Counting to None

I Can't Believe I Ate the Whole Thing.

2008-04-24T17:08:00.000-07:00

More than likely, no one is still reading this, as it's been effectively defunct for almost six months. I've been loyally, if somewhat miserably, reading Countdown that whole time, but to be honest, I just haven't had much to say. When I started this blog, I was coming off the high of 52, and a crucial part of that series for me was Doug Wolk's 52 Pickup blog. Returning home late from bartending on a Wednesday night, I'd crack a beer, read through the new issue and, the next morning at work, match it up with Doug's annotations. Wow, that sentence makes me sound like the nerdiest alcoholic on the planet.

There were two reasons Doug could do what he did. The first is that Doug is incredibly bright. The second is that 52 was bursting with ideas. The spinoffs from 52 were necessary because the four writers involved had packed more stuff into the book than they could possibly deal with in the bounds of the story. What's more, the story itself, centered on a handful of second (or third) string characters, developed those characters in such a way as to make them narratively and commercially viable again.

There were two reasons the writers could do what they did. The first is that they are not only four of the most talented writers in the industry, but they're all writers with the long eye. Each of those gentlemen has, on several occasions, proven that they have a gift for long form serial narrative and in most cases, for rehabilitating lackluster characters. Morrison made his career on it, but Rucka was, to me, central to pulling Batman out of a continuity rut, and Johns and Waid have done the same for Green Lantern and the Flash, respectively. This project was tailor made for these guys, or they were tailor made for it, depending on how you want to look at it. And the second reason is that DC gave them more or less free reign. Granted, there must have been some editorial mandate along the lines of "Hey, at the end we'd like a multiverse", but that doesn't exactly staple a writer's hands to his back; it's a fairly open-ended mandate, as these things go.

Contrast that with the mandate given to Paul Dini. Dini is not a bad writer, and I sincerely hope this project doesn't destroy his career, although it will surely haunt him for the rest of his days. But Dini's strengths have always been in writing short, iconic stories about iconic characters. The brilliant thing about his work on Batman: The Animated Series was his ability to make Batman seem more Batman-esque than he did in the regular comics. Dini followed this up with a series of large format one-shots with Alex Ross, who has the exact same strengths as Dini: Ross is fairly limited as a storyteller, but when it comes to making Superman (or any other hero) look as full-on godlike as possible, Ross is the go to guy. But Dini has never even attempted a long form story and has never been shackled to characters that in any way resemble human beings. Why on earth would DC editorial tap him to plot their spinal column?

But in fact, any writer would have failed at this task. Dini was given a start point and a very definite endpoint. He was in fact supposed to dovetail his story into another story by Grant Morrison, a writer who is kind of his exact opposite. Look at Dini's Detective and Morrison's Batman. Both great books, both appealing to, I'm guessing here, very different audiences. Both creating "timeless" Batman stories, in their own way: Dini by ignoring continuity in favor of concept, Morrison by making continuity the concept. I've suspected throughout Countdown that Dini was sneaking in backhanded digs against Morrison by portraying Grant's babies poorly (I mean, did he really have to make Klarion the witch boy such a asshole? And then there was that Invisibles dig in Arkham right at the outset), but who could blame him if he did?

The issue of editorial mandate brings me to my final point here. Countdown was doomed from the start; it was structured entirely from the outside, by editors who, while they may have many good qualities, are not writers. Any writer can tell you the crucial moment in working a story is when you're bent over the thing like a coroner and suddenly it sits up, politely removes the scalpel from your hand and says, "I'm sorry, but the type of story you thought you were telling? I'm not that kind of story at all. Let me tell you a little about myself." I believe this can happen within a collaboration of writers, but I don't believe it can happen as a result of an editorial mandate.

I'd like to bring Marvel into this for a minute. Marvel has an epic every couple months, and for the past two years, they've generally been okay. I mean, you can take whatever issues you want with the characterization in Civil War or the pacing of House of M, but they've been nowhere near as egregious as Countdown. All of the Marvel events come out of a similar approach. Editorial says, "We need an epic. Anyone got an epic?" and someone (usually Bendis) says, "Yeah, I've got this epic." And so the writer (usually Bendis) gets to have their epic and editorial figures out what to do in the aftermath. This used to be the model at DC as well: at the annual conferences of Batman or Superman writers, someone would present an idea, the idea would gestate among the writers and editorial would help direct the fallout. This was certainly the case with DC's most successful epic this year, the Sinestro Corps War. Which I loved. It was packed full of ideas and personality, it was clumsy and big and dumb, but the story was primary, the aftermath resulted from it. Countdown was always about aftermath. It was a pre-fabricated epic. It was like your dad planning the family vacation including a dozen required tourist stops on the way to Disneyland. At each stop, everyone ceremoniously and disinterestedly loads out of the car, stands in front of the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota and then loads back into the hot, sweaty, uncomfortable car. If you're lucky, the whole mess doesn't break down somewhere in the middle. But all anyone in the car wants is to get to Disneyland, goddammit!

Anyway, here we are at Disneyland. Grant Morrison is doing astounding superhero work right now and he's been given all the toys in the chest. The whole thing is going to be done up in sexy Chip Kidd-designed covers. That teaser image of Wonder Woman with tusks is hell of cool. Those of us who've read all of Countdown have paid a little higher admission price than everyone else and we came in a busted up Volvo that needed a new engine in Sioux City and lost its AC somewhere in the Great Plains, and its easy to look askance at those folks who just stepped off the plane and wound up in Disneyland. But the point is, we're here, the rides look awesome, and getting there isn't always half the fun.

#23- Special Guest Superman: Jack Bauer

2007-11-26T16:18:00.001-08:00

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.

#24- That's Really Super, Superman-Prime!

2007-11-26T15:08:00.001-08:00

When legal issues and publishing issues collide, it's a perfect storm of poorly executed comics!

So our black-clad Superperson is revealed to be the Annoying Little Twit Formerly Known as Superboy! But of course, we can't call him Superboy, because DC might not own the rights to the character.

To make things even better, he's showing up here in a new outfit and VISIBLY OLDER than he appears in the still on-going Sinestro Corps War, which won't finish up until December.

Now I ask you, what the hell is that all about? Why is DC so committed to sabotaging the Sinestro Corps storyline? Dan Didio is over at Newsarama asserting that pulling Kyle and Prime into Countdown before they've finished out their stories in the Lantern book is what's best for all involved. The argument seems to be that coordinating multiple storylines is hard. You don't say!

It also seems that the epilogue to the Sinestro Corps War will be published before its conclusion. How could anyone be confused?

No Rogues, no Jimmy and still no sign of Harley and Holly this issue. Maybe they got eaten by those guard dogs a couple weeks back.

Everyone's favorite copyright infringement finds himself on the apparently quite pleasant Earth-15, a planet where the sidekicks have become the heroes. And Zod has become Superman, which doesn't jive with the rest of things, but I guess it doesn't much matter, since Prime toasts Mr. and Mrs. Zod in the first couple pages.

Possessed by Desaad, Firestorm still can't figure out a way to effectively use his pretty mind-bending powers. You give a guy who's supposed to be some sort of torture genius the ability to turn anything into anything else and all he can think to do is fire poorly-aimed laser beams at Karate Kid, whose superpower is...karate? But the Atomic Knights come to the rescue, defeating Firesaad with a shiny ball of goo! One more panel would have been enough to explain what the ball of goo was all about, but instead, a significantly less fiery Desaad boomtubes back to Apokolips into the middle of a Darkseid-Mary Marvel rumble. Mary might be entirely insane, but she's still devoted to free will! Granted, sometimes free will means magically not-quite-killing-but-for-all-extents-and-purposes-killing a whole lot of people, but some New Gods just go too far. Mary toughs out some Omega Beams, zaps Darkseid with her poorly-defined powers, poses for yet another upskirt shot and escapes into, well, she escapes.

