#44- Family Feud

This is the speed we should have been moving at all along. Granted, we're still in "building up steam" mode, but for perhaps the first time, players are actually moving around on the board. The pacing within the issue is stronger than what we've seen so far, with three to four page check-ins on most of our major characters (sans Jason and Donna) that actually fulfill the issue's title, "Change of Address".

On the downside, the series still feels nowhere near self-contained. As expected, the key beat in the Rogues storyline is only referenced and not shown here. How do Piper and Trickster end up severed from the rest of the Rogues anyway? In an effort to focus on what's here and not what isn't, I will say that for the first time I'm actually interested in the Rogues storyline, but every appearance that came before this served no purpose whatsoever and openly clashed with the storyline in "The Flash". The two key players in that book were apparently never invited to the Rogue soirees we saw in "Countdown". While there's still no indication what this storyline has to do with any others, it's nice that it's finally become a storyline. And naturally, someone is watching Piper and Trickster from the shadows, since the basic rule of thumb for this series has been that someone is always watching from the shadows.

The Holly Robinson material remains utterly incomprehensible. The Amazons are Attacking Washington DC and simultaneously lounging in Sapphic bliss over in Metropolis? My first guess is that this is an embassy, but the pages are laid out such that we don't see enough of the building's exterior to really be sure. Of course, the Themsicryan embassy was replaced by Khandaq's embassy back in "52", but that might have been addressed somewhere in "Wonder Woman". As far as I can tell, Holly has no previous connection to the Amazons, but more importantly, shouldn't these here Amazons be more focused on Attacking than on recruiting continuity-glitched street urchins? The only possible explanation I can come up with now (and this involves some serious stretching) is that the 'zons have an interest in anamolies related to Donna, but if that's the case, we should have seen some interaction between Donna and the Amazons beyond the fact she's nearby the Attack scene.
It's nice to see Jimmy using his investigative skills to investigate. Sort of. Of course, you realize this is all a tease for the return of Turtle Boy. Or possibly this:Among the big stars here are the Marvel family and the new rules of Magic. Keeping in mind that the architects of the old rules of Magic in the DCU included Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, the updated Bible being scribed by Bill Willingham and Judd Winick is going to come across as a little less fully-cooked. But if Billy is Shazam is the Rock of Eternity, and the whole Marvel family is (possibly) filed under T for Transuniversal anomaly, the state of Magic in the DCU seems a little perilous. The magic meets sci-fi stuff has always made my skin crawl and I thought DC was wise to avoid the issue throughout "Infinite Crisis" and "52" by keeping the two separate, but this will have to be raised at some point. Speaking of raised, the hemline of Mary's skirt has officially hit absurd.

Incidentally, at what point did the Seven Deadlies get new names? Is anything gained by changing Sloth's name to Laziness? Has Greed been changed to "Wantin' Stuff" somewhere off panel?

Finally, we have the Monarch recruiting pitch, which is able to undo a thousand generations of race-programming in the span of five minutes, despite its vagueness and poor grammar. It's difficult to tell here if Monarch has been assembling an army or is about to be attacked by one, and since the Monitors are currently at odds with one another, it's equally unclear which Monitor agenda Monarch is opposed to.

In the structural oddities department, it seems like "Countdown" is missing fairly easy chances to establish a sense of narrative symmetry. The Rogues on the run would seem to pair up nicely with the situation we'd expect to find Karate Kid in after the events of "The Lightning Saga", but KK's absent entirely from this issue. Likewise, Jimmy experimenting with his new powers would have paired nicely with Mary's exploration of her powers, but coming several issues later, it comes across as a bit repetitive, leaving off at the same "what's going on with those wacky powers" moment Mary's narrative stopped at in issue #46. And I imagine we're in for a long sales pitch to Donna and Jason from the Mutton Chop Monitor within the next two issues, but why not play it off Monarch's speech? If this series is going to move this slowly, it could at least move elegantly.

#45- Watchers and Breeders

A whole lot of action in the DCU this week, most of it Flash-related and very little of it reflected in the DCU's backbone title. But let's look at what's here before we look at what isn't.

