I’m also listening to the #audiobook of Final Crisis, which is adapted from the novelization rather than directly from the #comicbook. It fixes a lot of the choppiness and sparseness that made the original hard to follow at times. Narrative fills in which details you need to glean from the artwork.
And of course having it all together avoids the problem of delays between chapters that plagued the original release, though that’s true of the collected edition too.
But wow, I’m really seeing the parallels with Dark Knights: Metal even more strongly than when I was just comparing to memory.
Barbatos, like Darkseid, takes over the world between issues, and we jump to a handful of heroes mounting a desperate resistance. The lynchpin of the multiverse – conveniently the main DC Earth – is in danger of being pulled “downward” into an unending hell.
They’re a lot more alike than any of the Crisis events are to each other or to Metal.
Oh, can’t forget fighting twisted versions of the heroes. Except in Final Crisis, it was the actual heroes having been brainwashed, not expendable alternates.