"Elsewhere", Donna and Kyle have a heart-to-heart on an earth that apparently doesn't even rate a name. Looks like if you're a Green Lantern, "stick together" is sometimes a euphemism for "make out". Hope springs eternal, Mr. Rayner.

Back to Earth-15, we get a very brief glimpse of the JLA made up of Garth, Connor and Cyborg. Oh, and Martian Manhunter, but that guy's like the J in JLA. And then they get exploded.

Even the combined power of the Bat-plane and the Invisible Jet are not enough to slow this little legal loophole! In a move that can only be described as "a slight over-reaction", Prime decides that if the people of Earth-15 can't learn to love his psychotic self, he'd simply plow through the earth's core and explode that, too. I'm no geologist, but I'm pretty sure that's not how the earth is set up. Yes, this is the one thing I'm taking issue with: I don't believe that flying through the earth would cause it to blow up, and I challenge any of you to fly through the center of the earth and prove me wrong.

So what book is this anyway? Couldn't we resolve one threat before adding another? I wasn't all that interested in Lil' Supes in Infinite Crisis or Sinestro Corps and I'm not that interested in him here. I'd be much keener on Cyborg Supes or the AntiMonitor showing up here. Hey, maybe 52 AntiMonitors! You know, someone who doesn't come off as a complete blundering idiot. Even blundering your way through the center of a planet is still blundering.

#25- Catching Up on the Countdown

2007-11-26T14:09:00.000-08:00

For starters, an apology. The combination of a busted hard drive, a death in the family and a looming book deadline moved Countdown to the back burner for quite a while.

Anyway, let's get back into it. After last issue's recap -fest, we're focused in on Karate Kid and Singular Girl as they are inexplicably accompanied by an elderly man and a small child through a post-apocalyptic wasteland. With the help of Firestorm, they hold off a couple of the Atomic Knights who've been patrolling Bludhaven since it done got blowed up. Not patrolling well, mind you, just patrolling. After a little bit of blood-specked chop-socky from KK, Firestorm remembers that he has the power to change any element into any other element, which is a handy skill to have, and the intrepid group proceeds into the bowels of Command D.

The Atomic Knights, by the way, show up in some of the post-Great Disaster stories, being all knightly and stuff. They also put Captain Atom into his current Monarch suit and we can see how well that went.

The Rogues once again escape from imminent capture through the stupidest means possible.

Over on Apokolips, it seems Jimmy Olsen's mysterious power-provider isn't the only one who cares if this little chucklehead lives or dies. Darkseid lays some Omega beams down on one of his own slavedrivers for messing with the kid. A nice gesture, but I've got to say, I just don't trust that Darkseid fellow. Something about his tendency to vaporize employees.

Mary Marvel, or Crazy McMiniskirt, gets the sales pitch for the Dark Side from Darkseid. Who can resist the thrills of "true darkness", you ask? Once again, we are confronted with the absurdity of self-aware evil. Darkseid is hoping to check one more item off his list of "Evil Things to Do Today..." But Mary looks a little wary. I mean, teaming up with the Wrath of God who happens to be inhabiting the body of the woman who trampled on your friend's brain is one thing, but...actually, I forgot where I was going with that.

Where are the Challengers? They're off in a tie-in issue. How about Holly and Harley? I'm not sure, but I'd bet whatever they're up to includes the phrase "scantily-clad".

And finally, KK, Singular Girl and the gang reach the super-secret caramel center of Command D, where the find Desaad, who is torturing an old guy! But not just any old guy, Professor Stein, who used to be the sciencey old guy portion of Firestorm. And by torturing said old guy, Desaad manages to take over the Firestorm matrix! Which I thought only had room for two people, but is currently housing three. Firestorm (or possibly just the Firestorm matrix) is not just an Elemental (which means he gets to hang around with Swamp Thing) but also contains part of the Life Equation, which is like the Anti-Life Equation only Life-ier. Despite his amazing powers, Firestorm is in the running for Most Killed DC Character. I'm pretty sure he died a couple times in Infinte Crisis and once got offed in Manhunter, which all of three people were reading anyway. You would think total control over the structure of atoms would keep you more or less intact (remember the Metamorphing Girl in Sandman?), but Firestorm and Metamorpho seem to be arguments to the contrary.

Before I sign off, let me just mention Ron Lim's art, which is wonderful, clear and makes the most of Keith Giffen's layouts. At some points it reminded me a bit of Matt Wagner's work on Mage, which is fairly high praise. A well-focused issue, which advances at least one of our stories a bit. At this point in Countdown, that's about the best we can expect.

Incidentally, I'm not picking up any of the Search for Ray Palmer specials. Salvation Run led off well, but it was Bill Willingham that got me in the door on that one, and Rucka's Crime Bible book is nice and sparse in the way Rucka's early Batman scripts were. Of course, all of this was trumped by the one-two punch of The Black Dossier and the new Scott Pilgrim. But you knew that, didn't you?

#26- Expositionaggedon

2007-11-03T17:36:00.000-07:00

You know what the Countdown team could have done to completely win back my heart? Simply titling this issue "Monitors watching monitors." That would have done it.

You know, I've had that joke in my head all weekend? How sad is that?

So starting this week, I'm following a whopping three weekly storylines: this one, Messiah Complex and the Return of Ra's A Ghul. Which puts a simultaneous strain on the patience and the pocketbook. Somehow I expected this would mean $10 a week worth of whiz-bang fun, but as I read through these three books, I realized I was following the resolution of a storyline I never really bought into with the X-Men and the surprise resurrection of a character whose superpower is resurrection. Next week will decide the fate of both storylines, but for now I'm feeling fairly yawny across the board.

But you're not here to find out about my comics purchases. You're here for non-stop Countdown to Final Crisis action! And title change means non-stop exposition!

This issue's purpose seems to be two-fold. The first is to bring new readers onto the title and get them caught up. Now some comic book companies might have done this by promoting the issue through ads. DC opted to promote this as a jump-on issue through Newsarama's weekly Countdown rundown, which, particularly during the contentious first weeks of Mike Carlin's reign on the title, is sometimes more interesting than the book it discusses. Before I post this, maybe I'll stroll around the corner and ask the fine folks at Comics for Collectors if they've seen a jump in sales. The second purpose seems to be alerting those of us who've been on board (almost typed "bored") for the last six months that we've been effectively scammed out of $77.74.

The art on this issue is the best we've seen so far. The layouts have a cramped, claustrophobic sense that effectively gives the reader the feeling of being crammed into Monitor HQ. Even the linework on characters contributes to this feeling and I really think that along with an improvement in the script, the art plays a huge part in making this issue feel taut in a way that the previous twenty-six installments don't. Tellingly, the art feels ill-fitting in the issues two interludes which occur outside of Monitor HQ and fail to evoke a feeling of open space.

Calling this issue a recap doesn't quite hit the nail. What this issue manages to do is bring together most (not all) of the stuff that should have been clear from reading Countdown and make it clear for the first time. Yes, it's highly annoying that the Monitors are once again deciding to rally behind Bearded Monitor, which they decided to do in, like, the fourth issue? And it's equally annoying that they declare war on...um...bad things. Things they dislike strongly. But at least we get some sense of what they're trying to avoid.