The Donna Troy vs. Forerunner throwdown isn't bad and Jim Califore's art is solid throughout. The machine gun bit seems a bit needless, especially with the conveniently placed bodies that show up on this page to remind us that the Amazons have apparently Attacked. It would be nice to hang around with Donna long enough to find out why she isn't involved in the melee, but maybe this has been explained in the miniseries.

The idea of the Monitors breeding a race of living weapons might be interesting if we had any idea what the protocols they keep babbling about are. My understanding at the moment is that Bearded Monitor was violating protocols by breeding Forerunner(s) and violating protocols by not using her to kill Duella Dent, and Mutton Chop Monitor is now violating protocols by saving Donna and Jason. Did I get all that?

The hints of Forerunner's history (the prophecy, the thousand wars) are interesting and I hope they're followed up here in "Countdown".

Donna and Jason joining up with Mutton Chop Monitor would be pretty exciting, if it weren't for the "Countdown Presents" solicit released earlier this week. Donna, Jason and Kyle Rayner are being spun off into an unnumbered miniseries to Search for Ray Palmer (weren't they already doing that in the All New Atom?). I think the idea of these characters bopping from universe to universe is great. It's exactly the kind of kickass project the return of the multiverse opens up. So why isn't it going to be included in "Countdown"?

Jimmy's right, by the way, his talking into a tape recorder taking a full page to recount five pages of action that appeared LAST WEEK is kind of idiotic. One of the perks of the weekly format is you really don't need to recap things we read seven days ago. And the two page spread of the New Gods doesn't even scratch the surface of these character's relationships with one another or their connection to Earth. A little history on Jimmy' connection to the New Gods could have filled this space much better.

The Karate Kid section is lagging about three weeks behind the "Lightning Saga" crossover, which came to its conclusion elsewhere this week. But the film reference jokes on the Justice League Satellite are lagging even further behind. I'm sure the DC superheroes are busy, but have any of them seen a movie this decade? Unless...the outdate movie references are a clue?

Now that I type that, I'm wondering how much of a joke it is. Tomorrow I'm combing through all the jokey cultural references we've seen so far to find out if any of them would be lost on someone reading "Crisis on Infinite Earths" in 1985.

Also, a mysterious figure is watching Jimmy Olsen. And a mysterious figure is watching Holly Robinson. And a mysterious figure is watching Forerunner. At least we get to find out who that is. The appearance of Monarch, whose character history is only slightly more intelligible than Donna Troy's, means pretty much all of DC's signifiers of big cosmic level things to come have made an appearance in "Countdown". I keep saying this, but the set-up for cool things to happen in this series is certainly there, but so far we've been given lots of promises and very little payoff.

Like all but one of the characters on this issue's cover, the big happenings are not in the issue but outside it. I think it's almost offensive that the big moment for the Rogues, who we've been forced to endure in every issue so far, isn't so much as referenced here. Without spoiling things that have certainly been spoiled everywhere else, I'll say this was a very exciting week for fans of Mark Waid's run on "The Flash". And was that Barry's reflection in the Lightning Rod?

#46- A Coat of Many Babies

A baby-eating demon made out of babies? That's pretty damn gross.

Pharyngula, incidentally, is a stage in the embryonic development of vertebrates during which most of the organ systems are beginning to develop but when embryos of all species are most similar to one another. So, closer to blastula than Dracula as far as naming goes.

As far as the end of the Black Mary Marvel vs. Dead Baby Suit Demon throw down, could it be Mary inherited Teth-Adam's reassigned magic word along with his power?

Six issues into the series and two out of six issues have used the last page as the cover. Aside from robbing the last pages of any impact, this decision highlights the sometimes shaky art that weighs these books down. Overall, the art has been pretty competent, but if you've got both an A-list and a B-list artist illustrating the same scene, the B-list artist is bound to suffer by comparison.

Um, the Monitors have a Forerunner and a Harbinger in their employ? Will they be hiring a Precursor anytime soon?

