All throughout April, we’re crowdsourcing a coronavirus comics reading list. Each weekday for a month, we’ll post a new recommendation from someone in the comics industry to help folks get through the quarantine. It’ll be a crowdsourced list of recommended reading from writers, artists, letterers, editors, comics journalists, publicists, and more…all paired with a local shop that’s currently selling the books via mail order.

Today’s first selection comes from writer Curt Pires…enjoy!

My pick for this quarantine reading recommendation is Grant Morrison and JG Jones Final Crisis. It’s a polarizing work, for certain, but most works of genius are. If you’re taking creative risks, it’s rare that the response to what you’re doing will be unanimous. Final Crisis is brilliant because it’s the comics equivalent of an arthouse blockbuster. The story has all the scale and the scope of a summer event comic, but the weirdness of being a narrative generated by mining both Morrisons’ DC Continuity he’d been building, and Jack Kirby’s Fourth World stuff. The resulting work is an epic that perfectly captures this mythic feeling of the DC Universe's darkest hour. The story jumps around unapologetically, with Morrison dubbing the narrative metod something akin to “channel switching / surfing”. I love JG Jones art on this too. He’s such a brilliant widescreen comics artist, and I’m really glad that despite the fact he couldn’t finish the book, he came back to draw the Batman sequence in that one issue. You’ll know the one I’m talking about when you read it.

Final Crisis is important to me because it shows that comics can be mythical and bombastic without losing their emotional core or sense of intelligence, a lesson I think a great deal of superhero comics could benefit from.

I’d also suggest people read all of Morrison’s Batman run that surrounds and intertwines with this story to fully appreciate the dense tapestry he was weaving at the time. Truly one of the great moments in modern superhero comics. -Curt Pires

Curt Pires is the writer of Wyrd from Dark Horse Comics and Olympia from Image Comics.

Final Crisis
Writer: Grant Morrison
Main Artist: J.G. Jones
Publisher: DC Comics
The mind-blowing miniseries is back in an expanded trade paperback collecting FINAL CRISIS #1-7, FINAL CRISIS: SUBMIT #1, FINAL CRISIS: SUPERMAN BEYOND #1-2, DC UNIVERSE #0, BATMAN #682-683 and pages from ABSOLUTE FINAL CRISIS! What happens when evil wins? Superman, Batman and the Justice League must face this reality when Darkseid and his followers win the war between light and dark!

Buy Comics Here: Looking for Final Crisis or other comics reading during the crisis? Third Eye Comics in Annapolis, Md., is open and sending out orders. Learn more here!

Click here for the full coronavirus reading list!