So here's the deal. The Source Wall(s) separate each of the 52 universes from one another, which is pretty important. Every time someone passes through one, it degrades the Source Wall a little bit, like termites in wood. If this keeps up, the Source Walls are all going to collapse, resulting in a Final Crisis, which is not to be confused with a Great Disaster. So Monarch and Bob the Monitor are bad news. I think it's still okay for Bearded Monitor to jump from HQ into whatever universe he damn well likes, but since I can't for the ever-loving life of me figure out where in this cosmology Monitor HQ, Apokolips or New Genesis are supposed to be located, that's just an assumption.

As if a Final Crisis wasn't enough, we're apparently also staring down the barrel of a Great Disaster. Karate Kid, who was hale and hearty last week, is suddenly vomiting blood. Greatly Disastrous blood. Once he's out of his containment suit, his Karate Sense starts tingling (you know, KK, that tingling feeling might just be the deadly virus) and a helpful Firestorm shows up to blast the whole gang into the offices of Command D. Firestorm's got one of those truly baffling backstories that regularly force DC to ditch its entire continuity, but the (possibly) relevant point here is that he contains one-fourth of the Life Equation, which is like the anti-Anti-Life Equation that Darkseid's so keen on. Good to know, eh? Thanks, wikipedia!

Possibly my favorite line this week is Bearded Monitor's assertion that apparently "SOMEONE considers Olsen invaluable." Certainly not readers, but someone. Jimmy, in case you haven't been reading, has developed wacky superpowers, most prominently the power to not get his dumbass self killed. What's not mentioned here is Jimmy's connection to the Source Wall, or the fact that there's a new Source Wall that contains all the dead New Gods. Jimmy and Forager dive right into Apokolips and get dropped like a box of rocks by a small army of Parademons. So much for that plan.

Oh yeah, someone's been killing the New Gods. So, along with a Final Crisis and a Great Disaster, you can add the End of the Fourth World to the mix. Which wouldn't be such a major concern, except that the Fourth World is the current DCU.

Mary Marvel's decline in mental health is mentioned, but that's about it. And perhaps the same hand is behind all of these things? Perhaps a big stony hand in a big blue glove? Perhaps the hand of the guy she's shown cowering before on the cover?

With all that bad news mapped out and the assertion that someone is certainly behind it, the Monitors, spurred by Bearded Monitor and Probably Kryptonian Monitor, decide to go to war against whoever happens to be certainly behind it. PKM makes with a sneaky little smile and a line about fear being a powerful motivator, straight out of the Sinestro Corps training manual after interrupting BM's communication with (wait for it) someone unidentified! I hope those guys know fear is also the path to the Dark Side, but seeing how versed everyone in Countdown is with films of the 1980s, I'm sure they do.

Next up, it's time for some interludes! The first is a reveal that really could have waited til next week. I mean, come on, give us a minute to sweat it out, why don't you? Yep, Jason Todd's switching of teams was a clever ruse, coordinated with the omniscient and totally useless Bob the Monitor so that the Challengers could teleport to somewhere still not very far away. The important thing about this interlude is that it gave the writers a chance to drop in this week's offensive adolescent put-down. Since Jason is so aggressively heterosexual, there's no use impugning his manliness, so Donna hits him with her "Re-Todd" zinger, receiving a high five from Kyle for her effort. Again, folks, this is not okay. How can we make this any clearer? Using sexual orientation or mental disability as insults is not okay. Words like "gay" or "retarded" should not be used as pejoratives outside a fucking elementary school. Editors and writers at DC, please grow up and stop putting embarassing crap like this in your comics.

I really am looking forward to issues where I don't have to include little tirades like that in my reviews. I can't express enough how much I'm looking forward to that.

The second interlude on Earth-15 opens up what looks like a whole new can of worms. A character who looks a whole lot like the post-resurrection Superman flies off into space with Earth-15's Lex Luthor, who looks like not such a bad guy. I mean, anyone whose willing to throw a thumbs-up at a camera can't be pure evil, can they? We know Zod is wearing the ol' blue and reds on Earth-15 and that the black suit was for maximum absorption of yellow sunlight. Oh, and we know that Black Suited Supes was getting chummy with Cyborg Supes and Kingdom Come Supes in the second teaser image. That, my friends, is about all we know. To clear up a minor point, my understanding of current continuity is that the S-symbol stands for Kryptonianism in general and not just the House of El, so your guess on this new guy's story is as good as mine.

Holly, Piper and Trickster are noticeably absent from BM's rallying speech, indicating that neither he, nor the editors have any idea how their storylines tie in. Mike Carlin has intimated that only two out of the three are going to be around by next month. Anyone want to place a bet?

I know I read the first installment of "Thy Kingdom Come" over in JSA, and I know it's probably of crucial importance to Countdown, since it contains not one but two universe-hoppers, Supes and Starman, who is one of my favorite folks in the DCU at the moment. But I can't for the life of me remember what happened. I'll give it a re-read and post on it if it seems relevant. The Death of the New Gods seems to be moving at Starlin speed, which is slow but steady (catch the "steady" part there, Countdowners?), with Mr. Miracle donning darker colors and heading for Apokolips with Superman and Orion, and Takion finding a new Source Wall that looks more like the devil's rec room. Instead of becoming one with the Source, the souls of the recently deceased New Gods are getting stuffed and mounted, which will probably lead to some sort of Great Crisis or Final Disaster.

Unfortunately, I didn't manage to get my hands on the first issue of Crime Bible, but I've got a copy coming soon. Like a lot of people, this was the 52 spin-off I was waiting for. Even if DC can't summon up the intestinal fortitude to launch a Batwoman title, cause lesbianism is clearly such a blow to sales, at least Montoya's back in rotation.

Not a bad little issue, except for Donna's awful little comment. I feel like the story is on more solid ground than it has been, and there were less WTF moments here than previously. Maybe DC truly has circled the wagons?

#27- The Countdown to the Countdown to Final Crisis is Over!

2007-10-29T11:02:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-23T10:53:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-13T10:50:00.000-07:00

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!

2007-10-05T14:25:00.000-07:00

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.

#31- Everybody Hates a Tourist

2007-09-29T10:22:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the lateness of this post. I picked this book up last Wednesday and threw it in my bag and it kind of migrated to the bottom of standard bag detritus. Funny how that works, huh?

All right, let's get to it. First off, we've got the Challengers landed on Earth-3, where evil always triumphs! I'm not about to go dusting off my philosphy degree, but don't you think that in a world where evil always triumphs, they'd stop calling it evil? Which also makes the juxtaposition of "Crime" and "Society" a little tough to swallow. Naturally, the presence of this group of B-listers warrants the appearance of the whole Crime Society in their teeming...well, there's about a dozen. You've got your Superwoman, your Owlman (who miraculous reappears after being well-chucked away by Donna), Ultraman, Power Ring, and...oh, seriously, who cares? These are clearly not the characters we've seen in Morrison and Buseik's Crime Syndicate storylines, and since the Challengers are just on a sightseeing tour anyway (picking up a smiley little souvenir), we'll more than likely not see them again, except as foot soldiers in Monarch's little army.

This, by the way, is the first mention of Monitor forming in army here in Countdown proper. Since I've stated a number of times how desperately this series needs an antagonist, let me politely golf-clap for this Monarch appearance. But why would Monarch be set against the Challengers, who are up against the Monitors? Isn't the enemy of my enemy my friend?

