Irked by the Gods

So let me get this straight...Orion pulled out Darkseid's heart in final battle:

Darkseid had a hissy fit...

...and then exploded:

And then Orion, last survivor of the New Gods, trudged away in the rain:


And, parallel to these events, the rest of the New Gods died and made Superman cry:

(Being honest after sitting through eight issues of that, I cried a little bit too).

And then at the start of Final Crisis, Orion turns up dead and Darkseid is back in his Seven Soldiers guise of the owner of the Dark Side club, an underground superhero fightclub unlike any we've seen before...except that its like every club like that we've seen before.

Oh, and Dark Side has been around for a while because some of the Seven Soldiers showed up in the DCU in 52 and a few other places, right?

Well, I guess Grant Morrison has at least now let us know what's going on:

As we’ll learn, when we see Darkseid’s ‘Fall’ from the world of the New Gods - as depicted in DCU #0 - he’s falling backwards through time. In DCU #0 we’re watching him fall back through the present, into the past of Seven Soldiers where he finally comes to rest in the body of ‘Boss Dark Side’, the gangster from that story. The implication is that Darkseid has been consolidating his power base on Earth, in a human body, since at least the time of Infinite Crisis. Only Shilo Norman AKA Mister Miracle has any real idea what’s going on but he’s seen as a crazy-ass showbiz loon who’s had a bizarre quasi-religious experience, so no-one takes him entirely seriously.

Ah okay. So Darkseid fell back in time to end up running a nightclub-come-arena-thing, right? Because that's what a god would do. Maybe he tried to get techno music to make a comeback while he was at it.

And as for Orion?

What mattered to me was what had already been written, drawn or plotted in Final Crisis. The Guardians didn’t call 1011 when Lightray and the other gods died in Countdown because, again, Final Crisis was already underway before Countdown came out.

Why didn’t Superman recount his experiences from DOTNG ? 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.

The way I see it readers can choose to spend the rest of the year fixating on the plot quirks of a series which has ended, or they can breathe a sigh of relief, settle back and enjoy the shiny new DC universe status quo we’re setting up in the pages of Final Crisis and its satellite books. I’m sure both of these paths to enlightenment will find adherents of different temperaments.

So...Morrison plotted Final Crisis before Countdown and Death of the New Gods started, and then ignored anything that contradicted what he was doing?

I can live with that - but what it means is that editorial really screwed up with Countdown and Death of the New Gods even more than I thought they had.

I won't let it bother my enjoyment of Final Crisis (which is a whole other post) but I do find it a bit annoying.

Oh, and you know what? New Gods as street level characters? Not new...