DC Fans Have Been Wrong About The Real Hero of Final Crisis For Almost 20 Years

DC’s Final Crisis is a very interesting beast, and fans have long been wrong about one key element of it. After the success of Infinite Crisis, the company was on something of a creative upswing. Writer Grant Morrison had returned to DC in late ’04, and helped co-write 52 before working on the “Seven Soldiers of Victory” crossover, JLA Classified #1-4, All-Star Superman, and Batman. Morrison had long been one of DC’s most trusted hands, and they had an idea for the ultimate Crisis story.

This idea would become Final Crisis, a series that was sold as “The Day Evil Won.” It was a massive crossover with Darkseid as its main villain, and looking at it, a valid interpretation of the story is that Superman is the lead protagonist. Darkseid does his best to keep Superman off the Earth for his attack, and the tide is turned when Superman returns. Superman is the one who brings the Miracle Machine from the future to rebuild the Multiverse. He destroys Darkseid, and the Supermen of the Multiverse are able to defeat the Vampire Monitor Mandrakk, who took advantage of the situation with Darkseid to try to destroy everything. However, there’s a more intriguing choice for the story’s hero — Darkseid.

Final Crisis is a perfect event, in my opinion, and a big reason for that is how complicated the story is. Morrison wasn’t giving readers a story that was easy to digest, but one with hidden depths that rewards re-reading, taking multiple ideas from their work and DC history in order to inform the story. Darkseid is DC’s greatest villain, but there’s a reading of the story that would reveal that Darkseid’s actions were actually important to the rebirth of the multiverse. In many ways, Darkseid served a heroic role in the story and is Final Crisis‘s true hero.

Darkseid Plays a Crucial Role in the Cosmology of the DC Multiverse and Final Crisis Plays into That

So, in order to understand Darkseid’s heroic role in the story, we’ll have to go over some things about the DC Multiverse. There are two types of energies in the DC Multiverse. Hope, which has been called Superman energy, and doom, which is the energy that Darkseid represents. Superman is the beginning of the DC Multiverse, and even though he is no longer chronologically the first superhero like he used to be in pre-Crisis continuity, he is the nucleus of the DC Multiverse. His opposite is Darkseid.

Created by Jack Kirby to be the evil that is in the heart of all things, Darkseid stands diametrically opposed to everything that Superman stands for. The next thing you need to understand is the DC Multiverse of Final Crisis. The multiverse had been reborn in 52. The Monitors had sprang into existence, and the worlds of the multiverse were both brand new and had existed for all of time. However, as we’ve learned in past Crisis events, the multiverse can be unstable; it was all meant to be on,e and so splitting it apart again could do huge damage to the fabric of reality in the DC Multiverse. There’s an idea that Final Crisis was meant to be the final crisis of the Monitors, revealing their nature as vampiric beings that fed off the Bleed, and the birth of Nix Uotan as the Superjudge, a being who was the key to the survival of existence.

So, that brings us to Final Crisis. Before the events of the story, Darkseid was killed in battle with his son Orion, fulfilling the prophecy at the center of the New Gods. The destruction of Darkseid’s body caused a black hole in existence that was deforming all of reality; by the end of the story, the black hole had crushed the multiverse down into one construct, represented by the JLA Watchtower and Titan Tower. Darkseid taking over Earth was meant to allow him to reshape the multiverse as it died, creating a new reality from it. This new multiverse was weak and unstable, and the Monitors kept it separate and broken. Darkseid wanted to remake everything in his own image, but his attack allowed something else to happen — Superman to create the tools that would remake and strengthen the Multiverse.

Darkseid fulfilled his purpose as the epicenter of the energies of doom, dooming the unstable multiverse. His attack brought Superman into the mix with the tools to fix everything, using both his own Superman energies and the Miracle Machine to recreate reality the way it should have been — strong and stable, without the Monitors draining the energy of the Bleed to nourish themselves, leaving only the Superjudge to serve as the being who watched the walls of reality, as it should have been. Darkseid’s destruction of the multiverse was like a forest fire, burning away the dead growth to allow new life to take its place.

On top of that, Darkseid, as the personification of evil, had his energies recombined with the nascent multiverse that Superman created. In fact, it could have easily been the fact that Darkseid’s energy wasn’t part of the creation of the new multiverse that made the whole thing unstable. Darkseid is death and entropy; perhaps the only way for the multiverse to be stable is for these energies to be free of form when it’s created, something Superman was able to manage by discorporating him with a whistle.

Darkseid Had to Destroy Everything In Order for It to Be Recreated Correctly

Grant Morrison is a student of comics. They’ve talked often about the role that comics have played in their life, many times. One of my favorite Morrison ideas is the meta-nature of superheroes. Morrison writes superheroes as personifications of forces that need to exist. A fictional universe like DC, to Morrison, is just as real as anything else. So, from that respect, Morrison was showing the power of hope in the face of the ultimate doom in Final Crisis, a story that saw entropy ultimately allow for new growth to take it place; doom striking and allowing hope to remake everything. So, sure, Superman is the one who defeated the evil and remade the multiverse. However, he never could have done that without Darkseid’s actions.

Darkseid’s actions were “evil”, but he was just following his nature. Is the lightning bolt that starts a forest fire that destroys a forest evil? No, it’s serving its purpose, and the destruction it causes allows something new to grow from the ashes. In fact, you could say that the lightning bolt is the hero; the fire may kill many, but it also results in the birth of many more. Darkseid is that lightning bolt. His death and the actions he took afterwards made the birth of a stronger multiverse possible. Darkseid is a monster, but he’s also an important hero in the events of Final Crisis.

Do you think Darkseid is the hero of Final Crisis? Does any of this make sense? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!

DC’s Crisis Events, Ranked