#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.