Like most of the storylines, the Donna/Jason team up is creeping along at a snail's pace. I wish I believed they were meeting in DC from reasons other than a pointless tie-in to "Amazons Attack", but I doubt it. Jason Todd is apparently the smartest man in the game right now, no matter where he happened to find a description of what a Monitor looks like. A little bit of light is finally shining in on these heroes, even if it is information the readers were already hip to.

Also in the "characters learning things we already knew" department, Jimmy finds out that Darkseid is somehow involved in...something. His informant, Sleez, is a John Byrne concoction; a childhood friend of Darkseid who was too depraved for the Lord of Apokolips. How depraved, you ask? During Byrne's post-Crisis restructuring of the Superman mythos, Sleez almost made a porn flick of Superman making sweet mind-controlled love to Big Barda.

Lazy, lazy coloring on the Suicide Slum sequence. It's one thing to make the buildings shades of drab, but did the prostitutes really have to be drab as well? And in case you didn't notice Holly Robinson standing next to the steps, she's been helpful enough to wear a bright pink kitty shirt.

And in a surprising twist, nothing at all happens with the Rogues. I wouldn't mind a couple pages of comic relief that didn't really advance the plot, but the dialogue in the Rogues' scenes is absolutely awful. It doesn't even rise to the level of Tarantino knock off. Some hint of what's going on with the Rogues needs to be dropped immediately to salvage this storyline.

This issue manages to get Jimmy, Jason and Donna at least up to page one, which builds up a little hope that things might finally start to kick into gear. I think this book can work if it can keep focusing on marginal characters involved in major stories, while playing carefully off events in bigger titles. All of which "Countdown" currently seems set up to do.

The JLA shot for next issue's cover doesn't exactly bode well in that regard.

#47- Genocide means only having to say you're sorry.

"Sorry"? The magic word that gives a rampaging killer back his god like powers is "sorry"? Not even a little "droevig" or "apesadumbrado" so that maybe we don't run the risk of Teth-Adam spilling someone's coffee and suddenly regaining the ability to beat down most of the Eastern Hemisphere?

All right, let's get past the Teth-Adam thing, because I really did like this issue and I'm never going to see Adam as anything more than a watered-down version of Kid Miracleman anyway.

Jimmy's nightmare makes for a good beginning, but with this second appearance of the Source Wall in "Countdown" some questions need to be asked. For one thing, why is the Source Wall so much scarier looking in Jimmy's dream? When the Mutton Chop Monitor (MCM) approached in in #51, it was just some vaguely New Gods-lookin' fellows posed something like the Vitruvian Man, but in Jimmy's dream it's snarling monsters aplenty. The MCM says the Source Wall is the "barrier of each of the respective universes", which is fine, although it makes for a mighty snaky (not to mention permeable) Source Wall. And if the purpose of the Source Wall is to form a barrier between universes, what happened to the Source?

My understanding is that there's currently no one we'd recognized grafted onto the Source Wall, although Darkseid and his dad have both been bricks in the wall at various points, as has Ares before he split to join the Mighty Avengers. Hal Jordan passed through it during his Spectre days and found a huge Green Latern battery, which is a little like meeting God and finding out he looks eerily like your dad.

Rather than following up on strong opening, we shift over to Holly Robinson, who you might remember as...actually, you might not remember her at all. She was created by Frank Miller for "Batman: Year One" and had a brief stint as Catwoman. Of course, "Countdown" readers will gather all of this from the whip surreptitiously poking out of her duffel bag. Just like the Karate Kid intro, this appearance does little more than flag the character as someone Dini and Co. want us to care about.

The Watcher's Council, I mean, the Monitor's meeting does a good job of advancing the Monitor plot, although if Bearded Monitor alone is "one of the most powerful sentients" in the whole shooting match, it's tough to imagine Jason Todd, Donna Troy and Kyle Rayner lasting long against a whole posse of them. I'm a little unclear on how the inquest from a couple issues back transformed into a student council rally, though. And Mutton Chop Monitor learns that even overusing the word "crisis" doesn't always win an argument.

