#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.