Taken as individual issues during their initial release, Final Crisis felt weirdly insubstantial, as if they needed to be experienced as a whole to gain the weight that you were somehow convinced that they secretly had, hidden away somewhere - and, to an extent, that's true... It's just that the whole they need isn't the whole that DC's new collected edition gives to you. Yes, the handsome $29.99 edition collects all of the Grant Morrison-written issues of the storyline, and puts them all in chronological order, but in doing so it entirely disrupts the experience of reading either the core Final Crisis storyline or the Superman Beyond tie-in series that's also included here (There's a third story, the one issue Submit, but the less said about that, the better; when placed beside the other stories, it feels even more unnecessary and inconsequential than it did originally).

The plot of Final Crisis, for those who missed the original serialization, is essentially that Earth is invaded by Darkseid and his minions, the few remaining "New Gods" from the 1970s Fourth World comics by comic great Jack Kirby, and that Darkseid takes over the world, eradicates free will, and in doing so, brings about the end of everything. Included within this are sequences about divine intervention bringing fire to humanity, Superman transcending reality to save the love of his life and the universe - in that order - the return of the Flash and the death of Batman, amongst many others, and if that description makes it seem very scattered and overly busy, then that's not entirely an unfair complaint (Add in that deadlines on the original publication meant that multiple artists draw the core Final Crisis series, and that their styles aren't always a good match for each other, and you have another complication, although I admit that this particular one didn't bother me at all).

Sadly, one of the things that saved the series in its original format - the consistency of tone, despite the (intentionally) choppy storytelling - is sacrificed here, as Final Crisis itself takes a break after three issues for the Submit and Superman Beyond issues; while Submit is in keeping with the increasingly bleak, disturbing feel of Crisis, Superman Beyond is a much more inspirational story, and ends with a moment of triumph entirely at odds with the continuation of Crisis that immediately follows (In its original release, Superman Beyond's conclusion was released concurrently with the final episode of Crisis, which makes more sense, tonally); reading the collection straight through, there's a wrench going into, and coming out of, Beyond that damages the coherency of the overall story in a way that it struggles to recover from for a long time afterwards.

Like the majority of Morrison's superhero work, this isn't a story that will satisfy fans of the literal; it's very much an allegorical, lyrical story (Literally, on that last point, by the time you reach Darkseid's final confrontation with Superman), with narrative clarity sacrificed on occasion for artistic effect - It's very much a story you feel as much as anything, and because of that, re-reading it becomes a strange celebration of the successful moments with an increasing awareness of its faults; you notice the plots that disappear, or moments that defy sense more clearly, but throughout the entire thing, there's something so ambitious and self-aware about its own superhero comic nature that you can't help but be won over at times nonetheless (The amount of times may rely on how much you enjoy the melodramatic dialogue patterned after Jack Kirby's, or the importance of the spectacle over the minutiae, however). Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream, as one of his heroes once advised, and you'll be fine.

(A word or two about the art: Morrison has spoken, since the series ended, about the shift from original artist JG Jones to Doug Mahnke, who went from the Superman Beyond two-parter to the final chapter of Final Crisis, saying that he felt that the change was organic, and that Mahnke's art suits the more dynamic conclusion as much as Jones' more realistic style suited the downbeat, mundane beginning. He's right, and there are scenes at the end that I can't imagine working under Jones' more photo-realism-tinged brushwork. Although the discontinuity between the artists - and additional artists Carlos Pacheco and Marcos Rudy, lending hands in between - is the kind of thing that'll annoy some purists who'd rather imagine what could have been, everyone involved in the art in this collection offers amazing work, bringing their own strengths to the page without overshadowing anyone else, and Alex Sinclair's coloring throughout manages to hold everything together without becoming too obvious on the page.)

It's difficult to wholeheartedly recommend Final Crisis, especially in this particular form; I wish that they'd placed Superman Beyond later in the collection (Between the fifth and sixth issues of Crisis, perhaps), and can't help but feel that pushing the "Director's Cut" extra material of the original script to Final Crisis #1 to the paperback Final Crisis Companion is a cynical marketing move that lessens this collection, as is the weird inclusion of only a few pages of the Final Crisis Sketchbook preview, which reads as if they just needed some filler material to close out the book and grabbed some pages at random. It's certainly not anyone involved's best work, nor even Morrison's best superhero work (His Seven Soldiers cycle is much, much more successful, although the Mister Miracle arc pretty much belongs at the opening of this story). But, at the same time, there's enough of interest, and enough raw ambition and unfulfilled potential, here that I can't help but feel as if it's something approaching a (at times severly) flawed masterpiece. It's a story, and a collection, that will entertain, inspire, frustrate and potentially even move you, and for that alone, I find myself loving it, even if it's not what it could have - and should have - been.

