#23- Special Guest Superman: Jack Bauer

I don't watch much/enough tv, but I do catch just enough to know that around the time Gitmo kicked into gear, torture scenes became par for the course in American television. Sure, the methods were brutal. In fact, they were staggeringly creative in their brutality. But to ease our collective conscience regarding actual acts of torture being perpetrated just off the east coast, tv's torturers were always in desperate situations and the guys they were torturing were generally pretty bad cats.

But Mr. Mxyzptlk never really hurt anybody and doesn't seem to have any crucial info. Mixy does inform us as to how SuperCopyrightInfringement Prime got all growed up. Looks like the black suit and some sort of "encounter" that will hopefully be explained as soon as Green Lantern 25 hits the shelves bulked up our boy. Except for his, ahem, superpackage. Lil' Supes has built a torturtastic Fortress of Solitude in the Source Wall (which Source Wall is anyone's guess) and is burrowed away with Mixy and Annataz Arataz, the evil equivalent of Zatanna. The torturing, including one nasty little facial tattoo, doesn't net us much information, except that Mxyzptlk is the third dimension's trickster god, sometimes known as Anasazi, Loki and Coyote. So, um, there's that.

In other news...actually, there is no other news. The aliens from Invasion show up briefly, only to get blowed up by Monarch's crew, currently lead by Lord Havok, who you might remember from never having cared about him before.

In the end, Annataz gives up her life to protect Mixy from Supes, and Mixy responds by flying away from the whole scene. And that, my friends, is all that happens this week. This week's treatment of Mr. Mxyzptlk is fairly indicative of DC editorial's treatment of some of their lesser properties. Whereas 52 tried to take the silly parts of the DCU and make them viable, it seems that Countdown is taking ideas that were never officially part of the DCU and doing violence to them. I hope no one actually likes any of those Elseworlds characters, because I get the feeling they're about to be trashed, for no good reason whatsoever.

#24- That's Really Super, Superman-Prime!

When legal issues and publishing issues collide, it's a perfect storm of poorly executed comics!

So our black-clad Superperson is revealed to be the Annoying Little Twit Formerly Known as Superboy! But of course, we can't call him Superboy, because DC might not own the rights to the character.

To make things even better, he's showing up here in a new outfit and VISIBLY OLDER than he appears in the still on-going Sinestro Corps War, which won't finish up until December.

Now I ask you, what the hell is that all about? Why is DC so committed to sabotaging the Sinestro Corps storyline? Dan Didio is over at Newsarama asserting that pulling Kyle and Prime into Countdown before they've finished out their stories in the Lantern book is what's best for all involved. The argument seems to be that coordinating multiple storylines is hard. You don't say!

It also seems that the epilogue to the Sinestro Corps War will be published before its conclusion. How could anyone be confused?

No Rogues, no Jimmy and still no sign of Harley and Holly this issue. Maybe they got eaten by those guard dogs a couple weeks back.

Everyone's favorite copyright infringement finds himself on the apparently quite pleasant Earth-15, a planet where the sidekicks have become the heroes. And Zod has become Superman, which doesn't jive with the rest of things, but I guess it doesn't much matter, since Prime toasts Mr. and Mrs. Zod in the first couple pages.

Possessed by Desaad, Firestorm still can't figure out a way to effectively use his pretty mind-bending powers. You give a guy who's supposed to be some sort of torture genius the ability to turn anything into anything else and all he can think to do is fire poorly-aimed laser beams at Karate Kid, whose superpower is...karate? But the Atomic Knights come to the rescue, defeating Firesaad with a shiny ball of goo! One more panel would have been enough to explain what the ball of goo was all about, but instead, a significantly less fiery Desaad boomtubes back to Apokolips into the middle of a Darkseid-Mary Marvel rumble. Mary might be entirely insane, but she's still devoted to free will! Granted, sometimes free will means magically not-quite-killing-but-for-all-extents-and-purposes-killing a whole lot of people, but some New Gods just go too far. Mary toughs out some Omega Beams, zaps Darkseid with her poorly-defined powers, poses for yet another upskirt shot and escapes into, well, she escapes.

"Elsewhere", Donna and Kyle have a heart-to-heart on an earth that apparently doesn't even rate a name. Looks like if you're a Green Lantern, "stick together" is sometimes a euphemism for "make out". Hope springs eternal, Mr. Rayner.

Back to Earth-15, we get a very brief glimpse of the JLA made up of Garth, Connor and Cyborg. Oh, and Martian Manhunter, but that guy's like the J in JLA. And then they get exploded.

Even the combined power of the Bat-plane and the Invisible Jet are not enough to slow this little legal loophole! In a move that can only be described as "a slight over-reaction", Prime decides that if the people of Earth-15 can't learn to love his psychotic self, he'd simply plow through the earth's core and explode that, too. I'm no geologist, but I'm pretty sure that's not how the earth is set up. Yes, this is the one thing I'm taking issue with: I don't believe that flying through the earth would cause it to blow up, and I challenge any of you to fly through the center of the earth and prove me wrong.

So what book is this anyway? Couldn't we resolve one threat before adding another? I wasn't all that interested in Lil' Supes in Infinite Crisis or Sinestro Corps and I'm not that interested in him here. I'd be much keener on Cyborg Supes or the AntiMonitor showing up here. Hey, maybe 52 AntiMonitors! You know, someone who doesn't come off as a complete blundering idiot. Even blundering your way through the center of a planet is still blundering.

#25- Catching Up on the Countdown

For starters, an apology. The combination of a busted hard drive, a death in the family and a looming book deadline moved Countdown to the back burner for quite a while.

Anyway, let's get back into it. After last issue's recap -fest, we're focused in on Karate Kid and Singular Girl as they are inexplicably accompanied by an elderly man and a small child through a post-apocalyptic wasteland. With the help of Firestorm, they hold off a couple of the Atomic Knights who've been patrolling Bludhaven since it done got blowed up. Not patrolling well, mind you, just patrolling. After a little bit of blood-specked chop-socky from KK, Firestorm remembers that he has the power to change any element into any other element, which is a handy skill to have, and the intrepid group proceeds into the bowels of Command D.

The Atomic Knights, by the way, show up in some of the post-Great Disaster stories, being all knightly and stuff. They also put Captain Atom into his current Monarch suit and we can see how well that went.

The Rogues once again escape from imminent capture through the stupidest means possible.

Over on Apokolips, it seems Jimmy Olsen's mysterious power-provider isn't the only one who cares if this little chucklehead lives or dies. Darkseid lays some Omega beams down on one of his own slavedrivers for messing with the kid. A nice gesture, but I've got to say, I just don't trust that Darkseid fellow. Something about his tendency to vaporize employees.

Mary Marvel, or Crazy McMiniskirt, gets the sales pitch for the Dark Side from Darkseid. Who can resist the thrills of "true darkness", you ask? Once again, we are confronted with the absurdity of self-aware evil. Darkseid is hoping to check one more item off his list of "Evil Things to Do Today..." But Mary looks a little wary. I mean, teaming up with the Wrath of God who happens to be inhabiting the body of the woman who trampled on your friend's brain is one thing, but...actually, I forgot where I was going with that.

Where are the Challengers? They're off in a tie-in issue. How about Holly and Harley? I'm not sure, but I'd bet whatever they're up to includes the phrase "scantily-clad".

And finally, KK, Singular Girl and the gang reach the super-secret caramel center of Command D, where the find Desaad, who is torturing an old guy! But not just any old guy, Professor Stein, who used to be the sciencey old guy portion of Firestorm. And by torturing said old guy, Desaad manages to take over the Firestorm matrix! Which I thought only had room for two people, but is currently housing three. Firestorm (or possibly just the Firestorm matrix) is not just an Elemental (which means he gets to hang around with Swamp Thing) but also contains part of the Life Equation, which is like the Anti-Life Equation only Life-ier. Despite his amazing powers, Firestorm is in the running for Most Killed DC Character. I'm pretty sure he died a couple times in Infinte Crisis and once got offed in Manhunter, which all of three people were reading anyway. You would think total control over the structure of atoms would keep you more or less intact (remember the Metamorphing Girl in Sandman?), but Firestorm and Metamorpho seem to be arguments to the contrary.

Before I sign off, let me just mention Ron Lim's art, which is wonderful, clear and makes the most of Keith Giffen's layouts. At some points it reminded me a bit of Matt Wagner's work on Mage, which is fairly high praise. A well-focused issue, which advances at least one of our stories a bit. At this point in Countdown, that's about the best we can expect.

Incidentally, I'm not picking up any of the Search for Ray Palmer specials. Salvation Run led off well, but it was Bill Willingham that got me in the door on that one, and Rucka's Crime Bible book is nice and sparse in the way Rucka's early Batman scripts were. Of course, all of this was trumped by the one-two punch of The Black Dossier and the new Scott Pilgrim. But you knew that, didn't you?

#26- Expositionaggedon

You know what the Countdown team could have done to completely win back my heart? Simply titling this issue "Monitors watching monitors." That would have done it.

You know, I've had that joke in my head all weekend? How sad is that?

So starting this week, I'm following a whopping three weekly storylines: this one, Messiah Complex and the Return of Ra's A Ghul. Which puts a simultaneous strain on the patience and the pocketbook. Somehow I expected this would mean $10 a week worth of whiz-bang fun, but as I read through these three books, I realized I was following the resolution of a storyline I never really bought into with the X-Men and the surprise resurrection of a character whose superpower is resurrection. Next week will decide the fate of both storylines, but for now I'm feeling fairly yawny across the board.

But you're not here to find out about my comics purchases. You're here for non-stop Countdown to Final Crisis action! And title change means non-stop exposition!

This issue's purpose seems to be two-fold. The first is to bring new readers onto the title and get them caught up. Now some comic book companies might have done this by promoting the issue through ads. DC opted to promote this as a jump-on issue through Newsarama's weekly Countdown rundown, which, particularly during the contentious first weeks of Mike Carlin's reign on the title, is sometimes more interesting than the book it discusses. Before I post this, maybe I'll stroll around the corner and ask the fine folks at Comics for Collectors if they've seen a jump in sales. The second purpose seems to be alerting those of us who've been on board (almost typed "bored") for the last six months that we've been effectively scammed out of $77.74.

