Not Lost

[New York Magazine's loss = Your gain!]

Hey, "Lost" fans - since you love hyper-intelligent, philosophically bent, diabolically elusive and fantastic serialized narratives so much, you probably bought Grant Morrison's "Final Crisis #1" yesterday, right?

No?

Well, if you didn't, you've missed out on the week's sub-prime opportunity to be baffled, teased and yet vaguely satisfied by a piece of storytelling. Morrison is noted by funnybook fans for his historic runs on X-Men, JLA, and Animal Man, as well as for being batshit insane. DC Comics (they publish Superman and Batman) has given him the keys to their summer "event" - a sequel, of sorts, to the company's ridiculously confusing continuity-fluxing "Crisis on Infinite Earths" and "Infinite Crisis." And if you're one of those people who finds themselves perversely thrilled by not understanding what's going on, the resulting pamphlet is an E-ticket ride.

Not for Morrison the simple pleasures offered by Marvel's "Battlestar Galactica"-aping paranoid allegory "Secret Invasion." No, "Final Crisis #1" does not feature gigantic spy satellites exploding, large groups of spandex-clad superheroes hurting each other, or a great deal of respect for last week's continuity. Instead, we get a police procedural about the death of one kind of obscure Jack Kirby character as investigated by an obscurer Kirby creation, framed by a nearly wordless, time-hopscotching flashback/forward that suggests that one of Kirby's New Gods played the role Greek mythology assigns to Prometheus. This device also implies that that the First and Last Boys on Earth (in DC's take on things) are about to get to know each other.

Morrison's single concession to the tropes of mainstream comic "events" is that one of the company's most popular characters gets murdered by a brand-new bad guy. Altogether, it's kind of a trip. No, it's not set on a desert island - but it will screw with your head.