Surprise! The Rogues story is still going absolutely nowhere!

I'm not touching the "Amazons Attack" ad that finishes out this issue, although at some point I'm going to have to discuss the interaction between this book and other crossovers, especially if it continues to be as clumsy as this one.

Finally, I'm going to have faith that Teth-Adam has played his part in "Countdown" and won't be heard from again. You do have to wonder how far he's going to make it in Gotham City with no powers and that sporty little dress. Even though it's pretty clear things are going to get worse before they get better for Ms. Marvel, this could open up an exploration of the nature of the Black Marvel family's power. Osiris was maybe a little too clumsy to really be called a good guy, and Isis did recant all that goodness and mercy noise on her death bed, but I'm looking forward to seeing what happens to an established hero powered by the same gods who refused to stop Black Adam's rampage.

Okay, this was a whole lot of catching up. We are now officially going to start weekly installments on this mother. Thanks for bearing with me so far, hopefully from here on out things will feel less rushed and I'll feel a little less cornerered in by what's already been said about the issue at hand. Onward to #46!

#48- When The Daily Planet Said "God is Dead"

What does it mean for the universe when a GOD DIES?

Eh, not so much.

In fact, if you glanced at this issue's cover, you've more or less read it. Dini might have overestimated the impact of offing characters most readers have never seen. I guess the argument could be made that killing off any Kirby character is a big deal, but plenty of the New Gods have done the death and rebirth thing. It's kind of what gods do.

The best piece here is the Karate Kid/Starman interaction. Starman's presence was enough to get me through the first five issues of "JSA" and these two pages might be enough to march me down to the comic book shop around the corner to pick up the JLA/JSA crossover after I catch up on these entries.

And best of all, no Rogues!

Since there's not a whole lot to say about this issue, let's step back and mention the pairings that are starting to crystalize.

Donna and Jason- The aberrations, who finally meet up this issue and look like they're set to spearhead the Monitor investigation. I've got to do a little more research into Donna Troy's backstory before I comment, but doesn't it seem a bit unfair that Jason Todd's getting hunted down just cause Superboy's wacky timepunching brought him back? How does that violate the integrity of the universes? The only integrity I can see getting damaged by the timepunch is DC editorial. Jason and Donna seem like they might develop a strong dynamic between them, if the writers can keep the buddy movie cliches in check and avoid the budding romance copout.

Piper and Trickster- Ditto on the buddy movie trap and budding romance copout. We know from the ads these two are destined to be chained together, but at this point I can honestly say I have no idea where the Rogues storyline is headed, how it plays into the other plots or why I should care. I have some lingering affection for Piper from Mark Waid's run on "Flash" but not enough to sustain my interest here and so far, there's not a single page of "Countdown" Rogue-ery I wouldn't rather see dedicated to something else.

Mary and Jimmy- Not so much partners as parallels. Mary searching for powers regardless of the explanations, Jimmy searching for explanations with little interest in powers. At this point, Mary and Jimmy are the most compelling characters in the mix, and I think the best thing Dini and the kids could do at this juncture would be to spend the bulk of a full issue fronting one or the other of them, while leaving the rest of the cast to stew for a bit.

#49- The Great Escape

And three issues in, we finally have a mystery worth solving. Jimmy's elastic moment played out better than any story beat so far and marks the most effective use of the two page spread we've seen in the first six issues. There's something inherently unnerving about a superpowered Jimmy Olsen, as Alan Davis demonstrated in "JLA;The Nail", and with Superman's Pal showing off his Ralph Dibny impersonation, "Countdown" sets its first effective story hook.

There's a reason both DC and Marvel keep Everyman characters like Jimmy Olsen and Rick Jones around. They simultaneously act as a ground for their superheroic pals and a manageable lens (hey, more camera/eye metaphors!) through which the reader can view superheroes from within a world full of superheroes. Kurt Busiek has practically made a career out of spotlighting the Everyman characters, conveying to readers what it feels like to walk among giants. One of the things that made Busiek's "Up, Up and Away" storyline so great was that he actually nailed the feeling of being Clark Kent walking powerless through a world of supermen.