Art issues on Earth-3. First of all, a reverse Earth lends itself to all sorts of neat little visual gags. None of which show up here. Hell, even the Daily Planet is still called the Daily Planet. Isn't the whole point of tourism to see new and exciting places? It looks the Challengers are going to show up on identical blocks of downtown Metropolis, mysteriously eliciting the immediate appearance of all that universe's superheroes/villians and then checking out. Thrill-a-minute! Secondly, what's supposed to be a speed effect at the top of page five somehow manages to drag Johnny Quick's entrance line out to a full ten seconds.

Back in Monitor camp, the Monitors are still mad. Really mad. In case you didn't get that. But now they're determined to stop Bob and the gang (who they couldn't find a couple weeks ago, but have a pretty good fix on at the end of this issue) by any means necessary. For instance, doing something. Too bad they killed off all those Forerunners they'd been breedin' up. Yep, a big old warrior race would probably come in pretty handy right about now.

In other news, Holly Robinson has apparently been on the worst sting operation since OJ (sorry if that joke was a little too current. At least, like the cultural references in Countdown, it wasn't all that funny). Even though she wouldn't call Selina a couple weeks ago, Holly decides its a good idea to send a letter through the Amazonian post office about how she's infiltrated the Amazons. We can presume it's addressed to "Catwoman". Next time, write by WASTE. The government will open it if you use the other. The dolphins will be mad.

Mr. Mxyzptlyk shows up for reasons which passeth understanding and is snatched out of the fifth dimension. Hell of a band, "Age of Aquarius" is one of my favorite songs. Do I even want to ask whether this is the fifth dimension of Earth-1 or whether there's only one fifth dimension for the entire multiverse or AAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGHHHH! My head!

The newly mohawked Eclipso finally gets to chat up Mary Marvel, informing her of pretty much nothing. Even if we assume Mary Marvel is stupid enough to team up with the woman who killed her friend, Sue, the art here is terrible. Particularly problematic is MM's petrification of the Turkish guards. We fet a "fwash" then a "pok", but at no point do we even see these guys have been turned to stone. At least a panel missing, sloppy work.

Over in Karate Kid's neck of the woods, KK has apparently aged into Karate Middle-Aged Dude (KMAD). My favorite line of the week is Singular Girl's "Why would the mysterious Mr. Orr who we know nothing about possibly lie to us?" Gee whiz, KK, if you can't trust shadowy biotech geniuses with questionable mustaches and Darkseid on speed dial, who can you trust? For extra laziness, Buddy Blank apparently lives in "The Burbs". Dear DC Editorial: you operate a fictional universe with a whole list of fictional cities, each of which (with the exception of Opal City) presumably has suburbs. Take two seconds and pick one. Buddy, whose grandkid has a certain resemblence to Kamandi, don't you think, is going to take KK and Singular Girl off to see Brother Eye, who I guess is not evil anymore and will probably tell them to go see someone else.

Runner up for best line of the issue? "No one likes a dated pop culture reference." Here's the thing, you can only make fun of how bad a series used to be once it's gotten better. Jimmy asks the $64,000 question, "What's happening to me?" and gets, unsurprisingly, no answers.

Well, you know next issue, Tony Bedard promised things were going to get all kinds of crazy. So this ish is probaby just a set up. You know. For the craziness.

#32- The Return of the Surprise Ending that Surprised No One

2007-09-24T11:52:00.000-07:00

Holy crap, you mean Eclipso has been manipulating Mary Marvel all this time? It's like some kind of Seduction of the Innocent!

Short, late entry on this one, as not a whole lot happens. Mary and Eclipso finally meet up. The Challengers finally end up in one of the few iterations of the multiverse I'm some what familar with: the crime-ridden Earth-3. Jimmy ends up in the hands of the Cadmus project and the Rogues once again narrowly escape from certain homosexual tension.

A note on the strip-club scene. First off, Piper's exit line of "Hey didja seem all them strippers?" is pretty ridiculous, especially since only one dancer ever makes it into the shot. In fact, the club is almost entirely full of scantily-clad ladies. Don't you imagine if you're Big Barda you might relish a chance to leave that helmet at home for a night? The whole thing makes Barbara and Lois look a little dowdy by comparison. Or, I dunno, sane?

The secret identity thing is in question again here. How many party attendees know Barbara Gordon is Oracle? What's Lois doing there anyway? These issues could be resolved in all of two panels, but Countdown has never had any interest in checking itself for loose ends and frayed edges.

I didn't pick up a copy of the Green Arrow/Black Canary wedding, so there's yet another blank spot in the DCU for me. Does Ollie get offed (again)? I did just see a solicit for GA/BC with Connor on the cover, which makes me a little concerned for ol' Curly Beard. (Update: Yup, Ollie's dead. Again.)

The insta-tension between Kyle and Jason seems a little off as well. Kyle in particular should perhaps have a little more perspective after a couple months of being possessed by the embodiment of fear. I know my time possessed by the embodiment of fear was followed by a period of zen-like calm, rather than adolescent jealousy. But that's just me.

You know what the best thing is about Project Cadmus? Its dark counterpart is called the Evil Factory. A place that manufactures Evil. A whole industry of evil, Evil Wholesalers with Evil Warehouses and Evil Invoices. I know we all love Jack Kirby, but that one just feels phoned in. Cadmus has been disbanded more times than...well, actually I can't think of a DCU team that hasn't gone through a bunch of dramatic disbandings, so let's just say it's been disbanded more often than a generic DCU team. Last time out, they were controlled by the Evil Factory, which was controlled by the Agenda, which was controlled by Lex Luthor's wife. Got that? I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that this time, they're tied to Darkseid. I'm assuming everything's tied to Darkseid, down to the pomegranate margaritas. Dubbilex was one of those characters that made the Superman books all but unreadable for me in the 90s, and I wasn't real psyched to see him back. My fears regarding the return of a crew-cut, flag waving Guardian remain with me. Serling asks a good question of Jimmy, who gives a fairly bland answer, but it hardly forgives the time Countdown wasted with the Mr. Action storyline. Come to think of it, why the hell was Jimmy trying to join the Titans or the JLA before he knew anything about his powers? His current path of inquiry seems much more natural and rational, but then there were pages to fill before Kyle Rayner could show up months before the end of his current arc. A delicate balance of timing.

Another note, motiveless mummies make horribly uninteresting antagonists. And this series could use some antagonism. The reason any minor appearance by Darkseid (or even Eclipso) seems like such a shot in the arm for this series is the sense that they're the only characters on the board with any type of plan. All of our heroes are bopping from point to point aimlessly and the only hope of redemption is the idea that someone (Dini, Darkseid, Didio) has some idea of what's going on.

The art is passable, with no glaring inconsistencies. Bedard mercifully drops the transitional phrases that marked the last couple issues, but unfortunately the issue as a whole comes off as comic relief, even though there's nothing to be relieved from just yet.

Bedard has said that by issue 30, things are really going to blow up. Thing is, Countdown has this amazing ability to constantly give the impression of something about to happen. One major plot development could tip the whole mess towards interesting. For now, reminding myself that this is not even the halfway point should be in some way encouraging, but the thought of reading 31 more issues feels like when you're at the laundromat and realize how many more times you'll have to do laundry before you die. This week's release of the third 52 trade didn't help. It's hurtful how much Countdown suffers in comparison.

#33- The Surprise Ending That Surprised No One

2007-09-13T09:49:00.000-07:00

I've been patient. Lord knows I've been patient. But this was absolutely the worst, most useless issue of Countdown to date.