Final Crisis is released today, and available in all good - and some evil - comic book stores.

They're the core characters behind DC's summer extravaganza Final Crisis, but that doesn't mean that you necessarily know who Darkseid, Orion, Metron or any of the rest of the New Gods actually are. Before "evil wins" in the DC Universe, here's a quick primer to let you know just what a Fourth World actually is, anyway.

There came a time when the old gods died! The brave died with the cunning! The noble perished, locked in battle with unleashed evil! It was the last day for them! An ancient era was passing in fiery holocaust!

Those were the words that started the first issue of The New Gods, one of three comics from the 1970s that formed the core of creator Jack Kirby's Fourth World line of books (The line had theoretically started earlier when Kirby had taken over Superman spin-off title Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen, but that book - as enjoyable as it is - is at best peripheral to the main Fourth World storyline. Although it does feature Don Rickles). Kirby, who had co-created the majority of Marvel Comics' big names - essentially, everyone except for Spider-Man, and there's even some doubt there -had jumped ship to main rivals DC in 1970 as a result of increasing frustration at lack of creative or legal control over his creations, and immediately started work on what came to be possibly his greatest achievement: One sprawling, epic, story that gave the old mythical gods new life as technological, alien creatures locked in a war that threaded through multiple comics running simultaneously and could be read on multiple levels.

The story of the Fourth World is deceptively simple: Darkseid, personification of evil and despotic ruler of the planet Apokolips, has come to Earth in order to find The Anti-Life Equation, a mythical concept that will enable him to destroy all free will in the universe and finally win the ongoing war between Apokolips and New Genesis, another planet that happens to be a utopia led by the kind and loving Highfather. There was a lot more to it, of course (Each issue was filled with new concepts - each character could travel through a Boom Tube, which created a tunnel between two points in space, and they each had living computers called Mother Box, who could understand and meet their needs without being asked - and introduced new characters, almost too quickly for the reader to make any sense of what was happening), and that's where each of the three series came into their own. Those series were:

The New Gods: Also titled Orion of The New Gods, this series concentrated on the adventures of New Genesis' greatest warrior, Orion, and his friend Lightray, as they dealt with Darkseid's latest schemes on Earth. In a move that foreshadowed George Lucas' movie franchise, Orion was revealed to be actually the son of Darkseid; he and Highfather's son had been exchanged as babies to be raised on each others' home planets as the result of a (failed) peace treaty. In many ways, this series was WWII-veteran Kirby's chance to deal with war as both an idea and a reality; as well as the sacrifices Orion has to make in order to fight Darkseid (including literally changing his face from handsome to a more natural monster-like appearance; subtlety wasn't Kirby's strong point), there are moments where a pacifist son confront his veteran father over Vietnam, or we see Highfather deal with the loss of his wife, killed as a result of the conflict with Apokolips. Kirby's strengths were always ideas and art, and so the rawness of the writing can sometimes betray the depth of the intent, but nonetheless, this was groundbreaking stuff in 1971.

Mister Miracle: The second of the three series focused on Highfather's son who, after having been given to Darkseid as part of the same pact that brought Orion to New Genesis, had run away from Apokolips to become Earth's Greatest Escape Artist... Well, you'd probably do the same thing in similar circumstances. Mister Miracle - or Scott Free, as he had named himself, mid-escape ("Let me be Scott Free - And let me find myself!") - also ran across Darkseid's plans on a regular basis as the stories demanded, but was much more of a lover than a fighter, especially when his own lover (and, by series' end, wife) Big Barda was involved (Barda had also run away from Darkseid's clutches, abandoning life as a soldier for true love). In some ways the most fanciful and whimsical of the three series - Never mind the hero called Scott Free, check out his dwarf sidekick Oberon - this was also the longest-lived; maybe there was something about series' almost Saturday Morning Cartoon "death trap of the issue" set-up that made people want to stick around, or perhaps kids just wanted to read that it didn't matter about nature or nurture - if you were a good person, it'd find a way to show through somehow.