Dini plays this perfectly over these two issues. Jimmy waltzes into danger as if he has an angel watching over him, because he literally does. The Killer Croc attack is paced brilliantly. With Jimmy on the phone, the reader gets a sense of exactly how much time elapses between Croc breaking his restraints and Jimmy going stretch-o. Plenty of time for Supes to notice the situation, swoop down and rectify. But instead, Jimmy, whose only power has always been his ability to narrowly escape danger, manifests a superpower in order to narrowly escape danger.

A quick survey of Jimmy's sordid little past reveals myriad possibly explanations for the superpowers, most of which involve either alternate universes or the New Gods. Let's hope this isn't leading to a permanently powered-up Mr. Olsen, since DC needs another well-mannered caucasian male who stumbles into powers roughly as much as it needs the return of Turtle Boy.

Unfortunately, this is the only well-paced section of the issue. It takes two pages to show that the JLA really did toss Karate Kid in the brig, just like they said they would, and the interrogation pays off with the same exchange of half-witted insults the Rogues have been regularly treating us to. Speaking of which, we get five pages of those wacky Rogues here which does nothing but stress how poorly Mirror Master is being scripted.

In the reveal department, we also get our first glimpse of the Bearded Monitor's universe-hopping targets, since apparently when the Bearded Monitor fled the scene in the first issue he fled directly to Monitor HQ.

And the big reveal: Teth-Adam makes a shocking return after being absent from DC's pages for a whopping five weeks of publishing time. Kind of a slap on the wrist for that whole world war thing.

#50- The Return of the No-Prize

With the second issue, DC introduces its new editorial policy that all incongruities of continuity and logic are actually "clues". Veteran Marvel zombies will surely recognize this strategy from letter cols of old. Looks like when the multiverse came back, it brought the No-Prize with it.

Something needs to be said about DC's overall defensive stance on this series. I'm willing to roll with the "It's not a mistake, it's a clue" line, but the "It's not bad, you just don't understand it" line that came out fo the DC offices early on was downright insulting. There are slews of pretty savvy readers out there who, rightfully, blasted the opening issues of this series as being badly paced and being told they don't get it by the heads at DC is not going to bring them around. "Countdown" is going to have to do it on the page to keep its already skeptical readership.

I am hoping the apparent errors in this issue are actually pointing to something in the story, but they would have to account for how Jimmy Olsen knows the entire Bat-family on a first name basis (with the exception of Bruce and possibly Tim), how Jimmy also knew that Jason witnessed Duella's murder, how Arkham changed from its standard iron-bar Goth look to the "Silence of the Lambs" set, and how the Joker recovered from his disfigurement in Morrison's "Batman", has been running around killing magicians in Dini's "Detective" and is still sitting in a cell to play Hannibal to Jimmy's Clarice here in "Countdown".

Speaking of Morrison, is the "4-D beings" line supposed to be a dig? They're playing with a lot of Grant's toys here and handling them pretty roughly. Dini's already dismissed Grant's take on the New Gods as being just a Seven Soldiers thing, not to mention the sheer disrespect of calling a Scotsman a limey. And Morrison's revamp of the Joker has been dismissed entirely in favor of...well, that's not really clear yet.

I like the possibility of the Joker's insanity allowing him access an awareness of what's going on, cosmos-wise, but it's an idea that could derail pretty quickly. I hope we see more of the Joker in some iteration. What would a proud papa Joker look like?

I also like that we got some character history on Jason Todd in this issue, through the lens (catch that?) of Jimmy Olsen. Would have been that hard to have Batman or Black Lightning do the same on the Karate Kid situation? Wikipedia managed to sum it up in a couple paragraphs, couldn't the "Countdown" team throw a little exposition our way? It was nice to know that Columbia Pictures had to borrow the rights to the name for the Ralph Macchio film.