The art on this issue is the best we've seen so far. The layouts have a cramped, claustrophobic sense that effectively gives the reader the feeling of being crammed into Monitor HQ. Even the linework on characters contributes to this feeling and I really think that along with an improvement in the script, the art plays a huge part in making this issue feel taut in a way that the previous twenty-six installments don't. Tellingly, the art feels ill-fitting in the issues two interludes which occur outside of Monitor HQ and fail to evoke a feeling of open space.

Calling this issue a recap doesn't quite hit the nail. What this issue manages to do is bring together most (not all) of the stuff that should have been clear from reading Countdown and make it clear for the first time. Yes, it's highly annoying that the Monitors are once again deciding to rally behind Bearded Monitor, which they decided to do in, like, the fourth issue? And it's equally annoying that they declare war on...um...bad things. Things they dislike strongly. But at least we get some sense of what they're trying to avoid.

So here's the deal. The Source Wall(s) separate each of the 52 universes from one another, which is pretty important. Every time someone passes through one, it degrades the Source Wall a little bit, like termites in wood. If this keeps up, the Source Walls are all going to collapse, resulting in a Final Crisis, which is not to be confused with a Great Disaster. So Monarch and Bob the Monitor are bad news. I think it's still okay for Bearded Monitor to jump from HQ into whatever universe he damn well likes, but since I can't for the ever-loving life of me figure out where in this cosmology Monitor HQ, Apokolips or New Genesis are supposed to be located, that's just an assumption.

As if a Final Crisis wasn't enough, we're apparently also staring down the barrel of a Great Disaster. Karate Kid, who was hale and hearty last week, is suddenly vomiting blood. Greatly Disastrous blood. Once he's out of his containment suit, his Karate Sense starts tingling (you know, KK, that tingling feeling might just be the deadly virus) and a helpful Firestorm shows up to blast the whole gang into the offices of Command D. Firestorm's got one of those truly baffling backstories that regularly force DC to ditch its entire continuity, but the (possibly) relevant point here is that he contains one-fourth of the Life Equation, which is like the anti-Anti-Life Equation that Darkseid's so keen on. Good to know, eh? Thanks, wikipedia!

Possibly my favorite line this week is Bearded Monitor's assertion that apparently "SOMEONE considers Olsen invaluable." Certainly not readers, but someone. Jimmy, in case you haven't been reading, has developed wacky superpowers, most prominently the power to not get his dumbass self killed. What's not mentioned here is Jimmy's connection to the Source Wall, or the fact that there's a new Source Wall that contains all the dead New Gods. Jimmy and Forager dive right into Apokolips and get dropped like a box of rocks by a small army of Parademons. So much for that plan.

Oh yeah, someone's been killing the New Gods. So, along with a Final Crisis and a Great Disaster, you can add the End of the Fourth World to the mix. Which wouldn't be such a major concern, except that the Fourth World is the current DCU.

Mary Marvel's decline in mental health is mentioned, but that's about it. And perhaps the same hand is behind all of these things? Perhaps a big stony hand in a big blue glove? Perhaps the hand of the guy she's shown cowering before on the cover?

With all that bad news mapped out and the assertion that someone is certainly behind it, the Monitors, spurred by Bearded Monitor and Probably Kryptonian Monitor, decide to go to war against whoever happens to be certainly behind it. PKM makes with a sneaky little smile and a line about fear being a powerful motivator, straight out of the Sinestro Corps training manual after interrupting BM's communication with (wait for it) someone unidentified! I hope those guys know fear is also the path to the Dark Side, but seeing how versed everyone in Countdown is with films of the 1980s, I'm sure they do.

Next up, it's time for some interludes! The first is a reveal that really could have waited til next week. I mean, come on, give us a minute to sweat it out, why don't you? Yep, Jason Todd's switching of teams was a clever ruse, coordinated with the omniscient and totally useless Bob the Monitor so that the Challengers could teleport to somewhere still not very far away. The important thing about this interlude is that it gave the writers a chance to drop in this week's offensive adolescent put-down. Since Jason is so aggressively heterosexual, there's no use impugning his manliness, so Donna hits him with her "Re-Todd" zinger, receiving a high five from Kyle for her effort. Again, folks, this is not okay. How can we make this any clearer? Using sexual orientation or mental disability as insults is not okay. Words like "gay" or "retarded" should not be used as pejoratives outside a fucking elementary school. Editors and writers at DC, please grow up and stop putting embarassing crap like this in your comics.

I really am looking forward to issues where I don't have to include little tirades like that in my reviews. I can't express enough how much I'm looking forward to that.

The second interlude on Earth-15 opens up what looks like a whole new can of worms. A character who looks a whole lot like the post-resurrection Superman flies off into space with Earth-15's Lex Luthor, who looks like not such a bad guy. I mean, anyone whose willing to throw a thumbs-up at a camera can't be pure evil, can they? We know Zod is wearing the ol' blue and reds on Earth-15 and that the black suit was for maximum absorption of yellow sunlight. Oh, and we know that Black Suited Supes was getting chummy with Cyborg Supes and Kingdom Come Supes in the second teaser image. That, my friends, is about all we know. To clear up a minor point, my understanding of current continuity is that the S-symbol stands for Kryptonianism in general and not just the House of El, so your guess on this new guy's story is as good as mine.

Holly, Piper and Trickster are noticeably absent from BM's rallying speech, indicating that neither he, nor the editors have any idea how their storylines tie in. Mike Carlin has intimated that only two out of the three are going to be around by next month. Anyone want to place a bet?

I know I read the first installment of "Thy Kingdom Come" over in JSA, and I know it's probably of crucial importance to Countdown, since it contains not one but two universe-hoppers, Supes and Starman, who is one of my favorite folks in the DCU at the moment. But I can't for the life of me remember what happened. I'll give it a re-read and post on it if it seems relevant. The Death of the New Gods seems to be moving at Starlin speed, which is slow but steady (catch the "steady" part there, Countdowners?), with Mr. Miracle donning darker colors and heading for Apokolips with Superman and Orion, and Takion finding a new Source Wall that looks more like the devil's rec room. Instead of becoming one with the Source, the souls of the recently deceased New Gods are getting stuffed and mounted, which will probably lead to some sort of Great Crisis or Final Disaster.

Unfortunately, I didn't manage to get my hands on the first issue of Crime Bible, but I've got a copy coming soon. Like a lot of people, this was the 52 spin-off I was waiting for. Even if DC can't summon up the intestinal fortitude to launch a Batwoman title, cause lesbianism is clearly such a blow to sales, at least Montoya's back in rotation.

Not a bad little issue, except for Donna's awful little comment. I feel like the story is on more solid ground than it has been, and there were less WTF moments here than previously. Maybe DC truly has circled the wagons?

#27- The Countdown to the Countdown to Final Crisis is Over!

So that's all folks! It's been a hell of a ride, kind of like one of those old-timey wooden roller coaster that shakes you violently and uncomfortably for longer than you'd really like, causing chipped teeth and mild abdominal brusing, till it coasts into the station and you say to your neighbor, "Did we seriously wait in line for that?"

This is the last official issue of Countdown, which will be replaced with Countdown to Final Crisis next week. And what a last official issue it was! Hoo..bingo. Let's get to review, shall we?

First of all, we could review the ways to ruin a surprise ending. There's the ever popular "mention the ending in another comic" method used to ruin the Sinestro Corps War and the first issue of Death of the New Gods. But then there's also that Countdown favorite, use the surprise ending as the cover! So I won't be spoiling anything by telling you that this issue ends with Jason Todd shooting Donna Troy. With a gun Bob the Monitor has been apparently carting around this whole time. Wait, Bob's had a GUN this whole time? What is with that guy being captain of the Useless Patrol? Jason offs Donna to prove his allegiance to Monarch. Which actually makes more sense than a lot of crap that's gone on around here. Let's remember, since he got Superboy-punched back to life, Jason's been a fairly unpleasant guy, not the loveable scamp we've seen here in Countdown. I don't necessarily think Donna's actually dead, although she's been dead about a dozen times before, so she's probably getting used to it. But for once, Countdown actually pulled a surprise that was at least mildly surprising and also made sense. And it only took them six months.

So the Challengers enter CtFC down two members and still stuck on Earth-8, which was a pretty stupid place to go in the first place.

Speaking of stupid places to go, Karate Kid, Singular Girl and World's Best Grandpa Buddy Blank take the kid who maybe might be Kamandi on a scenic tour of Bludhaven. No threat of impending death is going to keep Buddy from showing his grandkid "what the world could one day become." He's a tough kid, after all. I remember when my grandpappy set me on fire to show me that fire is pretty hot. It was a learning experience and I'm better for it.

Hey, it's Darkseid! And he's got a little Kid Who Maybe Might Be Kamandi chess piece! Oh, the foreboding of it all. And that look on Darkseid's face as he looks at the bottom of the chess piece clearly says, "Made in Taiwan, huh?" For those of you who aren't reading every other DC comic, you should probably know that at this point, everyone on the planet earth is working for Darkseid. Checkmate? Darkseid. Eclipso? Darkseid. Athena? Darkseid. Darkseid? Darkseid.

This week's barely intelligible award goes to Jimmy Olsen! Jimmy and Lady Forager have moved their poorly-dialogued tete-a-tete from the roof to the storeroom of the Daily Planet, and they've conveniently moved the Newsboy Legion to just outside the door. Huh? Congratulations, Jimmy Olsen, you've won Countdown's Continuity Error of the Week. What are you going to do now? I'm headed for Apokolips! Boom.

Mary and Eclipso (apparently they're close enough now that Mary can just call her "Jean" rather than "Crazy Lady Who Killed Sue Dibny" or "Spiky-Haired Embodiment of Evil") handily beat down Shadowpact. How did the 'pact's decision to hunt down Mary end up with her at the Oblivion Bar? Who knows? Countdown is too action-packed to deal with minor story elements like that. More importantly, Detective Chimp looks silly without his Sherlock hat, and our wacky Thelma and Louise analogs have headed far, far away. I hear Apokolips is nice this time of year.

