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
2 comments:
"Fast becoming"? So it made sense to you when Karate Kid just showed up in the Batcave, fought Batman, and got taken out by Black Lightning without a word of explanation within the Countdown series as to what the heck was going on?
(I mean, obviously it made sense to you if you were also reading JLA and JSA...)
Point. Actually, it didn't make all that much sense even after reading The Lightning Saga, come to think of it.
And in retrospect, "fast becoming" are really not two words that should be in any way attached to this series.
Post a Comment