#51- Another Girl, Another Planet

No one's going to argue that "Countdown" doesn't stumble coming out of the gate. Even the rare favorable reviews of the first issue are essentially being optimistic, dreaming of storylines to come and ignoring the story in front of them. The issue has been widely and rightfully disparaged for lacking the opening grab of other works

The cover pretty much announces the problem that will haunt the first few issues of the series. It's all-inclusive and sprawling, with every DC hero Andy Kubert can fit into a three-page spread. Some of the "guides to the series" are included: Mary Marvel out on the left fringe, Donna and Jason split by the right fold and maybe Karate Kid is in there somewhere (behind Big Barda? Tough to tell). The inclusion of Monarch/Captain Atom, Batgirl and one of the OMACs are interesting choices that might indicate interesting things to come, but for the most part, the cover, once again stamped with the "So Begins the End" tagline, gives no hints of what the series is going to be about.

Inside, there are serious problems with pacing. In short, the issue doesn't get enough done. The rooftop chase scene takes up a full third of the issue in the lead up to the "jaw-dropping" opening event. The Rogues' scene seems like something that would have been a page's worth of Keith Giffen's layouts. Narrative space is eaten up by a lot of big panels that show very little, including the two-page spread that opens the issue and the title, "Look to the Skies" has absolutely nothing to do with the action of the story, since nothing seems to come from the skies in this issue but a bit of rain.

Which brings up a side issue: is everything in this issue, save the scenes on Apokolips and at the Source Wall, supposed to be taking place in the same city? The consistent rooftop setting and confusing page layouts that crosscut between Duella, Mary and the Rogues seem to suggest we're in the same city, but the fact it isn't raining on Piper suggests we're not. Either way, where the hell is all of this going on?

Enough abuse, let's look at positives. Starting out with Darkseid is a good move, even if he doesn't really do anything. The absence of the New Gods was pretty obvious throughout "Infinite Crisis" and "52", so announcing their presence in "Countdown" at the start is a solid way to go. Darkseid completes the Big Three of DC villians (along with Luthor, who was prominent in "52" and the Joker, about whom more later) and leading off with him assures the reader that big things are afoot, even if those things are not yet apparent. Desaad's speech does a decent job of laying out the model for the start of the series: not a crash, just a small stone dropped in a very large lake.

Also interesting is the question of how exactly Duella Dent knows she's from a neighboring earth. Was it just the realization that she'd been rehashing an overdone concept with the Jokerette routine, or was Duella actually aware of herself as "an incongruity"? Her offhanded comment about Jason Todd's place in the cosmic scheme is clearly going to be the underlying question for a lot of the central cast in a very concrete way. Rather than vague wonderings about where one belongs in the universe, what does a person do when they learn that they explicitly don't belong in the universe?

The idea of multiple Monitors has potential, especially when you figure in a recent discussion with "Countdown" editor Mike Marts at Newsarama that suggests the personalities of particular Monitors could be influenced by the universes they, um, monitor. Nazi Monitor, anyone? Although it seems this idea might have been introduced over in the "Ion" series where DC has been secretly bringing back the multiverse. Am I correct in assuming that most of the DCU doesn't know what a Monitor looks like, other than Donna Troy, Kyle Rayner and the Psycho Pirate, whose face was recently relocated to the back of his head by Black Adam? Continuity-wise, do the veterans of the original "Crisis" recollect what happened? This is a point of ignorance for me, so help would be appreciated.

The real hook here for me is the Mary Marvel storyline, which is handled with humanity and humor. Her plight, introduced in just three pages, is more interesting to me than dueling Monitors, the murder of a fourth-string character or the pointless infighting of the Rogues.

The ending, with the repetition of two of the series's marketing taglines, is kind of a dull thud in terms of a cliffhanger, since we've already been alerted to the coming of a Great Disaster and the necessity of locating Ray Palmer, and dedicating a full panel to the Mutton-Chopped Monitor's shock only underlines the total lack of shock on the part of the reader. The last two pages seem grafted on, and as far as details on the Great Disaster go, this issue's not much more forthcoming than the Source Wall.

