Final Crisis #5

Well, jeez: now that Jog's done the very funny review and David's done his usual first-rate job with the notes, what's there left for me? Maybe a little bit of extra mop-up. Let's see.

Pg. 1:

Malet Dasim, created by Bob Toomey and Alex Saviuk, first appeared in GREEN LANTERN #130; he's a lawyerly type, and tends to switch off between prosecution and defense roles. (Athough it always strikes me as particularly odd that intergalactic justice is based on the Anglo-American trial system.) And you'd think that it'd have occurred to somebody to draw Hal's scar this issue.

Infallibility by decree: always a tricky thing.

Pg. 2:

Guy Gardner, created by John Broome and Gil Kane, first appeared in 1968's GREEN LANTERN #59.

Ion/Kyle Rayner, created by Ron Marz and Darryl Banks, first appeared in 1994's GREEN LANTERN #48.

Pg. 3:

Poor visual storytelling: what's happening in the third panel with the green armored dude & Guy? (David's explanation that they're ring-avatars to fight Kraken's caterpillars kinda makes sense, but why wouldn't they just fight them themselves?)

Pg. 4:

Krona hasn't been mentioned by name in FC until now, surprisingly enough, although he's a big part of the giant-hand-holding-a-galaxy creation-story imagery referred to in DC UNIVERSE 0 that goes back to 1965's GREEN LANTERN #40. (As David pointed out, the "Krona protocol" is to protect the battery against, say, being blown up the way Krona did in TALES OF THE GREEN LANTERN CORPS.) He's also a significant part of TRINITY, of course, which might be why he's offstage here.

The dialogue here skirts around an idea that's been a major subtext of Green Lantern stories for a while (and has been more so under Geoff Johns): the relationship of the Lanterns' power to will being made manifest in the world. If that's connected to the Krona origin-story business, it's essentially voluntarism in the philosophical sense. The "ultimate technology" that Metron gave Anthro in the first issue is fire, which is in some sense the very most primitive form of the Green Flame--"a deadly plasma that responds to the dictates of pure will," if not very conveniently...

Pg. 5:

A good left cross beats an evil god every time.

Pg. 6:

Crumpled spacetime provides a good explanation for all the timeline weirdness around the FC project; might as well throw that chronology out the window, huh? (Although I'll probably still try to update it at some point.)

Pg. 7:

The M in M-theory "could stand for master, mathematical, mother, mystery, membrane, magic, or matrix." Or... Morrison! "Science speculation" is a little closer than "science fact" here.

The nu-OMACs are conveniently packaged à la OMAC #1. Checkmate as "the last move in the human game"; interesting, if kind of pumping up its significance. (But it's worth noting that the original Checkmate started as The Agency, which was founded by Amanda Waller!)

Do they want Renee to be part of it because of her significance within the Crime Cult, per REVELATIONS? (Which appears to be happening some time earlier than this, crumpled spacetime aside?)

Pg. 8:

Those scars on Wonder Woman's back: cree-py.

Pg. 10:

Donna Troy finally gets a speaking line, so I might as well note that she was created (as Wonder Girl) by Bob Haney and Bruno Premiani, and first appeared in 1965 in THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #60.

Pg. 18:

The Spanish-speaking guy is Iman, created by Oscar Pinto, F.G. Haghenbeck and Giovanni Barberi, who first appeared in 2000's SUPERMAN ANNUAL #12. His dialogue translates roughly as "What hit me? Ah, $&#*! My armor's useless. Weighs a ton... what would Superman do...?" (I might be wrong about that last bit.)

Frankenstein on a motorbike, sword in his right hand and gun in his right, quoting Milton's Satan. This is why I read superhero comics. (The Paradise Lost line is followed, a few lines later, by the more familiar "The mind is its own place, and in itself/Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heaven.")

"Wait for the lightning to strike": obviously this is the Marvel Family lightning, but the lightning business is also echoed by the Flash and Legion angles to FC. The solicitation for this issue included the line "Does the secret of humankind's salvation lie in a mysterious cave painting and a bolt of lightning?"

Pg. 20:

Mary Marvel is of course possessed by Sakker-Masokk, one of the lesser-known Kirby-created Darkseid henchmen. (And of course her dirty new power word would be an acronym for a different group of new gods, right?)

Pg. 21:

"You're not facing Freddie this..." --well, he's drawn like Freddie! Is someone else possessing him?

Pg. 22:

The mute cube-solver seems to be the version of Metron from SEVEN SOLDIERS: MISTER MIRACLE. Points to David for noting the "different... unforeseen" bit as a reference to Metron's self-description in NEW GODS #7.

"Nobody ever did it in less than 18": well, that's a mighty poor explanation of God's number. It's not the minimum number of moves to solve a Rubik's Cube (that would be 0), it's the minimum number of moves to solve a maximally scrambled Rubik's Cube.

Pg. 23:

"If it don't exist, think it up. Then make it real": this is as good an explanation of magic as any--you have to have a will, and inscribe it in some symbolic way, before you can turn it into reality. "Rings only work if you can think!"

The cube image also echoes the cubes and dice that turn up all over SEVEN SOLDIERS: a two-dimensional act of imagination (like Nix's drawings, or a comic book) that becomes a three-dimensional thing (entering the world).

Pg. 24:

Not Mokkari, but part of the Mokkari-cult he was boasting about earlier in the issue.

Pg. 25:

The Calculator, created by Bob Rozakis and Mike Grell, first appeared in 1976 in DETECTIVE COMICS #463; he was obsessed with Oracle in BIRDS OF PREY. And yes, it sure looks like Luthor was the one who betrayed the villains (he wasn't too keen on knuckling under in #3). Treason to Darkseid is loyalty to humanity, and if there's one thing Luthor thinks he stands for, it's humanity--that's why he hates Superman. Although he looks uncharacteristically remorseful about having thrown the Calculator under a bus.

"If you show willing": it's odd that a panel as closely analyzed as this one includes this grammatical error. But there's the idea of "will" again.

Pg. 26:

Now we know what happens in the next issue of Batman! Darkseid's crew had been begging him not to kill them earlier in the issue: BZZT all around.

"The idea of a god is a god"--Alan Moore

Pg. 27:

"Dropt from the Zenith like a falling Star": Paradise Lost I, 745. (The dropt one was Mulciber/Hephaestus.) I love how compassionate Supergirl is.

Pg. 29:

The President would have to be Jonathan Horne, per #2.

The current population of Earth is about 6.7 billion, so what are the other 3.7 billion up to? Or have they already died for Darkseid?

Pg. 32:

Nix Uotan as Vykin the Black from FOREVER PEOPLE, sort of, except with Rubik's Cube surveillance headgear (the transparent images I can make out seem to be panels from this issue)--the person who's able to step outside the narrative and see it all at once.

OK--what'd I miss?