Precious story pages couldn't be devoted to the Mary/Shadowpact story because they were so desperately needed for Roger Corman's "Locker Room Confessions" on Paradise Island. In a brief moment of respite, we get to catch up with some women we've never met and see Holly and Harley in their bathrobes. Then Granny Goodness releases the hounds! It takes another upskirt shot of Holly for her to realize things are maybe not what they seem at this particular insane Amazon boot camp. In the past couple hours, she's been attacked by eyeless sharks and weird hydra things, chased by dogs and flanked by armor-clad AMAZONS who, you'll remember, recently ATTACKed the United States, but it's not till she sees a prison tower that she realizes this secluded, shark-surrounded island is like a prison. Catwoman needs to get a little choosier with her sidekicks.

Piper and Trickster's plan to get very close to where the villians have been taken, get practically no new information and then run away succeeds flawlessly. Wait, that wasn't their plan at all. They do learn that Checkmate is RUNning some sort of prison called SALVATION. I guess they didn't know the name last issue, so they're up by one. But the original totally absurb plan to break everybody out of prison (which is a sure-fire way to prove their innocent of killing Bart Allen, which is what this whole thing is all about) gets abandoned in favor of MORE GAY JOKES!

Shouldn't Two-Face be upgraded to baddest-assed bad guy at this point? He was trained by Batman pretty recently. Of course, most of the One Year Later stuff has been abandoned, so maybe we should just put Face the Face out of our minds as well. Certainly no mention of it in the back-up feature.

On the subject of art, I've got to say the six panel grid seems blocky and slow, and there's no continuity between panels. Mango is on the better end of Countdown artists, but the two central fight scenes here are horribly laid out, making me wish Countdown would abandon these melee scenes altogether until they get someone who can draw them.

And thus, we reach the end of the Countdown to the Countdown to Final Crisis. Man, we've had some good times, haven't we? When I think of all the spinoff miniseries we still have ahead of us, I get a little misty, I tell you what.

#28- Jimmy Olsen's Package

Finally, someone other than Mary Marvel gets Countdown's patented upskirt shot. This week's cover treats us to a view of Jimmy Olsen's business, and if you're in the market for cub reporters sans pantalones, you're in luck.

The busty new bug shows up to bring Jimmy back to task. "Forget about your current futile quest," she insists, "let's get back to your initial futile quest." Apparently the New Gods have not only been dying, but their souls are being stolen. And for a case this important, you'd naturally want to recruit A COMPLETELY INEPT REPORTER. Seriously, call up Batman, call up Lois Lane, call up the ghost of Ralph Dibny, for crying out loud. But asking Jimmy to help out just cause he's hung with the New Gods before? Batman using a wiki page for background would be a far better choice. Poorly played, Forager.

The new Forager, by the way, is only a distant cousin of the original, who got offed in Cosmic Odyssey. Her stilted dialogue is a pretty solid example of why the New Gods have to die. "Lowly anthill race"? Shouldn't someone a little sensitive about bug references avoid pejorative comparisons to ants?

Speaking of pejorative, how about Piper's gay crack? Should we really believe that a homosexual who named himself after the Pied Piper would call a Harry Potter reference gay? Tony Bedard defended the comment by saying it was meant in the sophomoric sense, as opposed to every other reference to homosexuality in Countdown. The Rogues manage to duck (literally) the Suicide Squad's roundup by hiding behind the counter at Denny's, then in a stroke of brilliance decide to get in the van with them anyway. I can't even remember what the point of these characters is anymore. They're not really escaping from anyone in particular, they're not really escaping to anywhere in particular. Trickster can apparently MacGuyver up an invisibility cloak out of styrofoam to-go containers, but he can't undo the shock chain they're wired together with. Finally, could there be an editorial memo forbidding the use of the glowing Piper eyes? He wears glasses. Some of my best friends wear glasses, and not one of them lights up like night vision goggles, especially in the middle of the day.

Mary Marvel is on the rampage and the Shadowpact are on the case. Because they did such a bang-up job when Eclipso took the Spectre out for a ride. But Mary hasn't killed anyone...yet. Just turned a couple people into stone (they were subsequently beheaded, but that's not MM's fault), turned some poachers into squirrels (they were subsequently trampled by rhinoceri, but that's not MM's fault) and fatally aged some death row inmates (they...well, it really looks like they died).

Okay, here's a tricky bit. Apparently last issue's cover, which seemed to have no bearing on the contents of the issue, actually happened! That's right, Karate Kid actually kicked Brother Eye in the eye at an indeterminate point within last issue. In fact, it seems to have happened between panels. But things are just so tightly plotted at Countdown, there was only room to show this incident on the cover. According to Mike Carlin, that's actually how it went down. So Brother Eye was totally justified in attacking them. Luckily for everyone involved, Buddy Blank's child endangerment powers save the day! Little Tommy placates Brother Eye by giving him props, which is apparently all he ever wanted. Brother Eye doesn't really have answers for them but (surprise!) sends them somewhere else. The gang is headed to the city of Bludhaven, which wasn't much of a hot tourist spot before it became a chemical wasteland. Maybe it's the name? Perhaps if it was called Puppyhaven?

Specifically, the gang is headed to a little spot called Command D in Bludhaven. Last I checked, this site housed Captain Atom, currently making the rounds as Monarch. And Kirby fans will remember a certain tow-headed boy emerging from Command D after a certain Great Disaster.

A clear up on the Brother Eye confusion: this Brother Eye is the predecessor to the evil Batman version. Hence, it is only mildly evil.

In another poorly conceived and poorly drawn fight scene, the Challengers throw down with the Extremists, Monarch, Forerunner and the CSA, who have apparently joined up with Monarch. Gee, too bad Bearded Monarch didn't stick around for five minutes. It's unclear how Monarch finds the Challengers in their secret hiding space or where his Big Red Train of Doom has gone, but Bob the Monitor continues his completely useless streak and Donna gets sliced up pretty good by...someone. Forerunner, I think.

In other news, Big Barda and the Black Racer are dead and Oliver Queen is alive.

In the abstract, I've been pondering the whole "self-identified evil" thing. It's not a new concept: Shakespeare is chockful of cats who proclaim themselves as evil for the hell of it (although they usually have some kind of motivation), but Countdown's been kind of pushing it lately. One of the things I liked about Darkseid was that he always had a clear purpose. He wanted to get his big gray hands on the Anti-Life Equation, and I could get behind that. I mean, up with science, right? But now, he and Monarch are both on about this Multiversal Dynasty noise (possibly the worst line of this issue was Bob the Monitor's "Gee Whiz, he really will be a Multiversal threat!"), which amounts to evil for evil's sake. Contrast this to the Sinestro Corps stuff. Yeah, they're out to spread some fear, which is kind of absurd. But they want to use that fear to create order, which is weirdly admirable, or at least understandable. I just wish one or more villians in Countdown would state their purpose outright, so the readers felt less like they were in the Rube Goldberg version of a Machievellian machination.

Next week is the last issue of Countdown as "Countdown" with the halfway-point switchover coming up the following week. The pacing is picking up, but the title is still kind of a mess, only made worse by the fact that other titles are doing Countdown-related stories so much better. Say what you will about Judd Winick, but he just tied Green Arrow flawlessly into the Big Plans of the DCU with exactly the amount of turnaround time Ollie's "death" warranted, producing a solid read in the process. I'll try to drop a review of Death of the New Gods in here soon, but the first issue was a solid start.

#29- Judging Books by Their Covers

First off, if any of you are buying Countdown rather than reading the Sinestro Corps War or Ellis's Black Summer, shame on you. Get thee to a comic book shop and pick them up. This week's Sinestro installment manages to be frustrating and nifty at the same time. While the Countdown franchise takes an entire issue to chronicle a series of non-confrontations between C-list heroes and a universe full of characters barely on the publishing schedule (I'm looking your way, Colon: Blow!), Green Lantern uses a NYC-destroying throwdown between the JLA and the Sinestro Corps as a backdrop. Where's the tie-in mini, kiddoes? Interesting pacing choices but an overall great read that keeps things focused on the book's central characters.

And Black Summer is the best stuff I've read from Ellis since Planetary. Oh, Planetary, where is that denouement, anyway?

Ahem. Okay, back to the subject at hand. If you happen to be a huge Karate Kid fan (for instance, if you happen to be Ralph Macchio or...his mom?), you might be tempted to pick up this issue for red-hot Daniel-san vs. HAL action. I'd hold off if I were you. KK and Singular Girl show up for one page in which they fail to kick anything at all. They do get vaguely scanned again though, so if you like scanning, check it out. Hasn't KK already kicked a hologram on a Countdown cover? Oops, looks like he actually punched that hologram. Point is, dude hates holograms.

Something I'm enjoying outside of the book itself is the fact that fellow Countdown blogger Kim Em and I seem to be doing this gradual Statler and Waldorf thing with our opinions on the book. Kim's been vocally pro-Countdown since the beginning and now seems to be souring, while I'm just now warming to the book.

Piper and Trickster sit down for a Grand Slam Breakfast with Double Down, who has the creepiest case of shingles in recorded history. The man flakes off playing cards, which makes it pretty amazing that the Rogues can keep down their Moons Over My-Hammy while he incessantly shuffles his scabs. He lets them in on a secret that DC solicit fans like myself are already hip to, namely that villians are disappearing. While in the van outside Denny's, someone ominous lurks. That should be the tagline for Countdown: "Someone ominous lurks."

Holly and Harley arrive at Paradise island. That's it.

Jimmy runs into the Newsboy Legion in the sewers who, instead of Morrison's multi-ethnic hallucinatory version are back to the All-Caucasian Squad from the Superman books. Sigh. In Countdown's continuing battle of Kirby vs. Morrison, rack up another one for the King.

In a pretty neat reversal of Isis's role in 52, Mary Marvel uses her powers to help the hell out of some folks. She helps them till it hurts. I don't know about you guys, but I don't entirely trust that Eclipso chick.

Did I miss an issue where Mary went from "prone to tantrums" to "derranged and sadistic"? I thought the standard model for the hero-goes-bad story was that a point is reached, a decision is made and a line is crossed. Mary just suddenly went supervillian on us. Although Carlin insists she hasn't killed yet, even if a certain headless statue might beg to differ.

