Comics readers – have you been a tad puzzled over how to keep the continuity straight in DC’s latest, ongoing universe-wide crisis – with, for example, Batman fighting crime as usual in one comic, M.I.A. in another comic, and M.I.A. for an entirely different reason in yet another comic?
You’ll get no reassurance from these comments by Grant Morrison about the continuity problems between Final Crisis and the series leading into it:
Why didn’t Superman recount his experiences from DOTNG [= Death of the New Gods]? 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 Crisis and 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.
So, I wonder what DC pays its editorial staff? It’s clearly either way too little or way too much.
In related news, there’s some frustrating intel on Anarky; it counts as a spoiler so I’ll bury it in the comments section.