The Forever People:, Appropriately, given such a hippie-friendly name, this series focused on. essentially, cosmic flower children who rejected the fight between good and evil altogether and just wanted to, like, just be, man. With names like Beautiful Dreamer, Big Bear and Mark Moonrider, there was no escaping the hippie nature of Kirby's intent, even though it came four years after the Summer of Love; they even tuned in and turned on thanks to their "cosmic cartridges," which gave them insight by temporarily making them one with the universe until their mellow was harshed, dude. Nonetheless, these were the only characters who actually came across the real Anti-Life Equation (more than once) in what was possibly commentary on the belief that Kirby felt in the potential of the younger generation of the day.

All three titles were cancelled midway through their planned runs due to claims of low sales, but the characters refused to go away, being revived and making guest-appearances in other series for years afterwards, but all without their creator's involvement; Kirby became disillusioned with DC in the mid-70s following the commercial failure of these and other books, and returned to Marvel.

By the mid-80s, a new market had opened up to comic publishers - A niche "direct market" that would pay more for comics, and could support smaller print-runs. As a result, DC started offering higher-quality reprints of fan-favorite books, and one of those was New Gods. To celebrate this - and also tie-in with the Fourth World characters appearances in the Super Friends TV show of the time, Jack Kirby was invited back to DC to complete the story the way he had originally planned for this series. He accepted and ended up creating a standalone graphic novel, The Hunger Dogs, which... wasn't really what anyone expected. Instead of bringing everything to a pulse-pounding, explosion-filled conclusion, Hunger Dogs is a sad story about technology corrupting everything, even the nobility of war, that ended with no one side truly victorious but everyone having lost, in some way. It's a wonderful book, but hardly likely to sell more Super Powers figures.

Despite having been revived multiple times since - and even having a series called Death Of The New Gods published last year - the entire Fourth World concept has essentially remained in a holding pattern since Kirby's involvement until this year's Final Crisis series, which started with the discovery of Orion's corpse and promises to finish with some kind of resolution for all of the New Gods. The story centers around Darkseid - now hiding in human form as "Boss Dark Side" - finally finding the Anti-Life Equation, and it allowing evil to finally "win," although it remains to be seen just what will happen after that; writer Grant Morrison and others at DC have talked about the series re-examining Kirby's characters and creating the "Fifth World" for them to live in, after all.

Perhaps Kirby had it right the first time; gods clash, die, and always find themselves reborn, doing the same thing over and over again, just looking somewhat different each time.

Jack Kirby's Fourth World [DC Database Project]

Talking about the death/rebirth rumor, Morrison explained where that got started:

When we first spoke about Final Crisis, coming out of the Seven Soldiers series, I had the New Gods cast down onto Earth, and because they'd lost their former shapes, they were cast as spirits or avatars possessing human bodies, like Voodoo gods [as shown in Seven Soldiers: Mr. Miracle].

For a brief moment back in 2006, I discussed the idea that the gods could then take over the bodies of familiar DC characters - so that an appropriate hero or villain could become the new Orion or Darkseid, say, and someone equally appropriate would become the new Lightray, kind of thing.

That didn't happen because no one wanted to mess with either Jack Kirby's or Gerry Conway's intellectual property by saying Lightray was now inhabiting Firestorm or something like that. Quite rightly, no-one was willing to change existing DC characters into Kirby characters, because that would immediately confuse the ownership of the character and somebody would get cheated out of equity if that character was used in a movie or TV show or whatever. It's very much a copyright issue.

Obviously, someone heard some faint years-old echo of this discarded idea and pawned it into the notion that Bruce Wayne was going to become a New God. That was never going to happen. That's just insane. (laughs)

I can tell you this much - this is the first story I had planned when Peter Tomasi, the editor at the time, asked me to do Batman, which must have been two years ago now... longer. And the very first story title I noted down was "Batman RIP". I had a particular image for the cover, which Alex Ross has done a bang-zoom- thousand-times-better version of for the second part of the story.

So it came from there...and out of that notion came the idea for the big overarching story I've been telling since I first came on the book. Everything...the "Zur-En-Arrh" graffiti, the Joker prose story, the Club of Heroes...every detail that's been in the book for the last couple of years is significant, everything is a clue to the grand design that's unfolding.

My run on Batman is a 25-chapter novel that reaches its climax in "RIP" and maneuvers Batman into the greatest danger he's ever known, at the mercy of the world's deadliest criminal lunatics.

And yeah, I've seen all kinds of speculation about "RIP," but it's not necessarily what people think it's going to be, although there are very big changes coming to Batman. When we say that this is the story that changes the legend of the Dark Knight forever, we're quite serious about that.