Pregame, Addendum: The Jiminez Teaser

I can't believe I spouted off about pre-marketing for the series and failed to mention the Jiminez teaser image. It's an amazing image showing off Jiminez's talent for elaborate layouts and it's jam-packed with little details that the discerning viewer can pick up if he or she is willing to get fairly intimate with their comic books (I think of myself as visually acute, but there's no way I would have spotted that Legion flight ring if someone hadn't pointed it out).

Enough people have done the good work of decrypting the image and if you're reading this, chances are you've already done a little sleuthing yourself, so I'll curtail that part of the discussion in favor of talking a little about the ad in the context of the "Countdown" marketing campaign.

Keeping in mind that this ad began running before DC had officially resurrected the multiverse(but after Dan Didio had let that one out of the bag), the image got a lot of fans pretty psyched up for "Countdown", with the "Kingdom Come" version of Robin almost at center stage, offset by an Elseworlds version of Batman, the someone-in-a-Flash-costume and a couple New Gods thrown in for good measure. Lay it all over a Planet of the Apes background, add in a weeping Superman and you've got yourself a hot little advertising pitch.

And it even works if you're not a devoted DC reader. The images of Superman and Wonder Woman grieving would grab any casual fan, as would the image of the ruins of the Statue of Liberty (that's why Planet of the Apes used it, after all). Even if you can't play Name That Corpse, you might have some interest in what reduced the Man of Steel to tears, or why Batman's sporting a sword.

But the image has no context. "Countdown" is not even mentioned, the image itself is a weird comingling of things that have already happened and things that will/might happen, and the text, "So Begins The End..." seems set up to leave most readers scratching their heads. Are we looking at the end? The beginning of the end?

Although I don't want to start talking about the actual series just yet, I think a lot of the initial disappointment readers had with the first couple issues of "Countdown" can be traced back to this image, which seems to promise some world-shattering event as "just the beginning".

The ad campaign leading up to "Countdown" offered a slew of mysteries, most of which were not necessarily suggested by any goings-on in DCU books over the past year (since most of the DCU bigs seem currently unaware the universe is multi again). The end of "52" reset the DCU cosmology to something that, whether you liked it or not, was discernibly different from what came before. And, burdened with expectations, the "Countdown" started.

Hopefully I'll be up to speed on the actual books by the time #46 hits the stands this week, but we'll see.