Lord Havok and the Extremists look like the stepped out of a second rate mid-nineties Image book. A cursory Wikipedia search on these cats (which is, incidentally, the same source editor Mike Carlin went to for info) reveals that their original confusing and uninteresting origin has been rendered irrelevant. Despite the ad's claim that "The Most Dangerous Villians in the Multiverse are Back!", it appears we've never really seen these guys before. The lowdown: they're a group of Marvel villian parodies who have taken over Earth-8 and kicked the collective asses of the Challengers. Which seems to happen a lot. Upon capturing our intrepid protagonists, LH and his crew proceed to torture them in their sleep, which anyone will tell you is pretty ineffective. But this momentary bout of unconsciousness somehow allows Bearded Monitor (remember him?) to locate the Challengers. Despite spending the past twenty-some issues in committee meetings with the rest of the Monitor crew, BM decides to face off against the single greatest threats to the integrity of the Multiverse on his own, Charles Bronson style! Maybe he's trying to fit in with Extremists by being a Punisher knock-off? One of the most powerful sentients in the so on and so forth manages to fire off two shots, which both MISS! The first frees the Challengers from Havok's Sleeptime Torture Machine and the second offs the character find of 2007. So long Jokester, we hardly used ye as a minor plot device.

(I know I said I was going to review Colon: Blow! Crime Society, but since it's twenty pages on the origin of a character who just got shot in the back, I'm going to pass on that. By the way, Jokester was Duella Dent's daddy, but how she got from Earth-3 to New Earth was never explained. There you go.)

Luckily, the Challengers manage to evade the detection of both Bearded Monitor and Bad Sabretooth knock off by teleporting ten feet away.

To add to the craziness, Monarch and Forerunner show up and...float in the air menacingly, issuing vague threats to end someone! Probably one of the Monitors. That Monarch guy hates Monitors almost as much as Karate Kid hates holograms. I sort of forget why that is. But he does manage to convince the Most Dangerous Villians in the Multiverse to get on board his Big Red Train of Doom!

In behind the scenes news, this is Mike Carlin's first solo issue as editor, which doesn't make much difference since it's pretty clear Mike Marts has been off the book for awhile. The rumor is that the unknown big name artists that are supposed to show up to pull this book's fat out of the fire are putting the current artists out of work, raising the question, "How the hell is there a work shortage at DC?" I can imagine there being a work shortage at Marvel due to Bendis and Brubaker writing every book that gets published, but DC is adding titles, subtitles and specials left and right. Give the Countdown artists work, preferrably on books I don't have to read.

#30- Things Get All Ker-razee!

Or possibly they don't. But Tony Bedard promised! We can trust Tony Bedard, right? Oh, wait, Bedard's not even writing this issue. Maybe Graymotti didn't get the "Things go nuts in issue 30" memo. Let's see, shall we?

Leading off the issue, we've got the meet up with Brother Eye, who I guess is no longer evil or destroyed. Last I checked, he was sort of both. Now Brother Eye is a big whopping obvious reference to HAL from "2001", which I guess it always sort of was. Apparently Brother Eye is also hip to the Great Disaster and has been waiting for it to drop by. Oh, and Karate Kid has the OMAC virus. Which we sort of knew.

Jump over to...a cave. Did Black Canary and Green Arrow have their wedding in a cave? That seems tacky. Especially the Cave of Poorly Drawn Villians. At least the Batcave has some nice photo ops. I didn't pick up the BC/GA wedding special, so I have no idea where this story beat takes place. I can tell you what happens, I think. Those wacky Rogues escaped the dust-up at the bachelorette party and decided to attend the wedding. They just care that much. But they escape that too! These guys are getting really good at escaping danger and running smack-dab into...more danger! After blowing up Poison Ivy with an exploding television, they find themselves carjacked by Bullseye! Wait, wrong publisher. They find themselves kidnapped by Gambit! Okay, by some DC villian who uses cards in a threatening manner.

I actually have no idea what happened in the Jimmy Olsen installment. The art is utterly incomprehensible. I think he's escaped the helpful folks at Cadmus via the sewer system. Why the lab has a drain that connects directly to a sewage line is beyond me.

Holly and Harley have made it to Paradise Island, but have to swim through shark infested waters to get there. Feels a bit like the experience of reading Countdown: we can see Morrison's Final Crisis series in the distance, but to get there, we have to fight our way through some sharks. Or some sewage. And Holly's exclamation that "They have no eyes" seems to reflect DC's policy regarding its readers' art appreciation. How else to explain it.

Finally, in the only story that seems to be going anywhere at all, the Challengers touch down in Gotham City of Earth-15. You can tell by the way it's labelled Earth-15. I wonder if the Challengers can see those little captions. Because the Challengers are apparently the most exciting thing to show up in any universe they happen to visit, they are quickly visited by Earth-15's Batman, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern, who are actually (gasp!) Jason Todd, Donna Troy and Kyle Rayner. Take the tip, kids: superheroes need nicknames and the classics never go out of style. Jason gets to express his understandable differences with the Joke(ste)r, and a frustration with Bob the Monitor's inefficacy which I think most of us can sympathize with at this point. Donna gets some inspirational words straight out of Bullfinch ("remember, good things pop out of people's foreheads") and then Superzod shows up to inform everyone that Ray Palmer's not around. Apparently he can figure that out faster than Bob the Monitor. I'm not at all sure how Kyle comes to the conclusion that this earth "has a Superman and doesn't need him", unless we assume all the relevant superheroes in any given universe would show up immediately when the Challengers arrive on the scene, not a whopping ten minutes afterwards.

Regarding the cover: why does Donna have a lasso? Is Donna supposed to have a lasso?

On the Monitor scene, it looks like they have both a wayward brother (Bob) and a zealous brother. I have my suspicions as to who the zealous brother is, but didn't he convert the whole brotherhood to his, um, zealotry? I really don't think we're hurting for a third Monitor faction when the goals of the first and second factions are still so sketchy. I mean, is there a middle ground between "avert Great Disaster" and "destroy. DESTROY!"? I think not.

So Tony Bedard has lied to us. Things have not gone all crazy go-nuts. In fact, we are about at the point where everything we knew was going to happen has happened. We also have only three more issues til the title change, which I'm deluding myself into believing will mark a pick up in pacing. I will say this, the Carlin era of this title has been decreasing its overall number of egregious continuity errors, so light applause for that.

Tomorrow, a review of Colon: Blow! #2, which might advance the plot of Countdown more than any given five issues of Countdown. Sometime this week, a review of Countdown reviews, since the web coverage of this series is easily as interesting as the series itself and I want to be the first Countdown blog to do the meta thing. For now, I'm reading the new Exterminators trade and going to bed.

#31- Everybody Hates a Tourist

Sorry about the lateness of this post. I picked this book up last Wednesday and threw it in my bag and it kind of migrated to the bottom of standard bag detritus. Funny how that works, huh?

All right, let's get to it. First off, we've got the Challengers landed on Earth-3, where evil always triumphs! I'm not about to go dusting off my philosphy degree, but don't you think that in a world where evil always triumphs, they'd stop calling it evil? Which also makes the juxtaposition of "Crime" and "Society" a little tough to swallow. Naturally, the presence of this group of B-listers warrants the appearance of the whole Crime Society in their teeming...well, there's about a dozen. You've got your Superwoman, your Owlman (who miraculous reappears after being well-chucked away by Donna), Ultraman, Power Ring, and...oh, seriously, who cares? These are clearly not the characters we've seen in Morrison and Buseik's Crime Syndicate storylines, and since the Challengers are just on a sightseeing tour anyway (picking up a smiley little souvenir), we'll more than likely not see them again, except as foot soldiers in Monarch's little army.

This, by the way, is the first mention of Monitor forming in army here in Countdown proper. Since I've stated a number of times how desperately this series needs an antagonist, let me politely golf-clap for this Monarch appearance. But why would Monarch be set against the Challengers, who are up against the Monitors? Isn't the enemy of my enemy my friend?

Art issues on Earth-3. First of all, a reverse Earth lends itself to all sorts of neat little visual gags. None of which show up here. Hell, even the Daily Planet is still called the Daily Planet. Isn't the whole point of tourism to see new and exciting places? It looks the Challengers are going to show up on identical blocks of downtown Metropolis, mysteriously eliciting the immediate appearance of all that universe's superheroes/villians and then checking out. Thrill-a-minute! Secondly, what's supposed to be a speed effect at the top of page five somehow manages to drag Johnny Quick's entrance line out to a full ten seconds.

Back in Monitor camp, the Monitors are still mad. Really mad. In case you didn't get that. But now they're determined to stop Bob and the gang (who they couldn't find a couple weeks ago, but have a pretty good fix on at the end of this issue) by any means necessary. For instance, doing something. Too bad they killed off all those Forerunners they'd been breedin' up. Yep, a big old warrior race would probably come in pretty handy right about now.

In other news, Holly Robinson has apparently been on the worst sting operation since OJ (sorry if that joke was a little too current. At least, like the cultural references in Countdown, it wasn't all that funny). Even though she wouldn't call Selina a couple weeks ago, Holly decides its a good idea to send a letter through the Amazonian post office about how she's infiltrated the Amazons. We can presume it's addressed to "Catwoman". Next time, write by WASTE. The government will open it if you use the other. The dolphins will be mad.

Mr. Mxyzptlyk shows up for reasons which passeth understanding and is snatched out of the fifth dimension. Hell of a band, "Age of Aquarius" is one of my favorite songs. Do I even want to ask whether this is the fifth dimension of Earth-1 or whether there's only one fifth dimension for the entire multiverse or AAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGHHHH! My head!

The newly mohawked Eclipso finally gets to chat up Mary Marvel, informing her of pretty much nothing. Even if we assume Mary Marvel is stupid enough to team up with the woman who killed her friend, Sue, the art here is terrible. Particularly problematic is MM's petrification of the Turkish guards. We fet a "fwash" then a "pok", but at no point do we even see these guys have been turned to stone. At least a panel missing, sloppy work.

Over in Karate Kid's neck of the woods, KK has apparently aged into Karate Middle-Aged Dude (KMAD). My favorite line of the week is Singular Girl's "Why would the mysterious Mr. Orr who we know nothing about possibly lie to us?" Gee whiz, KK, if you can't trust shadowy biotech geniuses with questionable mustaches and Darkseid on speed dial, who can you trust? For extra laziness, Buddy Blank apparently lives in "The Burbs". Dear DC Editorial: you operate a fictional universe with a whole list of fictional cities, each of which (with the exception of Opal City) presumably has suburbs. Take two seconds and pick one. Buddy, whose grandkid has a certain resemblence to Kamandi, don't you think, is going to take KK and Singular Girl off to see Brother Eye, who I guess is not evil anymore and will probably tell them to go see someone else.