Pregame, Addendum: The Jiminez Teaser

I can't believe I spouted off about pre-marketing for the series and failed to mention the Jiminez teaser image. It's an amazing image showing off Jiminez's talent for elaborate layouts and it's jam-packed with little details that the discerning viewer can pick up if he or she is willing to get fairly intimate with their comic books (I think of myself as visually acute, but there's no way I would have spotted that Legion flight ring if someone hadn't pointed it out).

Enough people have done the good work of decrypting the image and if you're reading this, chances are you've already done a little sleuthing yourself, so I'll curtail that part of the discussion in favor of talking a little about the ad in the context of the "Countdown" marketing campaign.

Keeping in mind that this ad began running before DC had officially resurrected the multiverse(but after Dan Didio had let that one out of the bag), the image got a lot of fans pretty psyched up for "Countdown", with the "Kingdom Come" version of Robin almost at center stage, offset by an Elseworlds version of Batman, the someone-in-a-Flash-costume and a couple New Gods thrown in for good measure. Lay it all over a Planet of the Apes background, add in a weeping Superman and you've got yourself a hot little advertising pitch.

And it even works if you're not a devoted DC reader. The images of Superman and Wonder Woman grieving would grab any casual fan, as would the image of the ruins of the Statue of Liberty (that's why Planet of the Apes used it, after all). Even if you can't play Name That Corpse, you might have some interest in what reduced the Man of Steel to tears, or why Batman's sporting a sword.

But the image has no context. "Countdown" is not even mentioned, the image itself is a weird comingling of things that have already happened and things that will/might happen, and the text, "So Begins The End..." seems set up to leave most readers scratching their heads. Are we looking at the end? The beginning of the end?

Although I don't want to start talking about the actual series just yet, I think a lot of the initial disappointment readers had with the first couple issues of "Countdown" can be traced back to this image, which seems to promise some world-shattering event as "just the beginning".

The ad campaign leading up to "Countdown" offered a slew of mysteries, most of which were not necessarily suggested by any goings-on in DCU books over the past year (since most of the DCU bigs seem currently unaware the universe is multi again). The end of "52" reset the DCU cosmology to something that, whether you liked it or not, was discernibly different from what came before. And, burdened with expectations, the "Countdown" started.

Hopefully I'll be up to speed on the actual books by the time #46 hits the stands this week, but we'll see.

Pregame: The Launch of a Non-Concept

There's been plenty said already about the assets "52" had starting out. First of all, the sustained weekly narrative was a fairly new concept (or at least one that hadn't been used in quite a while) and there was a certain element of wondering whether they could pull it off, especially as Marvel's concurrent seven part monthly superevent threatened to fall apart with delays. "52" also benefitted from the momentum of its predecessor, "Infinite Crisis". Say what you will about the quality of the series, but "IC" was a huge seller and left a lot of unanswered questions. DC also made the brilliant move of deferring those answers with the "One Year Later" stunt, so "52", picking up moments after the end of "Infinite Crisis" filled a necessary void for readers. To top all of these, DC signed up a dream team of writers for the project. Anyone who has been reading comics over the past ten years has almost certainly developed an affection for at least member of the "52" team, and as a Grant Morrison completist, I felt compelled to read "52" even after the disappointment of "Infinite Crisis".

But more than all these factors, "52" benefitted from a clearly outlined concept. "A year without Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman." Given that framework, "52" introduced its cast in a way that rewarded but didn't require readers who knew four decades of backstory. Readers with no prior knowledge of Booster Gold could get a handle on the character by the end of the first issue, and readers who'd been keeping up with the character since his Keith Giffen days would recognize the same Michael they'd come to...be mildly ambivalent about. And within the first three issues, the writers set more hooks than a Bassmasters Tournament, launching a dozen mysteries we were encouraged to parse out as the clues were sparingly dropped.

The in-house marketing for "52" actually amounted to little more than "Have you figured out the mystery"-style ads in other DC books, ads which could only serve to encourage people already reading the book.


