Maybe it’s the way Grant Morrison writes, or maybe that it took almost six months to get this to print, but I have to say: I have no idea what the hell happened here. Yes there was a resolution and yes Morrison finished Joe’s story but to be honest, getting to that point made me baffled from page one. I’m not surprised hearing that Morrison rewrote the hell out of this thing because the action goes in every direction to get to the final page. Characters are introduced at the last minute and the explanation of the realities apparently crossing over doesn’t seem to be handled well here. Morrison does write a very sweet moment with Joe finding a letter from his dad, but even then with the last page it feels like there is more to the story. Just what the hell happened to Joe? Was it really a diabetic hallucination or did he really fight for two worlds? Morrison clearly makes it ambiguous but not in a good way, more as in he didn’t clear it up at all.

I can certainly see why it did take Murphy such a long time to draw this now. Since the structure is such a mess he has to do everything in his power to make this at all readable. He executes everything perfectly from undead rat ronins, and the heroes taking back a castle, to everyback back in the real world. There is just a ton of detail in these panels and since this is an oversized finale you can enjoy this even longer then a normal issue. If there is anything to look back at this final issue fondly is how perfectly executed Sean Murphy’s art was.

I hinted that the extreme delay may have hurted this issue. Well I certainly think the massive rewriting Morrison did to cause the delay certained hurted it for me. But I read the previous 7 issues right up to reading this so I was certainly ready to finish this. Even with a re-read of this I still have no idea what the hell happened and while that is usually par for the course on Morrison stories I think it’s different here. Morrison usually likes to make the ending ambiguous and let the audience figure out on their own how it ended. But personally I thought this was a very shoddy written ending and by the fifth page I was completely lost. I’m not sure why Morrison felt a need to redo the final issue but I’d love to see what the original ending was. Cause quite frankly it had to have been a lot better then what we got here.