Runner up for best line of the issue? "No one likes a dated pop culture reference." Here's the thing, you can only make fun of how bad a series used to be once it's gotten better. Jimmy asks the $64,000 question, "What's happening to me?" and gets, unsurprisingly, no answers.

Well, you know next issue, Tony Bedard promised things were going to get all kinds of crazy. So this ish is probaby just a set up. You know. For the craziness.

#32- The Return of the Surprise Ending that Surprised No One

Holy crap, you mean Eclipso has been manipulating Mary Marvel all this time? It's like some kind of Seduction of the Innocent!

Short, late entry on this one, as not a whole lot happens. Mary and Eclipso finally meet up. The Challengers finally end up in one of the few iterations of the multiverse I'm some what familar with: the crime-ridden Earth-3. Jimmy ends up in the hands of the Cadmus project and the Rogues once again narrowly escape from certain homosexual tension.

A note on the strip-club scene. First off, Piper's exit line of "Hey didja seem all them strippers?" is pretty ridiculous, especially since only one dancer ever makes it into the shot. In fact, the club is almost entirely full of scantily-clad ladies. Don't you imagine if you're Big Barda you might relish a chance to leave that helmet at home for a night? The whole thing makes Barbara and Lois look a little dowdy by comparison. Or, I dunno, sane?

The secret identity thing is in question again here. How many party attendees know Barbara Gordon is Oracle? What's Lois doing there anyway? These issues could be resolved in all of two panels, but Countdown has never had any interest in checking itself for loose ends and frayed edges.

I didn't pick up a copy of the Green Arrow/Black Canary wedding, so there's yet another blank spot in the DCU for me. Does Ollie get offed (again)? I did just see a solicit for GA/BC with Connor on the cover, which makes me a little concerned for ol' Curly Beard. (Update: Yup, Ollie's dead. Again.)

The insta-tension between Kyle and Jason seems a little off as well. Kyle in particular should perhaps have a little more perspective after a couple months of being possessed by the embodiment of fear. I know my time possessed by the embodiment of fear was followed by a period of zen-like calm, rather than adolescent jealousy. But that's just me.

You know what the best thing is about Project Cadmus? Its dark counterpart is called the Evil Factory. A place that manufactures Evil. A whole industry of evil, Evil Wholesalers with Evil Warehouses and Evil Invoices. I know we all love Jack Kirby, but that one just feels phoned in. Cadmus has been disbanded more times than...well, actually I can't think of a DCU team that hasn't gone through a bunch of dramatic disbandings, so let's just say it's been disbanded more often than a generic DCU team. Last time out, they were controlled by the Evil Factory, which was controlled by the Agenda, which was controlled by Lex Luthor's wife. Got that? I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that this time, they're tied to Darkseid. I'm assuming everything's tied to Darkseid, down to the pomegranate margaritas. Dubbilex was one of those characters that made the Superman books all but unreadable for me in the 90s, and I wasn't real psyched to see him back. My fears regarding the return of a crew-cut, flag waving Guardian remain with me. Serling asks a good question of Jimmy, who gives a fairly bland answer, but it hardly forgives the time Countdown wasted with the Mr. Action storyline. Come to think of it, why the hell was Jimmy trying to join the Titans or the JLA before he knew anything about his powers? His current path of inquiry seems much more natural and rational, but then there were pages to fill before Kyle Rayner could show up months before the end of his current arc. A delicate balance of timing.

Another note, motiveless mummies make horribly uninteresting antagonists. And this series could use some antagonism. The reason any minor appearance by Darkseid (or even Eclipso) seems like such a shot in the arm for this series is the sense that they're the only characters on the board with any type of plan. All of our heroes are bopping from point to point aimlessly and the only hope of redemption is the idea that someone (Dini, Darkseid, Didio) has some idea of what's going on.

The art is passable, with no glaring inconsistencies. Bedard mercifully drops the transitional phrases that marked the last couple issues, but unfortunately the issue as a whole comes off as comic relief, even though there's nothing to be relieved from just yet.

Bedard has said that by issue 30, things are really going to blow up. Thing is, Countdown has this amazing ability to constantly give the impression of something about to happen. One major plot development could tip the whole mess towards interesting. For now, reminding myself that this is not even the halfway point should be in some way encouraging, but the thought of reading 31 more issues feels like when you're at the laundromat and realize how many more times you'll have to do laundry before you die. This week's release of the third 52 trade didn't help. It's hurtful how much Countdown suffers in comparison.

#33- The Surprise Ending That Surprised No One

I've been patient. Lord knows I've been patient. But this was absolutely the worst, most useless issue of Countdown to date.

Hey guess what? Kyle Rayner joins the Challengers. Which might seem odd seeing as he's poised to eat Hal Jordan's family in this week's issue of Green Lantern, but seems less odd seeing he did so in the first five pages of last week's All New Atom. Oh, and we've been told since the beginning of Countdown he'd be joining up. What could possibly happen next? Mary Marvel possessed by Eclipso? Jason Todd becoming Red Robin? Judging from the look of shock on the cover images of Donna and Bob, they haven't been reading DC solicits.

And the implication that Kyle showing up with disrupt the delicate chemistry between Donna and Jason? Those two have about as much chemistry as Miss Hoffman, my 10th grade chemistry teacher. That lady was like the Anti-Mr. Wizard.

Seriously, there is no reason to read this issue. If you are following Countdown, it is entirely possible to go from last week's All New Atom to this week's Countdown Presents: The Search for Ray Palmer: Wildstorm (or, if you will "Colon: Blow!") without missing a beat.

You would miss characters behaving inexplicably, however. Like Wally's "I trust you enough to save you from one lethal device but not two" treatment of the Rogues. Or Klarion "I'm a Witchboy!" the Witchboy's vase-shattering frame-up of Mary "I'm Mary Marvel" Marvel. You'd also miss out on the return of yet another shadowy shadowy organization within the DCU, as the Cadmus Project, whose scientific developments have included some of the worst Superman stories ever, returns. Oh, and some pretty terrible art. You'd miss that, too.

Am I the only one who suspects that a lot of Countdown is set up purely to crap in Grant Morrison's sandbox? Countdown has manhandled (you'll forgive the expression) Morrison's revamps of Zatanna, Klarion and the Joker, not to mention entirely dismissing his New Gods reboot. The first issue of "Colon: Blow!" presents an Authority team that's clearly not the same group Morrison set up in his two issues of the book (remember those? Those were pretty. When was that, 2005?). And with Cadmus back, can an All-New, All-Craptacular version of the Newsboy Legion be far behind? Maybe even a new Guardian who's a miliaristic caucasian!

Other issues have left me frustrated, this one left me downright angry. And in case you're wondering, the first issue of "Colon: Blow!" was pretty useless as well. Given the abyssmal state of the Wildstorm universe (has DC left other placeholders open in their 52 universes for publishers they might acquire later?), this might not be the ideal time to sound the trumpets about it. From what I can tell, the only Wildstorm team with a regularly published book, Stormwatch, is the only team absent from this issue. Someone clearly needs to smack Ron Marz around with the ol' cross-marketing stick.

#34- They Blinded Me with Bad Science

All right, this is going to take some figuring out. Let's get the easy stuff out of the way first. Mary Marvel meets up with Klarion the Witchboy and gets magicked. The Rogues meet up with the Flash and get beat on, revealing that Deathstroke's got plans to go all Wedding Crashers on Green Arrow and Black Canary. Not in a funny-yet-sad Vince Vaughn way, but in a slashy Owen Wilson way. Holly and Harley are headed to Paradise Island, which might not be Paradise Island at all, since Athena is really Granny Goodness. Still no mention of that switch here in Countdown, which leads me to believe that DC is assuming readers are either picking up Amazons Attack or reading some internet source. Even if they're right, this is going to contribute to Countdown being almost unreadable in trade.

On to the confusion!

Ryan Choi is inexplicably debugged and Queen Belthera is inexplicably repeating exactly what she said at the end of last issue. If that's not enough, pick up this week's All-New Atom. Wait, don't pick it up. Or, pick it up and don't read it til next week. Or until November. See, All-New Atom runs concurrent with next week's Countdown and the end of the Sinestro Corps War. It's mildly perverse, but I can't wait to see how Countdown handles introducing Kyle Rayner without ruining the next three months of Green Lantern books.

Actually, this is the least confusing thing going here. Let's move over to Jimmy Olsen, who has suddenly remembered he has a job other than dressing up like a jackass. Luckily, John Henry Irons has a device that's like a CAT scan, only metaphysically different. It's been a long time since I took a philosophy class, but wouldn't anything that's not a CAT scan be metaphysically different from a CAT scan? In a skull-clutching bit of bad science exposition, we find out that this device scans brainwaves and projects subconscious thoughts, since the subconsciouses of Luthor's Everymen are massively different (metaphysically different?) from those of everyone else. Jimmy's thoughts are even metaphysically differenter and blow up everything with physical manifestations of the Source Wall, several Earths and a pack of Mother Boxes. Oh, and his head expands like a bag of microwave popcorn. If the science is skull-clutchingly nonsensical, it's only made worse by the fact that this whole sequence gives us no new information. John Henry Irons' diagnosis: Kid, you're all kinds of messed up. And then he pawns him off on someone else, because that's what characters in Countdown do after confirming that something is horribly wrong.

Finally, we get to this issue's whopper of a skull-clutcher. First off, Mr. Orr is working for both Checkmate and Desaad. Which means either Desaad was claiming to be Checkmate when he contacted Orr, or that Apokolips has taken over Checkmate. The latter seems more promising. And then there's the science. Man, science is just taking a beating this issue. Orr reveals that KK has a variant of the OMAC virus, which was derrived from Brainiac-13. Somehow, the fact that KK's from the future indicates the virus has been dormant in humans for some time. Huh? Wouldn't it indicate the virus will be dormant or will have been dormant or some other twisting of verb tenses that's probably better expressed in French?

