#23- Special Guest Superman: Jack Bauer

I don't watch much/enough tv, but I do catch just enough to know that around the time Gitmo kicked into gear, torture scenes became par for the course in American television. Sure, the methods were brutal. In fact, they were staggeringly creative in their brutality. But to ease our collective conscience regarding actual acts of torture being perpetrated just off the east coast, tv's torturers were always in desperate situations and the guys they were torturing were generally pretty bad cats.

But Mr. Mxyzptlk never really hurt anybody and doesn't seem to have any crucial info. Mixy does inform us as to how SuperCopyrightInfringement Prime got all growed up. Looks like the black suit and some sort of "encounter" that will hopefully be explained as soon as Green Lantern 25 hits the shelves bulked up our boy. Except for his, ahem, superpackage. Lil' Supes has built a torturtastic Fortress of Solitude in the Source Wall (which Source Wall is anyone's guess) and is burrowed away with Mixy and Annataz Arataz, the evil equivalent of Zatanna. The torturing, including one nasty little facial tattoo, doesn't net us much information, except that Mxyzptlk is the third dimension's trickster god, sometimes known as Anasazi, Loki and Coyote. So, um, there's that.

In other news...actually, there is no other news. The aliens from Invasion show up briefly, only to get blowed up by Monarch's crew, currently lead by Lord Havok, who you might remember from never having cared about him before.

In the end, Annataz gives up her life to protect Mixy from Supes, and Mixy responds by flying away from the whole scene. And that, my friends, is all that happens this week. This week's treatment of Mr. Mxyzptlk is fairly indicative of DC editorial's treatment of some of their lesser properties. Whereas 52 tried to take the silly parts of the DCU and make them viable, it seems that Countdown is taking ideas that were never officially part of the DCU and doing violence to them. I hope no one actually likes any of those Elseworlds characters, because I get the feeling they're about to be trashed, for no good reason whatsoever.