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.
7 comments:
I agree completely, but have been unable to muster the anger to tear Countdown apart each every week these days. The book rarely makes sense, even at the best of times. The Wildstorm advertisement book did nothing but make the WS universe look like some cheesy 90's group of books and served only to piss off long term Authority (or any WS) fans.
As for Grant Morrison's Joker, I dont think DC even wanted to use the excellent new version from Morrison's The Joker At Midnight. The same week or shortly after, Dini pissed all over that with having him show up in Detective (although Im not 100% sure it was Dini's issue he showed up in, but it was Detective). McDuffie's JLA special this week also had him as his regular old self. It's ashame really, as the new interpretation of Grant's was awesome and updated the Joker for a new generation while at the same time sticking to what makes the Joker the character he is.
Good review, keep up the good work.
Two thoughts, both of which are probably going to sound vaguely uncomplimentary to Grant Morrison:
1) He doesn't get to complain about other people ignoring his versions of Klarion, the Guardian, and the New Gods, given that his new versions of those characters just ignored the previous versions of those. (And it wasn't a "pre-Crisis/post-Crisis" thing, either. Klarion showed up in 'Sins of Youth', back in 2000, and the Guardian was a Superman/Superboy mainstay for most of the 1990s.) If you don't play nicely with other people's toys, they're probably not going to play nicely with yours.
2) Morrison doesn't actually work well in a shared universe, because he tends to come up with a lot of ideas that either a) have definitive ending points, which he then writes, or b) can't be taken to their logical conclusions without taking the entire fictional universe someplace it doesn't want to go. (Case in point for A: Animal Man. Nobody was ever able to follow up Morrison's run on Animal Man, because the ending was so definitive that the only thing you could really do with Morrison's run was to ignore it.) (Case in point for B: X-Men. Sure, the idea of mutants becoming a larger and larger minority is interesting, but the more mutants you get, the more it would transform human society into something unrecognizable, and that's not the story Marvel is telling. So they had to rein in the mutant populace, and suddenly they look like the bad guys for following Morrison's ideas and realizing they ran into a metaphorical bad part of town.)
All of this probably sounds uncomplimentary to Grant Morrison, and I don't want to leave the impression I don't like his stuff--I do. But I feel that sometimes he gets a free pass from his fans for doing things that they wouldn't let other writers get away with.
Oh, dont worry. I think I agree with a lot of what you are saying as well. Typically, Morrison is just all high concept, big idea stuff. He comes in, does he thing and leaves a big shit storm for everyone else to worry about and fans typically get riled up over it being retconned when there was nothing else to do about it.
New X-Men was basically the best example of that. Magneto is a drug using / pushing pyscho that got killed off in the end very definitively. Left no way out to redeem the character or keep the Malcom X / MLK dynamic him and Xavier had going. Mutant population became a joke and the very core of the book with minority struggling for acceptance got wiped out.
His Joker, however, was a logical and perfect evolution of the character that did not deserve to be changed and ignored the way it was. DC didnt even try to make it work. The core of hte character was the same. It was similar to his Silver Age jokester character that was similar to the Adam West Batman TV series that got changed over the years to eventually the current Alan Moore Killing Joke version. There was room to eventually bring the character back if they disliked the way it was turning out, but they pretty much just killed his idea and stomped all over it without even trying.
Personally, I blame Time Warner, as they probably dictated they wanted a version they can sell toys and other merchandise of and that would synch up with the movie better.
*nod* I left the Joker stuff off, as I've been waiting for the trades on Morrison's Batman and thus don't feel really qualified to talk about it.
All good points and valid criticisms of Morrison's work. I'd even throw his JLA run into the category of unfollowable work: he finished with his standard "We're all going to evolve into superheroes" schtick, which had to be utterly jettisoned by later writers.
As for the Joker stuff (and yes, it was Dini's work on Detective that immediately contradicted Morrison's changes), it would seem that a more threatening Joker would synch up better with the character's portrayal in the movie. Even if it didn't, Batman readers deserved some explanation as to why the new version was abandoned.
And as far as the Seven Soldiers stuff goes, Morrison was asked to revamp the characters. The project was intended to be a launch point for what were intended to be (perhaps overoptimistically) franchise characters. Since I'm guessing this Klarion appearance will be as irrelevant to the plot as most of the stuff going on in this book, one wonders why Dini felt the need to trample on the character.
I just wonder if Dini isn't a little bitter somehow? After all, Morrison's on the flagship title while Dini's on Detective, and right now Dini is essentially shackled with writing Countdown as an opening act for Morrison's Final Crisis. I keep returning to the character in Arkham in the second issue, spouting off about fourth dimensional beings and it seems like such an obvious dig at Morrison.
On the bright side, thinking about your very valid criticism of Morrison's tendency towards teleology encourages one to think that Final Crisis might actually have a strong sense of finality. Which is to say, maybe they're going to let Morrison break the whole DCU.
I'm not sure it's so much a question of "let Morrison break the whole DCU" as "DC isn't really thinking through the long-term implication of things right now, so they're going to let Morrison do a story that sounds 'cool' and will get the fanboys talking and buying...but in five years, it will become apparent that it has broken the DCU."
Y'know, kind of like Civil War over at Marvel. :)
You write very well.
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