To top it off, Orr sends them to find Buddy Blank, who has direct access to Brother Eye. Despite the fact Brother Eye's been more or less out of commission since the end of Infinite Crisis (with some minor flare ups). And also, Brother Eye is totally EVIL! First rule of medical science: avoid evil diagnostic tools (e.g, satanic x-rays, Nazi MRIs). Depending on how you look at it, Buddy Blank is either the first OMAC or the first OMAC. A Buddy Blank (let's not say "the" Buddy Blank just yet) was the One Man Army Corps in Kirby's Earth AD saga, which Morrison has mentioned will be playing into Final Crisis. Another Buddy Blank was the first OMAC in Countdown to Infinite Crisis. And our current Buddy Blank is a researcher for Pseudo-People, which is in line with the Kirby material.

So the science is a little shaky, the publishing schedule is totally wonky and Countdown is fast becoming a book that can't be read without supplemental material, even though Mike Carlin staunchly refuses to include any. After reading an issue of 52, I'd rush over to Doug Wolk's blog for fun, now I find myself waiting for Mike Carlin's Newsarama interviews for clarity. On the bright side, we're slowly seeing more involvement from the Apokolips contingent, which is making the story look more like, well, a story

Off Topic: Vertigo's Next Generation, Part One

Since glomming dfown Doug Wolk's survey course in graphic novelty, Reading Comics, last week, I've been itching to write about something non-Countdown and non-superhero. Wolk's big on the single auteur theory (excepting Moore and Morrison, of course) which means a lot of the output of Vertigo comics falls outside his scope. Which is a shame.

Vertigo is at an interesting point right now, with current flagship titles like Y: The Last Man and 100 Bullets (and arguably, Fables, which seems set to conclude its major storylines within the next year) wrapping up, the everpresent Hellblazer chugging along under a steady stream of excellent creative teams and a handful of newbies finding their feet. Testament, Douglas Rushkoff's ambitious but aimless mapping of Old-Testament-as-open-source onto late global economics might be Fred Jameson's wet dream but failed to find an audience. Azzarello's Loveless left readers stranded in a deftly-worded historical morass after offing its protagonist. Which leaves The Exterminators, DMZ and American Virgin.

Despite a title that sounds like a low circulation periodical (which, in a way, it is), American Virgin might seem the horse to bet on, based on the experienced creative team and the bold opening statement of its author that AV would do for sexuality what Preacher did for gross-out humor and what Hellblazer did for demonology. Steven Seagle has been writing strong, sometimes inspired stories since the mid 80s. His Eisner nominated It's a Bird...is one of my favorite Superman stories, a mature artist reflecting on the deployment and relevance of a not always mature cultural icon. The premise: 21 year old Adam Chamberlain is the leader and figurehead of a nationwide youth celibacy movement with ties to a shady televagelist family (echoes of Manchurian Candidate), whose faith is deeply shaken by the murder of his girlfriend, the woman for whom God had told him to save himself (echoes of Yorrick's quest for Beth in Y: The Last Man). The book so far has followed Adam and his much more liberal stepsister as they globehop about for various reasons, encountering different cultural attitudes towards sex and sexuality.

But a year in (I've been keeping up in trades rather than floppies), AV seems to be suffering from a perpetual state of tourism. Luckily our visual tour guide (not the cliched mercenary character who leads Adam about) is Becky Cloonan, who for months grounded Brian Wood's Demo with her strong sense of character and even stronger sense of setting (Cloonan's issues are broken up occassionally by the work of fellow B. Wood collaborator Ryan Kelly, whose less manga-influenced style nevertheless shares many of Cloonan's strengths). While her page compositions are fairly conventional and her character designs just make it under the wire of "huge-eyed Japanocuteness", her eye for architecture and environment are detailed and exact, avoiding letting AV's characters languish in a generic pastiche of "3rd World" signifiers.

The problem with the tourist feel of the book is that the brief visits to other culture's sexual mores reinforces how much we're only tourists in Adam's committment to celibacy. It's a problem shared, to a degree, with pop culture's other current effort to put the fun (or at least the mental) back in fundamentalism: HBO's Big Love. But Big Love manages to dodge the faith bullet largely by centering on the outgrowth of that faith, polygamy, as a pragmatic concern. Characters spend minimal time telling us how God showed them the way (although there is a bit of that), and instead show the consequences of that decision, with early storylines focusing on the economics and logistics of multiple marriage. AV's Adam repeatedly tells the audience (both the readers and any character that opts to listen to him for two consecutive seconds) that celibacy is hard but God told him to do it. Which is persuasive if you happen to be a devout Christian from the get-go, but makes for pretty empty motivation if you're a skeptic. Seagle wants the book to be sex positive and for Adam's celibacy to be justified at the same time. Essentially, he wants to have his sex and Jesus too. But his failure to explore or explain Adam's decision (other than some highly subjective dream/vision sequences), his addressing of faith not as faith but as a subject/object of evangelism (Adam's book and quest, his late fiance's missionary work and his family's network) leave the reader feeling adrift; a tourist in a foriegn hotel room, channel-surfing past the religious station.

Later today or tomorrow, I'll get back to Countdown stuff, but at some point soon, I want to talk about Brian Wood's DMZ, in which tourism quite literally explodes and The Exterminators, which is strictly for the locals.

#35- Cyndi Lauper Spins in Her Cultural Grave

Oh goodness did this cover make me cringe. Not because of its execution, J.G. Jones does a fine job, but because it suggests that Countdown might be deciding to focus on its consistently poor portrayal of women. For the record, I'm guessing the lady to Donna's left is Singular Girl and Random Amazon is Holly (even though she's sporting a different helmet), but I could be wrong.

With a title constitutiing yet another outdated pop reference, Countdown makes the argument that when girls wanna have fun, they beat the ever-lovin' crap out of one another. Two and a half girl-on-girl fights in one issue. I'm fairly certain that's not what Cyndi meant.

Last issue's mystery claw is revealed as Queen Belthera, a sorceress queen with a bug fetish. Her Gregor Samsa job on Ryan Choi is plausible, but how she manages to enthrall "one of the most powerful sentients in all the multiverse" is unclear. In fact, for all their unlimited power, the Monitors in general (and Bob in particular) are kind of unimpressive. Has there every been a case of a Monitor clearly achieving his/her goals? The original Monitor got offed pretty easily and other than doing in Duella Dent, the combined forces of 52 Monitors have managed amazing feats of obvious plot exposition and not much else.

Funny we've had back to back issues featuring female characters with the power to enthrall. Little panicked regarding the ol' feminine wiles, Countdowners? I've been trying to think of a male counterpart to this, but all I can come up with is Bendis' supercreepy use of the Purple Man in "Alias" but in the DCU, enthralling seems to be a uniquely female ability.

It's funny that it took me this long to realize the significance of the "Jimmy Olsen Must Die" posters, but it wasn't til he asked the JLA to shove him in an airlock that it settled in. The multiverse apparently doesn't care much about Jimmy getting hurt, but will bend itself all out of shape to keep him from getting killed. The sparing use of Jimmy remains one of the better through-lines in Countdown and "It's like I got sunburned" is possibly the best line in Countdown so far.

The mysterious Elias Orr is revealed to be in the employ of the equally mysterious Checkmate, which is connected mysteriously to the Suicide Squad. Could this mean the Rogues' and KK's plots are linked? I'll have to read a couple more Wikipedia entries before I can say for sure, but it looks like Amanda Waller might be pulling strings on both plot threads.

I suspect it's so, but it'll be a shame if this issue marks Zatanna's exit from Countdown. Zee makes the highly irresponsible (which is to say out of character) decision to loose Mary onto the unsuspecting outer world, although she's at least temporarily de-powered. I'm no Eclipso scholar, but doesn't the black diamond have to be in contact or at least proximity to a person to exert its influence? Right now, Mary's under so many influences, I can't keep them straight.

Finally, we've got the mishmash of grecoromanism that is the Holly/Harley installment. Leaving aside the fact that the Greeks didn't engage in gladitorial combat of this kind, the most important development in this storyline takes place (surprise!) outside of Countdown. For those of you (including me) not following Amazons Attack, it turns out Athena has actually been Granny Goodness all this time. Of course, no mention of that here, just thought you guys should know.

Also from the department of "thought you should know", the origin of Forerunner or of the Forerunners or some such, was revealed in the "I Can't Believe It's $4!" Spectacular of "Countdown to Adventure". If you are a fan of Grant Morrison's run on Animal Man or Buddy's portrayal in 52, do not buy this comic. If you are a Countdown completist, do not buy this comic. I'll run it down for you: Adam Strange is replaced as Rann's hero by a borderline psychotic movie star, while Buddy returns to stunt doubling and hires Starfire as his nanny. Wackiness will, no doubt, ensue. As for Forerunner(s), it seems that on Earth 48, Earth was used as a WarWorld (nope, not that WarWorld) where other planets hashed out their differences gladiator-style. The losers got dead and the champs got...well, they got stranded. All of which lead to a whole lot of interbreeding among the strongest and meanest representatives from a bunch of planets, producing (ta-dah!) the Forerunners. The whole project was engineered by the Monitors, who have since wiped out all of the Forerunners except...um, Forerunner...using shadow demons and some lady who has the power to (wait for it) enthrall! Once again, the "How powerful are these weak-ass Monitors anyway?" question comes up, as Forerunner insists that a handful of Monitors could never take out a pack of Forerunners. And all of this comes out in a tender, getting to know you moment between Forerunner and Monarch.

The funny thing about the recurring theme of characters being controlled by others is how nicely it parellels the set up of this series. 52 was an assemblage of character driven arcs about self-discovery, but Countdown is precisely the opposite: a bric-a-brac of non-characters slotted into story-driven arcs, where the expected endpoint of discovery is not personal but (multi)universal. It's no wonder, then, that half our characters have been enthralled (Mary, Bob, Trickster, KK), literally manipulated by another, at some point and all of our characters have been represented as pieces on a chessboard, which is not exactly a metaphor for individual agency. Dini, Carlin and Didio might be unconsciouly showing their hands by portraying at a plot level exactly what's going on at an editorial level: the manipulation of characters by forces outside...in the dread dimension of the DC Editorial Offices.

#36- The Problem With Suspense

Once again this week, we have a perfectly serviceable issue that accomplishes pretty much nothing and leaves us with nearly every member of the cast in moral peril.

Come to think of it, Countdown has been chock full o'mortal peril, but this issue is especially overflowing with it.