Hey guess what? Kyle Rayner joins the Challengers. Which might seem odd seeing as he's poised to eat Hal Jordan's family in this week's issue of Green Lantern, but seems less odd seeing he did so in the first five pages of last week's All New Atom. Oh, and we've been told since the beginning of Countdown he'd be joining up. What could possibly happen next? Mary Marvel possessed by Eclipso? Jason Todd becoming Red Robin? Judging from the look of shock on the cover images of Donna and Bob, they haven't been reading DC solicits.

And the implication that Kyle showing up with disrupt the delicate chemistry between Donna and Jason? Those two have about as much chemistry as Miss Hoffman, my 10th grade chemistry teacher. That lady was like the Anti-Mr. Wizard.

Seriously, there is no reason to read this issue. If you are following Countdown, it is entirely possible to go from last week's All New Atom to this week's Countdown Presents: The Search for Ray Palmer: Wildstorm (or, if you will "Colon: Blow!") without missing a beat.

You would miss characters behaving inexplicably, however. Like Wally's "I trust you enough to save you from one lethal device but not two" treatment of the Rogues. Or Klarion "I'm a Witchboy!" the Witchboy's vase-shattering frame-up of Mary "I'm Mary Marvel" Marvel. You'd also miss out on the return of yet another shadowy shadowy organization within the DCU, as the Cadmus Project, whose scientific developments have included some of the worst Superman stories ever, returns. Oh, and some pretty terrible art. You'd miss that, too.

Am I the only one who suspects that a lot of Countdown is set up purely to crap in Grant Morrison's sandbox? Countdown has manhandled (you'll forgive the expression) Morrison's revamps of Zatanna, Klarion and the Joker, not to mention entirely dismissing his New Gods reboot. The first issue of "Colon: Blow!" presents an Authority team that's clearly not the same group Morrison set up in his two issues of the book (remember those? Those were pretty. When was that, 2005?). And with Cadmus back, can an All-New, All-Craptacular version of the Newsboy Legion be far behind? Maybe even a new Guardian who's a miliaristic caucasian!

Other issues have left me frustrated, this one left me downright angry. And in case you're wondering, the first issue of "Colon: Blow!" was pretty useless as well. Given the abyssmal state of the Wildstorm universe (has DC left other placeholders open in their 52 universes for publishers they might acquire later?), this might not be the ideal time to sound the trumpets about it. From what I can tell, the only Wildstorm team with a regularly published book, Stormwatch, is the only team absent from this issue. Someone clearly needs to smack Ron Marz around with the ol' cross-marketing stick.

#34- They Blinded Me with Bad Science

2007-09-10T13:57:00.001-07:00

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

Off Topic: Vertigo's Next Generation, Part One

2007-09-06T10:37:00.000-07:00

Since glomming dfown Doug Wolk's survey course in graphic novelty, Reading Comics, last week, I've been itching to write about something non-Countdown and non-superhero. Wolk's big on the single auteur theory (excepting Moore and Morrison, of course) which means a lot of the output of Vertigo comics falls outside his scope. Which is a shame.

Vertigo is at an interesting point right now, with current flagship titles like Y: The Last Man and 100 Bullets (and arguably, Fables, which seems set to conclude its major storylines within the next year) wrapping up, the everpresent Hellblazer chugging along under a steady stream of excellent creative teams and a handful of newbies finding their feet. Testament, Douglas Rushkoff's ambitious but aimless mapping of Old-Testament-as-open-source onto late global economics might be Fred Jameson's wet dream but failed to find an audience. Azzarello's Loveless left readers stranded in a deftly-worded historical morass after offing its protagonist. Which leaves The Exterminators, DMZ and American Virgin.

Despite a title that sounds like a low circulation periodical (which, in a way, it is), American Virgin might seem the horse to bet on, based on the experienced creative team and the bold opening statement of its author that AV would do for sexuality what Preacher did for gross-out humor and what Hellblazer did for demonology. Steven Seagle has been writing strong, sometimes inspired stories since the mid 80s. His Eisner nominated It's a Bird...is one of my favorite Superman stories, a mature artist reflecting on the deployment and relevance of a not always mature cultural icon. The premise: 21 year old Adam Chamberlain is the leader and figurehead of a nationwide youth celibacy movement with ties to a shady televagelist family (echoes of Manchurian Candidate), whose faith is deeply shaken by the murder of his girlfriend, the woman for whom God had told him to save himself (echoes of Yorrick's quest for Beth in Y: The Last Man). The book so far has followed Adam and his much more liberal stepsister as they globehop about for various reasons, encountering different cultural attitudes towards sex and sexuality.

But a year in (I've been keeping up in trades rather than floppies), AV seems to be suffering from a perpetual state of tourism. Luckily our visual tour guide (not the cliched mercenary character who leads Adam about) is Becky Cloonan, who for months grounded Brian Wood's Demo with her strong sense of character and even stronger sense of setting (Cloonan's issues are broken up occassionally by the work of fellow B. Wood collaborator Ryan Kelly, whose less manga-influenced style nevertheless shares many of Cloonan's strengths). While her page compositions are fairly conventional and her character designs just make it under the wire of "huge-eyed Japanocuteness", her eye for architecture and environment are detailed and exact, avoiding letting AV's characters languish in a generic pastiche of "3rd World" signifiers.

The problem with the tourist feel of the book is that the brief visits to other culture's sexual mores reinforces how much we're only tourists in Adam's committment to celibacy. It's a problem shared, to a degree, with pop culture's other current effort to put the fun (or at least the mental) back in fundamentalism: HBO's Big Love. But Big Love manages to dodge the faith bullet largely by centering on the outgrowth of that faith, polygamy, as a pragmatic concern. Characters spend minimal time telling us how God showed them the way (although there is a bit of that), and instead show the consequences of that decision, with early storylines focusing on the economics and logistics of multiple marriage. AV's Adam repeatedly tells the audience (both the readers and any character that opts to listen to him for two consecutive seconds) that celibacy is hard but God told him to do it. Which is persuasive if you happen to be a devout Christian from the get-go, but makes for pretty empty motivation if you're a skeptic. Seagle wants the book to be sex positive and for Adam's celibacy to be justified at the same time. Essentially, he wants to have his sex and Jesus too. But his failure to explore or explain Adam's decision (other than some highly subjective dream/vision sequences), his addressing of faith not as faith but as a subject/object of evangelism (Adam's book and quest, his late fiance's missionary work and his family's network) leave the reader feeling adrift; a tourist in a foriegn hotel room, channel-surfing past the religious station.

Later today or tomorrow, I'll get back to Countdown stuff, but at some point soon, I want to talk about Brian Wood's DMZ, in which tourism quite literally explodes and The Exterminators, which is strictly for the locals.

#35- Cyndi Lauper Spins in Her Cultural Grave

2007-08-30T12:15:00.000-07:00

Oh goodness did this cover make me cringe. Not because of its execution, J.G. Jones does a fine job, but because it suggests that Countdown might be deciding to focus on its consistently poor portrayal of women. For the record, I'm guessing the lady to Donna's left is Singular Girl and Random Amazon is Holly (even though she's sporting a different helmet), but I could be wrong.

With a title constitutiing yet another outdated pop reference, Countdown makes the argument that when girls wanna have fun, they beat the ever-lovin' crap out of one another. Two and a half girl-on-girl fights in one issue. I'm fairly certain that's not what Cyndi meant.

