Final Crisis & selling out

I can't say how many law school professors have ever assigned Grant Morrison's Invisibles and Marvel Boy in advanced seminars on corporate law, but my guess is that I'm the only one. But that's OK, because if you've ever those comics you know they raise provocative questions about the corporate commodification and personal identity.

One of things that makes Morrison's work so compelling to me is that he doesn't take the easy route of equating business with bad. Corporate identity can be a force for soul-erasing memetic replication (Hexus, the Living Corporation!) but it can also be a tool for subversive cultural enlightenment--King Mob's "I use the en-eh-mee . . . " Sex Pistols riff made that phrase a permanent part of my working vocabulary.

Beyond that, his exploration of ethics and identity is a much more informed and creative use of cutting-edge info than most of what you find in academic journals--for example, if you've read just the two series I've mentioned above, you understand more about Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine than many professors. And if you come to my office you'll straightaway notice issues of New Scientist on my meeting table--a subscription that began, not coincidentally, when the Invisibles was still ongoing.

Which brings me to Grant Morrison's latest series, Final Crisis. Yesterday marked the release of the second issue, and if you keep up with comics news sites you know the series has sparked its fair share of controversy. For my part, what's making this series work, as with so much of Morrison's work, is focusing not on the MacGuffins but on its magic mirror of our world.

Below: my two favorite scenes, both of which reflect identity crises that you might have noticed in other forms on this site. The culture clash in the first scene should be quite familiar to anyone familiar with do-goodery today:

The next, where the elder and younger Flash-es reflect on the final fate of a storied community-center--well, if you were in New York yesterday and got bumped by a guy walking down Broadway reading & laughing instead of watching where he was going, you know how much I enjoyed that.

Once again, it seems, the supercontext has a sense of humor.