But before we get to the subject of peril, let's address the gaping hole between this issue and the last. #37 ended with the most significant development we've seen in Countdown to date: Jimmy's discovery that Clark is Superman. This is a major story beat that's been subsequently dropped from this issue. I was willing to go along with the idea that Jimmy suddenly "knew" Clark's secret, but the writers have made a huge jump from there to Jimmy's JLA induction. It's implausible enough that Jimmy would come off his Titans rejection thinking he was JLA material, but if the writers are asking us to believe he essentially blackmailed his pal Supes into getting him a membership card, and that Supes went along with it, some amount of convincing is needed. One more ball dropped by Countdown, not that anyone's still keeping score.

This brings us pretty directly back to the idea of the cliffhanger as deployed in the book. I hate to keep comparing the structure of Countdown to 52, but the latter managed to exist almost entirely without cliffhangers due to its real-time structure. Only a handful of issues resorted to the 24 trick of having a momentous event occur at the perfect moment in time to carry over into the next issue (thinking here of Lex's switching off his newly minted metas). Countdown, on the other hand, has been an almost endless string of cliffhangers that seem based on the Batman TV series model. Will the Rogues escape the clutches of [whoever the hell has captured the Rogues this week]? Will Black Adam maul Mary Marvel? Will Forerunner disembowel Donna? Tune in next week to find out!

Granted, leaving a character in mortal peril is a standard device of serialized storytelling. But it's not the only device available and it's kind of the cheapest one out there. Last issue's cliffhanger, for example, hinged on the reader caring about the emotional lives of Jimmy and Superman/Clark. It required a knowledge of their prior relationship and a vested interest in whether or not their friendship could survive this revelation. The kick off to the series demonstrated another kind of hook: a pure narrative hook, the introduction of some sort of mystery. Something like this can be character driven, but can also just be an intriguing story idea. Countdown has tried this a couple times, ending issues with a question posed: What happens when A GOD DIES? What happens when AMAZONS ATTACK? Of course, they failed to follow up on either of these questions, but I'm just saying, it's a way to create suspense, as long as the reader is interested in the answers to the questions posed.

Cutting a story the moment before a character is stabbed/punched/shot/dismembered requires none of this. Given a situation where someone is about to be grievously injured, regardless of the person, a reader is going to feel some compulsion to find out what happens. In fact, this device works equally well for characters the reader cares nothing about or openly dislikes. Take the example of 24's "Kim is trapped by a cougar" cliffhanger (let your memory drift back, dear reader). A character the writers had rendered as unbearably idiotic, to the point most viewers could do little but wince every time she spoke, found herself in a completely ridiculous predicament that was in no way germaine to the plot. In the unlikely event the viewer still cared about the character, they'd be forced to return the next week to see if she escaped mortal peril. In the more likely case that the viewer kind of wanted to see Kim get eaten by a cougar, they'd still need to tune in the following week.

This kind of suspense is cheap and easy, and used far too often in Countdown at this point. What makes it even worse is that the cliffhangers' resolutions more often than not fall into the gutter between issues. 52 handled this smoothly, partly because the passage of time was so transparent and the issue ending cliffhangers less dire. We leave Ralph at a crisis moment and return to him weeks later, with an explanation of the intervening time. With its muddled and broken sense of narrative time, Countdown attempts to do the same thing with emotional cliffhangers and fails (Jimmy's story this week, for example), but more amazingly, fails to do this with the mortal peril-style cliffhanger as well. Next issue should pick up with one of two things, followed immediately by the other:

1. The MM/Zatanna throwdown
2. The KK/Equus throwdown

These two storylines need to pick up in the next moment to generate or fulfill any sort of suspense, while the predicament of the Rogues and the Challengers can wait a couple beats. But so far, Countdown's track record doesn't really indicate this is going to be the case. I'm betting with at least one of these storylines, the narrative is going to jump the next moment and drop us into an already resolved situation with little explanation of how we got there.

Are there positives here? Yes. There is a talking moose! It feels as if MM's storyline has finally hit the break point it's been creeping up on since she got Black Adam'd. KK and singular Girl actually find the object of their quest, unlike some folks I might mention. The Challengers fall into the clutches of an evil...hand. Any guesses on the prickly hand in question? Maybe it's just because Equus is here, but I'm reminded very vaguely of Jim Lee's version of Zod in the "For Tomorrow" storyline. Could we stress, as an aside, how much both the magic storylines would benefit from John Constantine's presence in the DCU? I understand editorial's position on this, I'm just saying. In and of itself, the one-page Jimmy appearance plays out well. The story beat with the Rogues moves well, even if Ivy's motivation for capturing Trickster and Piper has inexplicably changed since last issue. Piper being saved from Ivy's influence by his power of homosexuality could have been handled with a little more subtlety and I'm not sure it's been demonstrated that Ivy's pheremone tricks work only on those who'd be sexually into her to begin with. I was relieved the writers didn't feel the need to drop an even more blatant "Hey, this guy's gay" comment into Trickster's mouth here. Thank god for small favors.

On the Deathstroke origin: how many evil kids does this cat have anyway? Seems like a lot of action for a prematurely gray pirate assassin.

Absolute last word: the DC nation page should either be filled or dropped. Even though Dan Didio has been absent from the page for months, at least we've gotten a next issue teaser image. If Mike Carlin is going to complain there's no space for editorial to step in with some "See Also..." notes, maybe he should think about this little spot?

Oh, and I know this is a little late in coming, but for those of you not reading every book in the DCU, here's the casualty list on the New Gods:

1. Lightray (in Countdown)
2. Sleeze (in Countdown)
3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Deep Six (in Countdown)
9. Speed Queen (in Outsiders: Five of a Kind)
10. Grayven (in Outsiders: Five of a Kind)
11. Knockout (in Birds of Prey)

So there you go.

#37- Building a Mystery?

Holy Crap! Two stories in Countdown kind of sort almost maybe brushed up against one another!

KK's mystery virus may be an omen of the Great Disaster, according to Singular Girl. Of course, watching characters fight a virus is about as exciting as watching hackerbattles, unless the virus fighters happen to be virus-sized. Like as in maybe Atom-ic?

I'm really trying to give this stuff the benefit of the doubt, folks. Really trying.

I missed the issue where Babs became a doctor (she became a lawyer during the fairly intolerable "Bruce Wayne: Murderer?" storyline, courtesy of Harvard's rarely publicized Correspondence School of Law, but the idea of Correspondence Medical School gives me a rash) but she certainly has a lot of medical type gadgets, accompanied by a shelf full of manilla folders. I would have thought Babs would have a more complex filing system. Like maybe some cabinets.

The Lost Legionairres are sent off in search of Elias Orr, who's made minor appearances in some of Brian Azarrello's Superman work as a shadowy shadowy presence. As far as I can find, no one other than Az has worked the character into a story. Essentially, he created the supervillian Pilate out of the cancer-ridden Father Leone and makes some sort of offer to the Toyman, representing himself as Chechnyan. Clever me thought Elias Orr was an anagram of "Solaris" and then actually checked that. Turns out it's an anagram for "Solar Ire", which means, well, nothing at all. Leaves one wondering why Babs wouldn't send KK to check in with the folks at St. Camillus before pawning him off on an evil scientist who may not even exist.

Mary Marvel has apparently developed both the ability to regenerate her costume and to enlarge her eyes to the size of dinner plates. Zatanna gives her the tour her fairly large estate which conceals an even larger estate! Zee makes the mistake of showing Mary the two paths to power: laborious, disciplined study or stealing stuff from a glass case. Not that Mary would find "enough magical energy in that case alone to do pretty much anything you could imagine" tempting.

A gripe here: if this had been another weekly comic, a setting like Zatanna's house would be loaded to the gills with references to other magical aspects of the DCU. The book titles, the objects in the case, the posters on the walls, the physical appearances of the servants; everything would have constituted a little in-joke, a tiny reward for readers who were paying attention. Even something as blatant as a butler who looked like Oliver Queen. Instead Zee has her own performance posters on the walls, the book spines are unlabeled, and the objects in the case are a vague collection of pan-ethnic ephemera. The magic aspect of the DCU opens itself up to so much cross-referencing and just plain fun, it's a shame to see this bit done so dryly.

Moving on.

There's a little more play in this week's Challengers installment, as the kids run into a collection of wizards who are bailing due to the looming Great Disaster. Hey, someone else was worried about a Great Disaster just a couple pages ago! The Challengers are about to be attacked by clicking bug-like things for no apparent reason. No luck finding references on Queen Belthera, by the way. Again, it would have been nice to see one recognizable DCU magic-user in this flock, but no such luck.

Piper and Trickster get captured again. For no good reason, again. Which will probably have no consequences again. Ivy's behavior is totally inexplicable and without motive, as we've never seen her acting murderously protective of fruit in the past. Granted, she's never been the most consistent character, but this is just bizarre.

This week's installment of the Athenian women's shelter amounts to panty shots and girl on girl action. I guess since Mary Marvel's just walking around, this was the only plausible way to work this in. You've got to admire that kind of committment to an aesthetic mistake.

And finally we have what might be the first major event in Countdown so far: Jimmy's out-of-the-blue revelation that Clark Kent is Superman. Thus is the most obvious secret identity in the world revealed! But to stress the fact Jimmy has the investigative prowess of a tossed salad, he doesn't so much deduce Clark's secret as he is hit by this knowledge from elsewhere. Way to go, James!

And way to go Action Comics for totally blowing this issue's big reveal! I thought only in-house ads and solicits were allowed that kind of spoilering. That aside, this is the strongest end of an issue we've seen so far, which almost assures that it won't be touched on next issue.

#38- Hackers and the Creature from the Black Lagoon

Six out of 22 pages dedicated to a conflict between two characters with no real tie-in to "Countdown". Not so keen, and once again Countdown gives us a repeat ending: last week we closed out with KK poised to ask Oracle for help and thie week we close out with...KK poised to ask Oracle for help.

According to solicits, the Oracle vs. Calculator storyline will pay off in "Birds of Prey" in October. In case you're interested.

I vaguely remember the Deep Six from Peter David's run on Aquaman. Their appearance involved a spawning chamber and an explanation of how the characters managed to constantly resurrect themselves. Through spawning. But this runs up against the problem with the death of the new gods: almost all of these characters have already died. Multiple times. Which takes away a little of the impact of their deaths here. That and the fact they haven't appeared in a comic since I was in high school. The Monitors make reference to the New God death count hitting double digits, anyone know who the tenth is? I've got Lightray, Sleeze and the Deep Six. I feel as if there's one I'm forgetting, but not two. Any help?

