.
Superhero audiences have shown, for decades, a terrible tendency towards demanding all gaps be filled immediately, all mysteries solved and presented a priori. A superhero story beginning in media res, alone, can be a great distress to a superhero audience member, who might disdain the use of the term, “distress,” but that is what it is. In a similar and related way, tonal elements, atmosphere, and storytelling or art which do not distinctly impel the action-to-action causal narrative are held in disdain and generate anxiety, something which surprisingly has not wavered as superhero art has found an explosive success in movies of late, and superhero audiences have expanded from comics and television with punctuated moments of movie-audience, but broad and global mainstream audience.
Tamaki Saitō calls these two modes cinematic time and gekiga time, which I covered in Stop Worrying How Fast it Reads, and has expounded on their uses, correlations, and covariances in works such as, Beautiful Fighting Girl. Cinematic time and gekiga time are almost always present in all narrative-invoking art, in all art, be it movies, comics, paintings, or music. Cinematic time is, in all cases, when the narrative being invoked proceeds with a sense of unadulterated mechanistic pace, the ticking clock, each action moving to another action which moves to another action. Gekiga time, referencing a pre-cinema form of Japanese narrative art, is when the invoked narrative proceeds at a subjective pace, not a steady frames per second ratio, but a fluctuating sense of attention, processing, and emphasis.
In anglophone comics, toward the end of the Twentieth Century, gekiga time would become emphasized in what would be called decompression, which was quickly degraded into cinematic time that simply took four to six serialized comic book issues to form a story which could be packaged for bookstore sales. Because anxiety. Distress.
It is funny to me to see an omnibus edition, a comic book with over one thousand pages, seemingly acceding to worry that the clock is not ticking in objective, scientific seconds and milliseconds in the correct order, but in terms of Final Crisis, it gains something in doing so in a particular and story way:
Final Crisis’ narrative involves time and space “breaking down,” becoming odd, distended, even contradictory. The Earth expands in spatial dimensions, the solar system exaggerates in spacetime, the world gets heavier, the cosmos distress. By the final hundreds of pages of this omnibus edition, the story is explicitly overlapping stories, told things; tellings. By positioning elements like the first part of The Missing Chapter as existing in cinematic time, as behaving, the misbehavior of later elements attains a vibrant tonal and narrative immediacy, having now something established to buck against and violate.
With fifteen hundred pages, you can justify anything.
