I'm going to try to talk about this issue, and maybe the series as a whole, but it's going to be difficult. First, while there will be spoilers, I'm really not sure if I understand what happened after the first two or three issues well enough to really spoil much.
But here's trying:
So, at the end the last issue, Batman died after shooting Darkseid, the god of Evil, with a god-killing bullet. Yeah. That was pretty freaking weird. This week's Shortpacked does a good job of explaining everything that's wrong with Batman getting blown up by an evil god after shooting him(The short list of reasons is: Batman don't use guns, Batman's a essentially human, on the street character, he wasn't really a part of the story until he showed up to die, and seriously, what the fuck).
But that's last issue. This issue... there's a lot going on.
Superman's facing off against Darkseid, Captain Marvel and The Question are going universe hoppinh to round up a posse of super-people, something's happening with Lois, possibly on the set of Charlton Heston's Planet Of The Apes, but that may be another universe. I really don't know.
The Flash, the old one who died back the 80's Crisis On Infinite Earths, shows up and does... something. He apparently has Death, or a death, or time, or some other vaguely allegorical, vaguely metaphorical figure chasing him, and he helps to kill Darkseid by, I'm really rather confused here, running by him close enough that Death runs into Darkseid, killing him maybe. Goodness, so little sense was made here.
Oh, oh, and according to the narration, Time was stopping. Or collapsing so that every moment was every other moment. Or something.
And this is where is get weird: See, Superman is trying to build a god-machine based on the one Brainiac-5 showed him last issue(and no, I don't understand how that happened, but it did, and it's part of the story now). Apparently the god-machine will grant Superman one wish. As he's completing it, a cosmic vampire arrives on stage and ask to eat Sups.
Now, dear reader, you may be saying, "Combat Queer, weren't you just talking about the heroes fighting Darkseid? What happened with that?" Well, dear reader, I'm not clear on that. I think he was killed, but I don't know. The comic also says he fell through a black hole at the bottom of the universe. I've got zero idea. The point is, he seems to be gone, but what he did was bad, and Superman is trying to fix it with the god-machine.
But the cosmic vampire, the cosmic vampire. Well, the cosmic vampire is apparently also a Monitor(not to be mixed up with Marvel Comic's 'Watchers', of course) and also the Lord of the Dead? Or something. Well, the inter-dimensional army of Superman show up, roast the vamp with laser vision, and Sups makes his wish.
And the day is saved.
So, yeah, this comic made zero sense. If you've read any of Grant Morrison's All Star Superman, you'll have idea of the sort of surrealness that this series is over flowing with. It's just jam packed with ideas about the Ultimate, whatever that may be. It's all about infinite gods, who have infinite lives and deaths. Morrison took a freaking big bite when he was writing this stuff.
And now it's confession time: I don't hate this. No, I don't understand it, I don't think it works very well as a narrative, but as a piece of art, it is lovely. The images of the story are broken, no doubt about it, but each piece of the broken whole is gorgeous, astounding, the sort of beauty that sticks with you.
So, if you're looking for a good story, it isn't here. What is here is more like one of the those poems that summons a ranged of images, many contradictory, and allows each member of the audience to be taken to her or his own place by the work.
Or maybe it's like one of the Japanese rock gardens where the trick is to realize that the understanding you come to is valid, but in no way invalidates anyone else's. This rock garden, instead of gravels, is full of tiny bits of sensible narrative.
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