Last issue's mystery claw is revealed as Queen Belthera, a sorceress queen with a bug fetish. Her Gregor Samsa job on Ryan Choi is plausible, but how she manages to enthrall "one of the most powerful sentients in all the multiverse" is unclear. In fact, for all their unlimited power, the Monitors in general (and Bob in particular) are kind of unimpressive. Has there every been a case of a Monitor clearly achieving his/her goals? The original Monitor got offed pretty easily and other than doing in Duella Dent, the combined forces of 52 Monitors have managed amazing feats of obvious plot exposition and not much else.

Funny we've had back to back issues featuring female characters with the power to enthrall. Little panicked regarding the ol' feminine wiles, Countdowners? I've been trying to think of a male counterpart to this, but all I can come up with is Bendis' supercreepy use of the Purple Man in "Alias" but in the DCU, enthralling seems to be a uniquely female ability.

It's funny that it took me this long to realize the significance of the "Jimmy Olsen Must Die" posters, but it wasn't til he asked the JLA to shove him in an airlock that it settled in. The multiverse apparently doesn't care much about Jimmy getting hurt, but will bend itself all out of shape to keep him from getting killed. The sparing use of Jimmy remains one of the better through-lines in Countdown and "It's like I got sunburned" is possibly the best line in Countdown so far.

The mysterious Elias Orr is revealed to be in the employ of the equally mysterious Checkmate, which is connected mysteriously to the Suicide Squad. Could this mean the Rogues' and KK's plots are linked? I'll have to read a couple more Wikipedia entries before I can say for sure, but it looks like Amanda Waller might be pulling strings on both plot threads.

I suspect it's so, but it'll be a shame if this issue marks Zatanna's exit from Countdown. Zee makes the highly irresponsible (which is to say out of character) decision to loose Mary onto the unsuspecting outer world, although she's at least temporarily de-powered. I'm no Eclipso scholar, but doesn't the black diamond have to be in contact or at least proximity to a person to exert its influence? Right now, Mary's under so many influences, I can't keep them straight.

Finally, we've got the mishmash of grecoromanism that is the Holly/Harley installment. Leaving aside the fact that the Greeks didn't engage in gladitorial combat of this kind, the most important development in this storyline takes place (surprise!) outside of Countdown. For those of you (including me) not following Amazons Attack, it turns out Athena has actually been Granny Goodness all this time. Of course, no mention of that here, just thought you guys should know.

Also from the department of "thought you should know", the origin of Forerunner or of the Forerunners or some such, was revealed in the "I Can't Believe It's $4!" Spectacular of "Countdown to Adventure". If you are a fan of Grant Morrison's run on Animal Man or Buddy's portrayal in 52, do not buy this comic. If you are a Countdown completist, do not buy this comic. I'll run it down for you: Adam Strange is replaced as Rann's hero by a borderline psychotic movie star, while Buddy returns to stunt doubling and hires Starfire as his nanny. Wackiness will, no doubt, ensue. As for Forerunner(s), it seems that on Earth 48, Earth was used as a WarWorld (nope, not that WarWorld) where other planets hashed out their differences gladiator-style. The losers got dead and the champs got...well, they got stranded. All of which lead to a whole lot of interbreeding among the strongest and meanest representatives from a bunch of planets, producing (ta-dah!) the Forerunners. The whole project was engineered by the Monitors, who have since wiped out all of the Forerunners except...um, Forerunner...using shadow demons and some lady who has the power to (wait for it) enthrall! Once again, the "How powerful are these weak-ass Monitors anyway?" question comes up, as Forerunner insists that a handful of Monitors could never take out a pack of Forerunners. And all of this comes out in a tender, getting to know you moment between Forerunner and Monarch.

The funny thing about the recurring theme of characters being controlled by others is how nicely it parellels the set up of this series. 52 was an assemblage of character driven arcs about self-discovery, but Countdown is precisely the opposite: a bric-a-brac of non-characters slotted into story-driven arcs, where the expected endpoint of discovery is not personal but (multi)universal. It's no wonder, then, that half our characters have been enthralled (Mary, Bob, Trickster, KK), literally manipulated by another, at some point and all of our characters have been represented as pieces on a chessboard, which is not exactly a metaphor for individual agency. Dini, Carlin and Didio might be unconsciouly showing their hands by portraying at a plot level exactly what's going on at an editorial level: the manipulation of characters by forces outside...in the dread dimension of the DC Editorial Offices.

#36- The Problem With Suspense

2007-08-23T14:02:00.000-07:00

Once again this week, we have a perfectly serviceable issue that accomplishes pretty much nothing and leaves us with nearly every member of the cast in moral peril.

Come to think of it, Countdown has been chock full o'mortal peril, but this issue is especially overflowing with it.

But before we get to the subject of peril, let's address the gaping hole between this issue and the last. #37 ended with the most significant development we've seen in Countdown to date: Jimmy's discovery that Clark is Superman. This is a major story beat that's been subsequently dropped from this issue. I was willing to go along with the idea that Jimmy suddenly "knew" Clark's secret, but the writers have made a huge jump from there to Jimmy's JLA induction. It's implausible enough that Jimmy would come off his Titans rejection thinking he was JLA material, but if the writers are asking us to believe he essentially blackmailed his pal Supes into getting him a membership card, and that Supes went along with it, some amount of convincing is needed. One more ball dropped by Countdown, not that anyone's still keeping score.

This brings us pretty directly back to the idea of the cliffhanger as deployed in the book. I hate to keep comparing the structure of Countdown to 52, but the latter managed to exist almost entirely without cliffhangers due to its real-time structure. Only a handful of issues resorted to the 24 trick of having a momentous event occur at the perfect moment in time to carry over into the next issue (thinking here of Lex's switching off his newly minted metas). Countdown, on the other hand, has been an almost endless string of cliffhangers that seem based on the Batman TV series model. Will the Rogues escape the clutches of [whoever the hell has captured the Rogues this week]? Will Black Adam maul Mary Marvel? Will Forerunner disembowel Donna? Tune in next week to find out!

Granted, leaving a character in mortal peril is a standard device of serialized storytelling. But it's not the only device available and it's kind of the cheapest one out there. Last issue's cliffhanger, for example, hinged on the reader caring about the emotional lives of Jimmy and Superman/Clark. It required a knowledge of their prior relationship and a vested interest in whether or not their friendship could survive this revelation. The kick off to the series demonstrated another kind of hook: a pure narrative hook, the introduction of some sort of mystery. Something like this can be character driven, but can also just be an intriguing story idea. Countdown has tried this a couple times, ending issues with a question posed: What happens when A GOD DIES? What happens when AMAZONS ATTACK? Of course, they failed to follow up on either of these questions, but I'm just saying, it's a way to create suspense, as long as the reader is interested in the answers to the questions posed.

Cutting a story the moment before a character is stabbed/punched/shot/dismembered requires none of this. Given a situation where someone is about to be grievously injured, regardless of the person, a reader is going to feel some compulsion to find out what happens. In fact, this device works equally well for characters the reader cares nothing about or openly dislikes. Take the example of 24's "Kim is trapped by a cougar" cliffhanger (let your memory drift back, dear reader). A character the writers had rendered as unbearably idiotic, to the point most viewers could do little but wince every time she spoke, found herself in a completely ridiculous predicament that was in no way germaine to the plot. In the unlikely event the viewer still cared about the character, they'd be forced to return the next week to see if she escaped mortal peril. In the more likely case that the viewer kind of wanted to see Kim get eaten by a cougar, they'd still need to tune in the following week.

