It would be oh so very easy to pan FINAL CRISIS. We could start with the mere book's existence - what is the point of a novelization of a comic book? It's like a text-only version of Playboy. It misses most - if not all - of the point. Or we could turn to the title, "Final Crisis." For those of you that aren't particularly aware of comic books, let's just say that this title is just a little bit misleading. See, there are's already been "Crisis on Infinite Earths," "Infinite Crisis," and now FINAL CRISIS. Of course, there have been some other crises in between, but with non-crisis names, such as "52." And there's already been another crisis since this was written. A more accurate title would be "Another Crisis in an Ongoing Series of Crises." Or we could just make fun of the general silliness involved in comic books, with people running so fast they go back in time (huh?), people reincarnated by the "Flash Force" (uh?), Monitors, Supermen, and (I'm not making this up) a "Miracle Machine".

Yes, it would be so very easy to pan this book. The story is the kind of melange of fan-boy trivia that DC can sling together: Darkseid has finally obtained the anti-life equation, gets himself reincarnated on Planet Earth (well, one of them), and begins taking over the world. Chaos ensues.

Batman, Superman and every "-man" and "-woman" shows up and eventually saves the day using, amongst other things, the power of love, the Miracle Machine and whole bunch of glowing green things. The writing is competent, I suppose, but there are only so many ways to describe men and women running around in tights punching things. The problems with the book have nothing to do with the author, who is writing to someone else's story, using someone else's characters.

Nonetheless, this book is too easy to pan to not actually pan it. The book isn't bad per se, it's just pointless. If you aren't a comic book fan, it won't make any sense at all. If you are a comic book fan, it will make comic book sense to you... but why the hell are you reading this when you could be reading the comic? Unless, God help us, the book makes more sense.