The blinding at the hands of Mary Marvel was a little rough, however. At this point, Mary's lived through a couple lightning strikes and what looks a lot like an Omega beam. I like that Mary's moving magic around a bit, which should either set her up to accept a couple pointers from Zatanna or move even furher towards the Dark Side of the Force. Yet another ominous shot of Eclipso gives a little hint as to which it might be.

By the way, if the folks on Countdown want to see how to do an ominous villian shot, they should scope out last week's Superb...err, Prime appearance in Green Lantern. I know it's been said other places, but right now the Sinestro War storyline looks more interesting and potentially world altering than anything in Countdown.

There's something great about the idea that Trickster carries around a Trickster puppet in his coat. Maybe it's just that I'm waiting for the second season of the Muppet Show to show up from Amazon and have puppetry on the brain. Next month's cover is giving me the impression that the entire Rogue storyline might amount to a repetition of "They get caught, they escape in wacky fashion." In the hands of certain writers, this might work. Right here it's getting stale.

Jimmy's attempt to join the Titans was pretty well done and demonstrated the relative silliness of his superpowers. I'm actually glad the open mocking implied by the cover never actually came about and the confrontation with Tim Drake brought home what a well-developed and sympathetic character Tim Drake has become over the past couple years. I'd like to see someone do an Elseworlds-type story (although I guess Elseworlds no longer exist) that posits Tim as Batman. Either that or an in-continuity story of Tim finding a calling outside the cape-and-cowl set. It's just nice to be reminded that Tim is something more than a Dick Grayson clone.

And Darkseid's chessboard is taking on a little more importance as the big D makes his bid for Multiversal Dynasty. Good luck with that!

Overall, not a lot of progress in this issue, with antagonists slowly coming out of the shadows. Allow me to again recommend the Sinestro Corps War storyline for an all-stops-pulled epic, while Countdown continues the slow build.

First Quarter Rundown

Since the oppressive heat in my apartment is making it impossible to finish the chapter I'm supposed to be working on, it seems like the perfect time to do a first quarter breakdown of "Countdown" so far. We're thirteen issues in now, so there should be an opportunity to start making overall assessments. Unless you're a member of the DC editorial and writing staffs, who seem to believe no such assessments can be made until the very end.

Let's start out with time of possession. The complete lack of crossover between storylines makes this an easy enough assessment. With pages of comics in print, raw scores are as follows:

Jimmy Olsen: 60 pgs.
The Challengers: 54 pgs.
The Rogues: 49 pgs.
Mary Marvel: 41 pgs.
Karate Kid: 21 pgs.
Forerunner: 21 pgs.
Holly Robinson: 19 pgs.
Darkseid: 10 pgs.

As far as narrative yardage, let's start with

Darkseid: So far we know that Darkseid has both an army and a chessboard. He may be manipulating certain events on earth, as the series starts off with him placing Duella Dent in proximity to Jason Todd, but there's been no further evidence of his involvement. We know that there's currently an opportunity to destroy him. Oh, and according to a two page spread, he's apparently one of the "New Gods". Huh, you don't say.

Holly Robinson: Like most of our characters, Holly's on the run. For the moment, she's serving as the voice of reason, or at least the voice of derisive sarcasm in the Athena Women's Shelter, which is either in Gotham or Metropolis, but seems to have settled into the latter.

The Athenian storyline that Holly's our window into may or may not be related to the big "Amazons Attack" event, but from what I can tell, that storyline is such a clusterfuck, I'm not going anywhere near it. Aside from not getting her ass arrested, Holly doesn't seem to have any motivation or drive and her predominant character trait seems to be "pluck". As the first quarter ends, Holly is about to go to an Athenian Self-Esteem-Building Workshop. This storyline has also given the artists a chance to draw entirely gratuitous panels of young women bathing.

Forerunner: With a hairstyle lifted from the "Star Wars" prequels, Forerunner is supposedly the character find of 2007. Her interests include honor and killing stuff. According to Monarch, she is the "forerunner" to a race known as (wait for it) the Forerunners. A race the Monitors bred for killin' and have apparently decided to wipe out entirely, using one woman as their proxy. We haven't seen 'runner lately, but last time we did, she was heading across the multiverse to kill whoever offed her people. Could be a long trip.

The confusion of Forerunner/Forerunners is just one more of the fascinating inconsistencies of "Countdown". I know there's an impulse to call them "mistakes" but let's wait til all the facts are in. Oh, and Monarch's face being fleshy instead of Captain Atom-y under the mask? Yeah, that was a mistake.

Karate Kid: When KK entered the scene, he was posing as someone named Trident and taking swings at Batman. He spent some time imprisoned by the JLA, spent some more time imprisoned by the JLA, spent some time not quite as imprisoned but still fairly imprisoned by the JLA. He chats with a couple JLAers, which amounted to "Hey, something sure is wrong here, huh?" He joined up with One Third of a Triplicate Girl and ran off, ending up in Oracle's personal space looking for answers as to what might be wrong. Because apparently it's wrong with him, in particular.

Is it the lack of personality? Could KK's lack of a perceptible personality lead to the Final Crisis?

Like our girl Holly, KK is on the run, but unlike Holly there is no apparent reason why. Even if you've read "The Lightning Saga", you're left with no idea who KK is hiding from. Can't be Batman, he was chatting up Batman a couple issues ago. Probably not Supes, they go way back. Also like Holly, we've got no real sense of whay KK might be running towards. Hopefully Babs can shed some light on this mess.

Okay, those are the really messy storylines. With the exception of maybe the Forerunner thing, which despite its flaws seems to have some direction in front of it. Let's move on to the bigger stories and see how we're doing.

Mary Marvel: You know, except for the ass and crotch shots, this storyline's not going too badly. Mary wakes from a year long coma and finds herself powerless and sets out to get some powers. And she does, but they might not be what she expects. So at the urging of the Riddler, she goes looking for guidance and is about to meet up with Zatanna. Look, kids: it's a narrative arc!

Granted, it's a little hobbled by the fact that the ad campaigns have been touting an Eclipso'd MM since back in the "52" days, but Mary's got a lot of the qualities the above-mentioned characters so far lack. Personality and clear motive to their actions. Everytime MM shows up (usually descending on the camera-eye crotch-first), we know why she is where she is, which is pretty refreshing. I'm not sure how this storyline ties into the Great Disaster/Final Crisis noise, but it's an interesting enough story to keep reading.

Plus it hasn't yet required me to read a single comic outside of "Countdown"

The Rogues: Seriously, these guys should not have shown up until after the Flash got offed. The early Rogues sections drove me up a wall with their half-assed Tarantino dialogue, repetetive homophobia is funny motif and general lack of any edge whatsoever. Every appearance before issue 44 is entirely discardable.

Since then, a little better. The writers seem to have a slightly better sense of Piper and Trickster than they did the rest of the Rogues, and the reintroduction of the Suicide Squad, who clearly have some agenda involving making villians disappear, has made this story tolerable. Actually, the mere fact it's gotten Montoya back on the page makes it tolerable. But it still feels like a story only barely started.

The Challengers: If I was betting on a story to lead most directly into a Final Crisis, my money would be on this one. It's got scope, even if it got off to a rocky start with Jason Todd making pretty uncanny logical leaps to determine he and Donna are being hunted by the Monitors. Speaking of logical leaps, it would be nice if the readers were getting some clues as to what the trail of Ray Palmer is.

Overall, I'm okay with this story. Donna's character needs to be fleshed out a bit more (this is not a call for bigger breasts, folks at DC. Female characters can also have "well-developed" personalities), and hopefully the inclusion of Kyle Rayner in the group will contribute a little more in the way of personal dynamics. How they're getting Kyle out of his current state and into "Countdown" has got me riveted. I hope someone told Paul Dini that Kyle Rayner is, how you say, super evil right now.

And finally...

Jimmy Olsen: This storyline started out with promise and has sort of jumped the rails since. Jimmy investigated the death of Duella Dent for about ten minutes, then investigated the death of his friend Lightray for about ten minutes, then decided to take up sewing. I was excited at the possibility that lowly Jimmy Olsen was going to put together the puzzle of the Great Disaster, but what we've gotten instead is clear evidence why Jim is a photographer and not an investigative reporter.

But here's the thing about Jimmy.

As of right now, Jimmy is the only player in "Countdown" who retains ties to the superhero community. Everyone else is on the run from something or other. Narratively, this holds possibility. Big events are in the offing, and while the Big Five (formerly known as the Big Three) would be well equipped to stop them, all the puzzle pieces lie in the hands of outcasts and fugitives. If I was making a guess, I'd say Jimmy's story will idle in superheroic tomfoolery for a bit until something puts Jimmy on the run like the rest of the cast. I'm casting my vote now for a Jimmy Olsen/Forager team-up.

Overall, it's not as bad as it could be. It's sluggish, yes. The art has been inconsistent and the editorial gaffs really do have to stop; there are four editors currently on the title, one of them should be reading it. But on reading it all together, I don't hate it. In fact I kind of like it. This may be due more to speculation on what's to come on my part, but I'm pretty firmly on board, and the issues seem to be getting better as time goes on.

To contrast this with the quarter mark in "52", by that point I was in love with the series, had a firm grasp on several well-developed (personality-wise) characters and, rather than speculating, was anxious to see what the writers would come up with next. There were scenes that were out and out brilliant and most everything else was at a consistently high quality level. Four of the top writers in the industry with a universe-wide, year-long sandbox to play in will do that for you.

To contrast this with what's going on currently in the "Green Lantern" books, they took a bunch of characters I couldn't care less about (not a Corps fan, me) and had me on board within the first few pages. I'm buying books I wouldn't have even leafed through two months ago and they're at the top of my read pile. Clear motivation will do that for you.
Not that we're comparing.

Writer Tony Bedard promises everything will be batshit crazy by #30. Which is good, this title could use a little more batshit crazy. Not to mention the "higher caliber" artists Mike Carlin's teasing folks with ("52" got in a nice rhythm of competent art broken up by occassional guest work by guys like Jiminez and Robertson. Anyone approaching that level would get me through an extra month of "Countdown" even if the plot didn't pick up). And less ass shots. Please, again, enough.