_{Under the Influence: Final Crisis}

Welcome back, to you and me, I took a little bit of a summer sabbatical from the Newsletter. Since last we spoke? Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Black, White, & Green #3 featuring mine and Riley Rossmo’s story “Sin Sewer” came out and I feel it was a success. The reviews for the story were kind to me and rightly praised Riley’s brilliant artwork on the story. Folks who read it told me they loved it and some noted they hope it is not my last go around with the Turtles which when it comes to pre-existing characters is one of the nicest compliments you can get. And of special importance to me? The comic seemed to sell out at the two comic stories near where I grew up. Prompting my mom to buy a variant cover as it was the last copy the store had available, but then she bought multiple copies of every cover online, I got a great mom.

The first story of my career as a full-time comic writer is officially out in the universe, and the next is coming up very soon. I am returning to DC Comics as a writer, which is an incredible privilege. As previously mentioned in the newsletter the assignment is going to be a ten-page story for this year’s DC Halloween anthology I Know What You Did Last Crisis, each story in the anthology is set during one of DC’s iconic events and is also a horror story.

Having grown up a massive DC Comics fan and having worked there for almost a decade, I am very well versed in the history of their events, especially the Crisis storylines. When I started reading comics monthly in the early 2000’s DC was on a creative high in part due to their ramp-up and execution of the tremendous Infinite Crisis storyline. The main event series was written by Geoff Johns and drawn by Phil Jimenez, George Perez, Jerry Ordway, and Ivan Reis. The build-up and execution of that story made me a monthly comic book reader, and hardcore DC comics fan. It made me go backward to read what had come before and stick around for everything to come.

When my wonderful editor Andrew Marino called me and said he had my first assignment in mind and told me about the anthology, I was already trying to figure out what event he was going to have me set my story around. Would it be the aforementioned Infinite Crisis? Zero Hour: A Crisis in Time? The original JLA/JSA crossovers of the sixties, seventies, and eighties that are often referred to as Crisis on Multiple Worlds?

“I want you to do Final Crisis,” Andrew said. The 2008 event series was written by Grant Morrison with art by J.G. Jones, Doug Mahnke, Carlos Pacheco, and Marco Rudy. It was the scariest one he could offer me.

Let’s return to that time machine and talk about the DC Comics of the early 2000s. In addition to the build-up to Infinite Crisis, there were many other creatively exciting things going on, one of the biggest? The return of Grant Morrison to DC Comics following a multi-year stint at Marvel Comics where they had done the legendary New X-Men series with Frank Quitely, Phil Jimenez, Chris Bachalo, Igor Kordey, John Paul Leon, and others.

Infinite Crisis made me a monthly comic reader but there were several series I read in graphic novel form that set up the runway for me to get to that point, one of the most significant? JLA by Grant Morrison and Howard Porter, their last storyline, JLA: World War III was the first Justice League story I read and it blew me away, I started seeking out the other JLA stories they had done and the ones done by creative teams after them. I knew World War III was one of the last projects Grant had done at DC, and it was one I loved, so I felt like it was perfect timing for me to tune in more actively to this person who I knew to be a legend of comics and someone who was already foundational to DC.

Grant’s return to DC brought about a slew of seminal projects. All-Star Superman with artist Frank Quitely. Seven Soldiers of Victory with artists JH Williams III, Simone Bianchi, Pasqual Ferry, Freddie E. Williams II, Yanick Paquette, Doug Mahnke, Ryan Sook, Frazer Irving, and others. A return to the JLA with the first arc of the series JLA: Classified by artist Ed McGuinness. And stellar books for Vertigo as well, someday I’ll write about those as well, being shown the non-super hero side of things in those books was also seminal for me.

I dove full-on into Grant’s corners of the DCU. And in JLA: Classified and Seven Soldiers of Victory, I saw a meta-story unfolding. One about the cracks of reality beginning to show, Evil gods, starting to walk among us, and great doom to come. That story would carry through to Grant’s work on Batman and ultimately lead to the Final Crisis series itself. At the time, it labeled the end of the “Crisis Trilogy”, the first two installments being the original Crisis On Infinite Earths and Infinite Crisis.

So when I think of Final Crisis, and I think of that epoch of Grant’s DC work as a whole…it means everything to me. It’s work that expanded my imagination, made me seek out a lot of different things, and made me want to be as ambitious as possible with my writing. The concept of adding something to an epic Grant wrote… was terrifying, but something I very much wanted to do. Likewise, I have great reverence for JG Jones, Doug Mahnke, the late great Carlos Pacheco, and Marco Rudy. All of whom did A++ work on that storyline. And who delivered a visually stunning show-stopping multiversal rock opera for the ages.

I took on the assignment and over the next couple of weeks leading up to the story’s Final Order Cut-Off Date which is 9/2/24, I want to write more about it. How I went about adding to a story that has been finished for over sixteen years, my artistic collaboration with the great Sid Kotian who is drawing the story, and how nervous I was to come home again to DC Comics. Also NEXT WEEK in addition to writing more about Final Crisis…we will get to talk about the comic I have coming out in November, which I am told gets announced tomorrow…stay tuned.

Stay safe!

—Dave Wielgosz