This kind of suspense is cheap and easy, and used far too often in Countdown at this point. What makes it even worse is that the cliffhangers' resolutions more often than not fall into the gutter between issues. 52 handled this smoothly, partly because the passage of time was so transparent and the issue ending cliffhangers less dire. We leave Ralph at a crisis moment and return to him weeks later, with an explanation of the intervening time. With its muddled and broken sense of narrative time, Countdown attempts to do the same thing with emotional cliffhangers and fails (Jimmy's story this week, for example), but more amazingly, fails to do this with the mortal peril-style cliffhanger as well. Next issue should pick up with one of two things, followed immediately by the other:

1. The MM/Zatanna throwdown
2. The KK/Equus throwdown

These two storylines need to pick up in the next moment to generate or fulfill any sort of suspense, while the predicament of the Rogues and the Challengers can wait a couple beats. But so far, Countdown's track record doesn't really indicate this is going to be the case. I'm betting with at least one of these storylines, the narrative is going to jump the next moment and drop us into an already resolved situation with little explanation of how we got there.

Are there positives here? Yes. There is a talking moose! It feels as if MM's storyline has finally hit the break point it's been creeping up on since she got Black Adam'd. KK and singular Girl actually find the object of their quest, unlike some folks I might mention. The Challengers fall into the clutches of an evil...hand. Any guesses on the prickly hand in question? Maybe it's just because Equus is here, but I'm reminded very vaguely of Jim Lee's version of Zod in the "For Tomorrow" storyline. Could we stress, as an aside, how much both the magic storylines would benefit from John Constantine's presence in the DCU? I understand editorial's position on this, I'm just saying. In and of itself, the one-page Jimmy appearance plays out well. The story beat with the Rogues moves well, even if Ivy's motivation for capturing Trickster and Piper has inexplicably changed since last issue. Piper being saved from Ivy's influence by his power of homosexuality could have been handled with a little more subtlety and I'm not sure it's been demonstrated that Ivy's pheremone tricks work only on those who'd be sexually into her to begin with. I was relieved the writers didn't feel the need to drop an even more blatant "Hey, this guy's gay" comment into Trickster's mouth here. Thank god for small favors.

On the Deathstroke origin: how many evil kids does this cat have anyway? Seems like a lot of action for a prematurely gray pirate assassin.

Absolute last word: the DC nation page should either be filled or dropped. Even though Dan Didio has been absent from the page for months, at least we've gotten a next issue teaser image. If Mike Carlin is going to complain there's no space for editorial to step in with some "See Also..." notes, maybe he should think about this little spot?

Oh, and I know this is a little late in coming, but for those of you not reading every book in the DCU, here's the casualty list on the New Gods:

1. Lightray (in Countdown)
2. Sleeze (in Countdown)
3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Deep Six (in Countdown)
9. Speed Queen (in Outsiders: Five of a Kind)
10. Grayven (in Outsiders: Five of a Kind)
11. Knockout (in Birds of Prey)

So there you go.

#37- Building a Mystery?

2007-08-18T09:48:00.000-07:00

Holy Crap! Two stories in Countdown kind of sort almost maybe brushed up against one another!

KK's mystery virus may be an omen of the Great Disaster, according to Singular Girl. Of course, watching characters fight a virus is about as exciting as watching hackerbattles, unless the virus fighters happen to be virus-sized. Like as in maybe Atom-ic?

I'm really trying to give this stuff the benefit of the doubt, folks. Really trying.

I missed the issue where Babs became a doctor (she became a lawyer during the fairly intolerable "Bruce Wayne: Murderer?" storyline, courtesy of Harvard's rarely publicized Correspondence School of Law, but the idea of Correspondence Medical School gives me a rash) but she certainly has a lot of medical type gadgets, accompanied by a shelf full of manilla folders. I would have thought Babs would have a more complex filing system. Like maybe some cabinets.

The Lost Legionairres are sent off in search of Elias Orr, who's made minor appearances in some of Brian Azarrello's Superman work as a shadowy shadowy presence. As far as I can find, no one other than Az has worked the character into a story. Essentially, he created the supervillian Pilate out of the cancer-ridden Father Leone and makes some sort of offer to the Toyman, representing himself as Chechnyan. Clever me thought Elias Orr was an anagram of "Solaris" and then actually checked that. Turns out it's an anagram for "Solar Ire", which means, well, nothing at all. Leaves one wondering why Babs wouldn't send KK to check in with the folks at St. Camillus before pawning him off on an evil scientist who may not even exist.

Mary Marvel has apparently developed both the ability to regenerate her costume and to enlarge her eyes to the size of dinner plates. Zatanna gives her the tour her fairly large estate which conceals an even larger estate! Zee makes the mistake of showing Mary the two paths to power: laborious, disciplined study or stealing stuff from a glass case. Not that Mary would find "enough magical energy in that case alone to do pretty much anything you could imagine" tempting.

A gripe here: if this had been another weekly comic, a setting like Zatanna's house would be loaded to the gills with references to other magical aspects of the DCU. The book titles, the objects in the case, the posters on the walls, the physical appearances of the servants; everything would have constituted a little in-joke, a tiny reward for readers who were paying attention. Even something as blatant as a butler who looked like Oliver Queen. Instead Zee has her own performance posters on the walls, the book spines are unlabeled, and the objects in the case are a vague collection of pan-ethnic ephemera. The magic aspect of the DCU opens itself up to so much cross-referencing and just plain fun, it's a shame to see this bit done so dryly.

Moving on.

There's a little more play in this week's Challengers installment, as the kids run into a collection of wizards who are bailing due to the looming Great Disaster. Hey, someone else was worried about a Great Disaster just a couple pages ago! The Challengers are about to be attacked by clicking bug-like things for no apparent reason. No luck finding references on Queen Belthera, by the way. Again, it would have been nice to see one recognizable DCU magic-user in this flock, but no such luck.

Piper and Trickster get captured again. For no good reason, again. Which will probably have no consequences again. Ivy's behavior is totally inexplicable and without motive, as we've never seen her acting murderously protective of fruit in the past. Granted, she's never been the most consistent character, but this is just bizarre.

This week's installment of the Athenian women's shelter amounts to panty shots and girl on girl action. I guess since Mary Marvel's just walking around, this was the only plausible way to work this in. You've got to admire that kind of committment to an aesthetic mistake.

And finally we have what might be the first major event in Countdown so far: Jimmy's out-of-the-blue revelation that Clark Kent is Superman. Thus is the most obvious secret identity in the world revealed! But to stress the fact Jimmy has the investigative prowess of a tossed salad, he doesn't so much deduce Clark's secret as he is hit by this knowledge from elsewhere. Way to go, James!

And way to go Action Comics for totally blowing this issue's big reveal! I thought only in-house ads and solicits were allowed that kind of spoilering. That aside, this is the strongest end of an issue we've seen so far, which almost assures that it won't be touched on next issue.

#38- Hackers and the Creature from the Black Lagoon

2007-08-12T09:48:00.000-07:00

Six out of 22 pages dedicated to a conflict between two characters with no real tie-in to "Countdown". Not so keen, and once again Countdown gives us a repeat ending: last week we closed out with KK poised to ask Oracle for help and thie week we close out with...KK poised to ask Oracle for help.

According to solicits, the Oracle vs. Calculator storyline will pay off in "Birds of Prey" in October. In case you're interested.

