final crisis

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from our years on the Internet, it’s that there’s no aspect of comics that can’t be broken down and quantified in a single definitive list, preferably in amounts of five or ten. And since there’s no more definitive authority than ComicsAlliance, we’re taking it upon ourselves to compile Top Five lists of everything you could ever want to know about comics. Superman is the best. Just the absolute best. And if you disagree, I'm so sorry for your wrongness, but we're not here to argue about how wrong you could potentially be, we're here to talk about Superman's best team-ups.

George Pérez, born June 9, 1954, is one of superhero comics’ most enduring and iconic artists, with a bold, energetic style that helped define both the Marvel and DC visual universes, and an influence on the genre that has stood the test of time. Pérez first made his name at Marvel Comics in the mid-'70s, quickly graduating to high-profile titles such as Fantastic Four and The Avengers. His work on the Avengers story "The Korvac Saga" established one of his hallmarks; he was one of the best artists around if you needed a crowd shot packed with as many superheroes as the page would allow!

In magical practice, the term magnum opus has a different meaning than in popular context. Latin for "the Great Work," its been used since the early alchemists, and taken on various shades of metaphorical meaning through different traditions, but they're all essentially referring to the same thing: the total actualization of one's will, and the creation of the idealized self. Grant Morrison, the most inventive writer in comics, has been at it for a while now.

Teased for years and finally launched this week, The Multiversity is a universe-jumping series of DC Comics one-shots tracking the cosmic monitor Nix Uotan and an assemblage of star-crossed heroes as they attempt to save 52 universes and beyond from a trippy cosmic existential threat that, like much of Morrison’s best work, represents something far more mundane and relatable. Tying back into the very first Multiverse story in DC’s history, the heroes of these universes become aware of this threat by reading about it in comic books… comic books that, it turns out, take place in neighboring universes. Indeed, writer Grant Morrison continues his streak of highly metatextual DC cosmic epics with this eight-issue mega-series (plus one Tolkienesque guidebook). Described by Morrison as "the ultimate statement of what DC is", The Multiversity naturally offers the reader much beyond the surface level adventure, and that means annotations. Rather than merely filling out checklists of references, my hope with this feature is to slowly unearth and extrapolate a narrative model for Morrison and his collaborators' work on The Multiversity; an interconnecting web of themes and cause and effect that works both on literal and symbolic levels. Three pages into the preview for The Multiversity #1, I knew I was going to have a lot to work with. With no further ado, go get your erasers and your textbooks, close your laptops, sharpen your pencils, and get ready for some course notes. Let's go to school.

The practice of human sacrifice is as ancient as human civilization and has been practiced variously by various cultures, but most often to pacify gods or nature in the same manner of animal sacrifices. For example, maidens being tossed into volcanoes to keep them from erupting, or victims being buried at the foundations of castles, temples or bridges to protect the constructions from ruin. We're way past human sacrifice now, of course, but fictional character sacrifice? Today's super-comics creators seem rather devoted to that particular ritual, with many an "event" story arc beginning with the death of a character, as if they were being sacrificed to bless the ensuing narrative. The latest example is DC Comics' three-book Trinity War crossover, which begins in earnest this week but has been slowly ramping up in several books, most notably Justice League of America, where one of the publisher's oldest and best-known characters was seemingly killed recently. Be warned, for below there are spoilers for stories as old as 2004's Identity Crisis and as recent as Justice League of America #5.

Compounding many longtime DC Comics fans' confusion with respect to the revised histories of the publisher's superhero characters, Co-Publisher Dan DiDio confirmed that tent-pole storylines Crisis On Infinite Earths, Infinite Crisis, Final Crisis and all such universe defining Crises did not occur in DC's New 52 universe...

From Blackest Night to Flashpoint, today's super-hero comics are all built around the Big Event. But what if those stories had happened forty, fifty, or even sixty years ago? That's the question that ComicsAlliance is trying to answer with the help of artist Kerry Callen (who drew the incredible "Silver Age Marvel" pieces), by reimagining how the biggest modern-day DC Comics event comics

DC Comics recently announced that the long-awaited Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely Vertigo series Flex Mentallo would be returning to print, to the cheers of Morrison fans everywhere. If you never managed to get a hold of the single issues, you're not only missing out on a seminal work by a great comics writer, you're missing out on a series that foreshadowed a great deal of what Morrison would

Perhaps the most most sprawling and continuity-heavy crossover of all time, DC Comics' Final Crisis has already earned its place in comics history as the publisher's most polarizing mainstream works. For every reader who hails the epic's complex story architecture as genius, another decries its inaccessibility...

Today, Grant Morrison: Talking With Gods -- the feature-length documentary by Respect! Films, directed by Patrick Meaney -- was supposed to drop but seems to not be available until December 15, at least. It's a very well-crafted piece of work, a clear labor of love and result of the fairly extensive access Morrison and his friends and family gave the filmmakers...