In defence of Morrison...
I saw some people trashing Final Crisis, which of course is a common stance to take. I'm of the opinion that it's something of a flawed masterpiece, the kind of ambitious failure that I'll take over a modest success any day.
When compared alongside the vaccuous, event-by-numbers storytelling of Secret Invasion, the event Marvel was running at the same time, it's clear just how superior Final Crisis is in its storytelling. With so many events, the outcome is solicited months in advance, and the whole event just becomes a tiresome exercise in moving from point A to point B and launching the publishing directive de jour. Take Schism, where it took the whole mini-series before we got to the Wolverine/Cyclops fighting that was in all the advance marketing materials and so we knew what was coming. With Secret Incasion, much of the Dark Reign stuff was telegraphed well in advance and so the event itself was just a case of seeing how we'd get there. With Final Crisis, all the hype and marketing talk took us as far as issue #3, up to the skip month. From that point on, we were entering unknown territory. There was a genuine sense of not knowing how the hell the world could possibly be saved, and it's that kind of uncertainty that's like gold-dust in Big Two superhero books.
If Final Crisis has one major problem, it's that it doesn't quite stick the landing, with the closing chapters continuing to get bigger and bigger in scale at the point when focus should have been narrowed down to a more personal climactic moment. And such there is a kind of reader disconnect that ultimately makes this an aesthetically and structurally impressive but emotionally cold story. But still, a remarkable, underrated technical achievement that will be more deeply appreciated in future years with a greater degree of separation.
In defence of Snyder...
I think the assumption of "Anyone who likes Snyder's Batman is just a Nolan/BTAS fanboy" is imbecilic on multiple levels. First, it implies that liking two of the greatest depictions of Batman in any medium (I'll pretend we're in the strange, distant land of May 2012 where it isn't hideously unfashionable to praise Christopher Nolan) is somehow shameful and aomething a Batman fan shouldn't be doing. Second, it's a picture-perfect crystallisation of that Comic Book Guy elitism ("liking something remotely popular makes you lame and not a TRUE comic fan!") that gives us fanboys a bad name. Reductive arguments like that do no one any favours.
As for the idea that nobody who likes Scott Snyder's Batman is able to verbalise WHY they like it, and are therefore talking crap, I'll have a go. Morrison's Batman is also excellent, and I think will likely go down in history as the superior run of the two. But Snyder is telling different a different kind of story. While Morrison's is a run of dizzying key huge ideas and ambitious, labyrinthine plotting, Snyder's is more intensely psychological and character-driven. The whole run has essentially been a Batman character study, looking at the way his hubris continually comes back to haunt him. In many ways, he's the opposite of Morrison's Batgod, prepared for everything and nigh-superhuman in his ability to always be 10 steps ahead of everyone and have contingencies for his contingencies. And while that awesomeness is what often makes Morrison's run so thrilling, with Snyder it's Batman's flaws that make him compelling. The two runs are almost mirror images of each other. It's telling that Snyder's run has been at its least gripping when the arcs reach the "Batman makes the big comeback, beats the bad guys and saves the day" phase, as this character work where Snyder excels goes onto the back burner at these points.
With "Death of the Family" in particular, Snyder is excelling at creating this constant sense of turn-of-the-screw dread, and has successfully made The Joker a more frightening presence than he's been in some time. And while some are having fits over liberties taken with continuity, not enough credit is being given to all the nods to previous continuity, how the story draws on past Joker tales and is enrichened by them, I also think the event is bringing out the best in many of the creative teams participating in the crossover.
I gave my opinion in a civil manner (and was pretty objective about the New 52 in particular), yet it's constant nastiness. I feel like I'm in the Twilight Zone.
. And dare I say that most people who like Snyder's current Batwork simply because it is well....actually good.