Which brings us to "Countdown". DC has already shown they can "pull off" a long-form weekly book, and so "Countdown", which abandons the narrative constraint of "52"'s real-time, is not formally experimental. With attrition levels natural to a year long, 1000+ page book, the sales of the final issue of "52" were not really significant enough to say that "Countdown" started with any kind of sales momentum. Similarly, the one year jump between the end of "52" and the beginning of "Countdown" short-circuited any kind of direct narrative momentum. Although obviously events and repercussions from "52" were always intended to play out in "Countdown", it does have the effect of making the year's worth of books published concurrent to "52" have the feeling of dead time for the big story of the DC Uni/Multi-verse.

And then there's Paul Dini. Dini is a clearly gifted writer who's shown himself adept at crafting amazing self-contained stories dealing with icons from the DC stable. But "Countdown" seems to be structured to preclude a showcase of those talents. Dini is working involved in a long-form, plot-driven work that centers around second and third tier characters and, unlike Morrison or Waid, has yet to prove he can craft a narrative of this scope.

But the big problem is simply that there's no concept. The clever and well designed in-house advertising for "Countdown" has only highlighted this problem. Teaser images like the "Jimmy Olsen Must Die" and "I Found Ray Palmer" ads are striking (provided, of course, that the target market knows and cares who JImmy Olsen and Ray Palmer are), but only map out a selection of disparate plot points, with nothing linking them together. While most superevents have monikers clearly laying out what's going on within ("Amazons Attack", "World War Hulk"), "Countdown" leaves open the most obvious question: Countdown to what? With no strong hints of an answer coming out of the DC camp (sorry, but "Final Crisis" is not a content-bearing phrase at this stage of DC fandom), DC's approach going into "Countdown" seems muddled at best, and at worst, pinned to the hopes that a reader cares enough about Jimmy Olsen, Ray Palmer, Jason Todd or any of the other second-stringers in the cast to play along for 52 weeks and $155.48. Or that readers are still invested in the outcome of DC's near constant cosmological tinkering. A marketing campaign or overall company stance fronting the "Great Disaster" might have overcome this, the build up to "Countdown" made the Great Disaster seem about as important as two low-rent villians handcuffed together, buddy movie style. The series needs something that sums it up in one sentence, and here at the start, all we're getting is that it's the prelude to...something.

The last and certainly not least obstacle faced by "Countdown" is that it's being forced to run alongside DC continuity. In a world where 24 pages of one comic may account for three months of narrative time while the same page count covers only an hour's narrative time in another, the effects on a weekly comic are potentially disastrous. Add into that the pre-planned garbling of schedules on DC's flagship books (Morrison's "Batman" is about to split its second storyline and Donner's "Superman" schedule can only induce aggreived skull-clutching), and "Countdown", even with its outlines and story bibles, will be tightrope walking over a moat full of bees. While carrying a box of hornets.

And yes, I know giving a pregame rundown a full month in is totally cheating. But...hey look, over there: it's a confusing and obscure "Kingdom Come" reference!

Launch Code

So a quick intro and revealing of biases. We'll make it as short as possible.

This blog is intended to pick up where Andrew Hickey's "I Was 28 When I Heard the Countdown Start" (and, by extension, Doug Wolk's "52 Pickup") left off. I'll admit I'm more intrigued than impressed by DC's "Countdown" at this point, but unfortunately I suffer from an overriding compulsion to know how stories work out, so it looks like I'm in for the long haul. It seems to me that the series bears a critical picking apart, both for the content the work itself and the apparatus around it (including the marketing campaign and the sometimes clumsy cross promotion with other DC events. Yes, I'm talking to you "Amazons Attack"), and that's the plan.

Budgetary concerns make it impossible for me to read all titles involved with "Countdown", so I'm glad Andrew seems inclined to keep discussion going on other DC titles even though his interest in "Countdown" has flagged. Please post comments, as this is meant to be a forum for commentary above the level of "Gee Golly, d'you think Jason Todd is going to turn into Red Robin?"

Later today, I'll be posting a little commentary on the problems facing "Countdown" coming out of the gates and hopefully tomorrow I'll put up a recap on the first five issues. After that, expect posts every Thursday mid-afternoon-ish.