There are some excellent annotations at
http://finalcrisisannotations.blogspot.com/. I definitely would not have understood most of
Final Crisis without them.
That being said, my mind was blown roughly the same amount as the first time I read
Preacher. I loved
Final Crisis. For me, it changed the way I am looking at and evaluating new comics, both in terms of storytelling and story content. I understand that if a story requires you to look up annotations and interviews with the author in order to really "get it," a totally valid response is to say "Why not just put all that info in the story in the first place?", but I felt like even the
way the story was being told was commenting on the state of comics, so I didn't feel put off by having to read supplementary information.
Morrison has compared
Final Crisis to "channel surfing" comics, and I think it's a good comparison. The story is disjointed, but I think the comic is intentionally pushing the reader into shifting mindsets and storylines frequently. Think about reading something on Wikipedia, and how quickly you can shift from one subject to another just by clicking on a link. I think
Final Crisis is an attempt at telling a story for a generation of people already used to rapidly shifting their focus at a moment's notice. Storytelling with ADD, but not necessarily in a bad way. The scene with Nix Uotan trying to coordinate all of the events reminded me a lot of the scene in Watchmen when Ozymandias is viewing all of the rapidly changing television stations, and I feel like the comic is essentially written for an audience a slightly more accustomed to "changing channels" than we are. This is not to say that Morrison is writing comics for the future or anything, but I think he is attempting to embrace what he sees as a shift in human thinking. If you believe
The Medium is the Massage, then our brains are shifting the way we think as a response to technology and I think
Final Crisis can be seen as an attempt to write a story for brains used to switching focus all the time due to the availability of information because of the internet and other communication technology.
Just to be clear though, I think everything I just said only really relates to
Final Crisis and
Superman Beyond. The rest of the spin-offs were interesting enough, and I enjoyed reading them, but only because they sort of filled in details. I don't think they are making nearly as much of an argument for anything as
Final Crisis is.