Hope from Without

Once again, the marketing campaign surrounding "Countdown" proves much more interesting than the book itself. This week, DC released the second teaser image, the villians equivalent of the image that preceded "Countdown". At around the same time, Dan Didio explicated the first teaser image in a manner I won't even attempt to parse. But if you've ever played the gym class team-building favorite, "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (at least that's what we called it when we were kids), the standard "touch the ground and you're dead" rules are in play. Except for the safe zone that Supes and Wonder Woman are on.

A couple people have already pointed out the similarities between this image and DaVinci's "The Last Supper", which would jive well with the obvious appropriation of pieta imagery in the last teaser. For the most part, this doesn't yield any clues, except that it casts J'on in the Judas role, with the Joker as Peter and the Kingdom Come Superman as (doubting) Thomas. And let's be honest, those are really the only apostles any of us know anything about.

Other things to note: Trickster is carrying Piper's pipe and KC Superman is either holding a yellow power ring or the Atom. Black Racer's ski gear, a broken arrow (Connor? Ollie?), a motherbox, the Kirbytech from the last teaser and the Crime Bible are all scattered on the ground, Granny Goodness and Desaad look pretty cheery considering who's statue they're standing on, and Catwoman is about to get more than just advice from the Joker, if the buzzer in his hand is any indication.

And for the record, I dig Lex's old purple and greens. I think they should fight Aquaman's old costume.

The two big questions are where are we at and who's the man in black? As for Supes, we've seen the black togs in the "Return of Superman" and the "Emperor Joker" storylines, but search me as to how it fits in here. The sky could be the kind of flamepits Intergang tried to let loose on Gotham in "52", but it seems more likely, especially after the events in "Sinestro Corps" (which I have been unable to get a copy of, but feel like I've read) that we're seeing the Anti-Matter universe. Or the Anti-Matter Multiverse. Or the Anti-Multi-Matter-Verse.

So again, DC has tried to rally fans to its big projects through the marvels of marketing rather than the books themselves. With sales flagging on "Countdown" and never really getting started on "Amazons Attack", one can only hope a campaign of in-house ads will have some effect.

More likely to have an effect is the ouster of editor Mike Marts in favor of Mike Carlin. Carlin shepherded four Superman books a month (that's one a week, folks!) through some major events back in the day and managed to coordinate them with other titles pretty seamlessly. I'm not convinced that the problems on this book can all be traced to editorial decisions, but Marts was clearly not cut out for this position. His editorial stint on the X-books was most notable for the lack of crossover between books, as creators like Grant Morrison and Joss Whedon built sandboxes for themselves and went about constructing beautiful and self-contained castles within them. The multivalent nature of "Countdown" not to mention the fact the book is helmed by less-than-visionary writers, puts extra pressure on the editor to take control of the book, but "Countdown" thus far is lacking in pacing and direction. Maybe switching Mikes will help.