••

This is the essential problem with the continuity heavy "universe" Marvel has become. Stan and Jack, or Stan and Steve, could do Big, Important Stories, that were essentially one-and-done. Think of the death of Franklin Storm, for instance, or any of a number of what we might think of a pre-Gwen deaths.

But the problem now, and for many years, is that something like alcoholism cannot be "one-and-done". Sure, in the context of the Marvel Universe, Tony Stark, realizing he is an alcoholic, could drop by a certain house in Greenwich Village, and the problem would be gone. But that's too much of a "comicbook solution" for these kinds of problems. So Stark becoming an alcoholic casts a permanent shadow across the character and the title.

Hasn't Tony essentially been reborn three times now in the last 15 years?  Heroes Reborn, then some sort of Kang-like future resurrection and during the Ellis Extremis run.  Any of those events could have wiped the alcoholism clean.  Especially Extremis, whose entire premise was to use his brain's own power to heal and purify his body by neural rewiring.

And even now, in Fraction's run, he has restored his brain-dead mind from some sort of pre-Marvel Civil War mind backup data storage.  Why not just decode that part of his brain?

Because alcoholism makes him interesting?  At this point, not having alcholism would make Tony interesting.

Emery, congratulations on an excellently observed series of comics' most egregious and nauseating "Jump the Shark" moments.

***

That was a good list. Maybe we should call it "Jumping the Stark" when it happens in comics.  

Superman singing to defeat Darkseid?!? What?!?

============

That's not quite what happened.  Darkseid was already defeated by that moment;  then there was the even greater threat of Mandrakk.  From the 30th Century, came the Miracle Machine and the song was how the Machine was activated to fix all of reality from the destruction that Darkseid and Mandrakk had caused.

Funny thing; first time I read Final Crisis, I liked it right up to the defeat of Darkseid.  But that ending, with the singing and Mandrakk was confusing.

For some bizarre reason, I bought the trade paperback which included the Superman 2-part story written by Morrison.  Reading the story with that piece, made the ending make sense and I enjoyed it.

Still, I can't recommend reading this story.    Well, except for Legion of Super-heroes Final Crisis drawn by Perez.  That was a good story.