Final Crisis was definetely a two edged sword for me. One the one hand it was great to see all these different characters in the storyline, from Sparx and Empress, to the Human Flame brought out of obscurity and rolled into the story. But too often the writing made me cringe. Morrison once again reminded me in the climax what bad cliched comic book writing can be.

Having the fortress of solitude accessing the phantom zone to journey across the hyper-reality nether regions of the proto-time stream in order to exist in the time stopped frame of the second before the big bang so that reality isn’t wiped out by the vampiric remains of the avatar of disbelief while every person on the planet has been de-hydrated into dust so there will be room in the bat-dust-vac before the are re-hydrated with light water (not heavy water contaminated with radioactive waste, regularly used to recharge the Batcave’s atomic pile, since we know what happened last time) and the world is eventually saved, and Superman saves Lois from death, (really just cause the story called for it although he might as well have discovered that his super-farts cure cancer, IS NOT GOOD STORYTELLING. It is quite frankly in my opinion lacking the story part.

Nevertheless,
In the end, Superboy was brought back from the dead, and I was happy.

Haters be damned, I really loved Final Crisis. It was very dark story and a great meta-commentary on the nature of superhero fiction as a whole, but at the end of the day it was a also a really great good old fashioned superhero story. Just when everything seems hopeless, the heroes of the DCU band together and save the day. IMO it’s the best crossover mini DC have published since the original Crisis.

But sorry, I have to side with the previous comment.
Final Crisis had lots of potential, but it meandered too much, Morrison, like so often, lost track of his goal and wasn’t able to give the readers a satisfying ending.
I love the guy, but sometimes he gets to metatextual and forgets to actually tell a story.

I’ve tried to read the story everytime I go to the book store and honestly, its the most convoluted plot ever. This comic is right. Its a story about stories. The problem is, its a crappy stories about a bunch of crappy stories that don’t really tie in together and honestly were made more complicated than it needed to be.

My 11 year old cousin read it and thought it was pretty straight forward and enjoyable. (actually maybe being a kid helps- modern techno-native visual communicating generation and all that) Seriously the only people who didn’t simply enjoy an old fashioned story about heroes beating villains against overwhelming odds seem to be cynical old people folks who didn’t want to get it.

…yeah, that’s pretty much what I got out of it, too.