I vaguely remember the Deep Six from Peter David's run on Aquaman. Their appearance involved a spawning chamber and an explanation of how the characters managed to constantly resurrect themselves. Through spawning. But this runs up against the problem with the death of the new gods: almost all of these characters have already died. Multiple times. Which takes away a little of the impact of their deaths here. That and the fact they haven't appeared in a comic since I was in high school. The Monitors make reference to the New God death count hitting double digits, anyone know who the tenth is? I've got Lightray, Sleeze and the Deep Six. I feel as if there's one I'm forgetting, but not two. Any help?

The blinding at the hands of Mary Marvel was a little rough, however. At this point, Mary's lived through a couple lightning strikes and what looks a lot like an Omega beam. I like that Mary's moving magic around a bit, which should either set her up to accept a couple pointers from Zatanna or move even furher towards the Dark Side of the Force. Yet another ominous shot of Eclipso gives a little hint as to which it might be.

By the way, if the folks on Countdown want to see how to do an ominous villian shot, they should scope out last week's Superb...err, Prime appearance in Green Lantern. I know it's been said other places, but right now the Sinestro War storyline looks more interesting and potentially world altering than anything in Countdown.

There's something great about the idea that Trickster carries around a Trickster puppet in his coat. Maybe it's just that I'm waiting for the second season of the Muppet Show to show up from Amazon and have puppetry on the brain. Next month's cover is giving me the impression that the entire Rogue storyline might amount to a repetition of "They get caught, they escape in wacky fashion." In the hands of certain writers, this might work. Right here it's getting stale.

Jimmy's attempt to join the Titans was pretty well done and demonstrated the relative silliness of his superpowers. I'm actually glad the open mocking implied by the cover never actually came about and the confrontation with Tim Drake brought home what a well-developed and sympathetic character Tim Drake has become over the past couple years. I'd like to see someone do an Elseworlds-type story (although I guess Elseworlds no longer exist) that posits Tim as Batman. Either that or an in-continuity story of Tim finding a calling outside the cape-and-cowl set. It's just nice to be reminded that Tim is something more than a Dick Grayson clone.

And Darkseid's chessboard is taking on a little more importance as the big D makes his bid for Multiversal Dynasty. Good luck with that!

Overall, not a lot of progress in this issue, with antagonists slowly coming out of the shadows. Allow me to again recommend the Sinestro Corps War storyline for an all-stops-pulled epic, while Countdown continues the slow build.

First Quarter Rundown

2007-08-07T15:10:00.000-07:00

Since the oppressive heat in my apartment is making it impossible to finish the chapter I'm supposed to be working on, it seems like the perfect time to do a first quarter breakdown of "Countdown" so far. We're thirteen issues in now, so there should be an opportunity to start making overall assessments. Unless you're a member of the DC editorial and writing staffs, who seem to believe no such assessments can be made until the very end.

Let's start out with time of possession. The complete lack of crossover between storylines makes this an easy enough assessment. With pages of comics in print, raw scores are as follows:

Jimmy Olsen: 60 pgs.
The Challengers: 54 pgs.
The Rogues: 49 pgs.
Mary Marvel: 41 pgs.
Karate Kid: 21 pgs.
Forerunner: 21 pgs.
Holly Robinson: 19 pgs.
Darkseid: 10 pgs.

As far as narrative yardage, let's start with

Darkseid: So far we know that Darkseid has both an army and a chessboard. He may be manipulating certain events on earth, as the series starts off with him placing Duella Dent in proximity to Jason Todd, but there's been no further evidence of his involvement. We know that there's currently an opportunity to destroy him. Oh, and according to a two page spread, he's apparently one of the "New Gods". Huh, you don't say.

Holly Robinson: Like most of our characters, Holly's on the run. For the moment, she's serving as the voice of reason, or at least the voice of derisive sarcasm in the Athena Women's Shelter, which is either in Gotham or Metropolis, but seems to have settled into the latter.

The Athenian storyline that Holly's our window into may or may not be related to the big "Amazons Attack" event, but from what I can tell, that storyline is such a clusterfuck, I'm not going anywhere near it. Aside from not getting her ass arrested, Holly doesn't seem to have any motivation or drive and her predominant character trait seems to be "pluck". As the first quarter ends, Holly is about to go to an Athenian Self-Esteem-Building Workshop. This storyline has also given the artists a chance to draw entirely gratuitous panels of young women bathing.

Forerunner: With a hairstyle lifted from the "Star Wars" prequels, Forerunner is supposedly the character find of 2007. Her interests include honor and killing stuff. According to Monarch, she is the "forerunner" to a race known as (wait for it) the Forerunners. A race the Monitors bred for killin' and have apparently decided to wipe out entirely, using one woman as their proxy. We haven't seen 'runner lately, but last time we did, she was heading across the multiverse to kill whoever offed her people. Could be a long trip.

The confusion of Forerunner/Forerunners is just one more of the fascinating inconsistencies of "Countdown". I know there's an impulse to call them "mistakes" but let's wait til all the facts are in. Oh, and Monarch's face being fleshy instead of Captain Atom-y under the mask? Yeah, that was a mistake.

Karate Kid: When KK entered the scene, he was posing as someone named Trident and taking swings at Batman. He spent some time imprisoned by the JLA, spent some more time imprisoned by the JLA, spent some time not quite as imprisoned but still fairly imprisoned by the JLA. He chats with a couple JLAers, which amounted to "Hey, something sure is wrong here, huh?" He joined up with One Third of a Triplicate Girl and ran off, ending up in Oracle's personal space looking for answers as to what might be wrong. Because apparently it's wrong with him, in particular.

Is it the lack of personality? Could KK's lack of a perceptible personality lead to the Final Crisis?

Like our girl Holly, KK is on the run, but unlike Holly there is no apparent reason why. Even if you've read "The Lightning Saga", you're left with no idea who KK is hiding from. Can't be Batman, he was chatting up Batman a couple issues ago. Probably not Supes, they go way back. Also like Holly, we've got no real sense of whay KK might be running towards. Hopefully Babs can shed some light on this mess.

Okay, those are the really messy storylines. With the exception of maybe the Forerunner thing, which despite its flaws seems to have some direction in front of it. Let's move on to the bigger stories and see how we're doing.

Mary Marvel: You know, except for the ass and crotch shots, this storyline's not going too badly. Mary wakes from a year long coma and finds herself powerless and sets out to get some powers. And she does, but they might not be what she expects. So at the urging of the Riddler, she goes looking for guidance and is about to meet up with Zatanna. Look, kids: it's a narrative arc!

Granted, it's a little hobbled by the fact that the ad campaigns have been touting an Eclipso'd MM since back in the "52" days, but Mary's got a lot of the qualities the above-mentioned characters so far lack. Personality and clear motive to their actions. Everytime MM shows up (usually descending on the camera-eye crotch-first), we know why she is where she is, which is pretty refreshing. I'm not sure how this storyline ties into the Great Disaster/Final Crisis noise, but it's an interesting enough story to keep reading.

Plus it hasn't yet required me to read a single comic outside of "Countdown"

The Rogues: Seriously, these guys should not have shown up until after the Flash got offed. The early Rogues sections drove me up a wall with their half-assed Tarantino dialogue, repetetive homophobia is funny motif and general lack of any edge whatsoever. Every appearance before issue 44 is entirely discardable.

Since then, a little better. The writers seem to have a slightly better sense of Piper and Trickster than they did the rest of the Rogues, and the reintroduction of the Suicide Squad, who clearly have some agenda involving making villians disappear, has made this story tolerable. Actually, the mere fact it's gotten Montoya back on the page makes it tolerable. But it still feels like a story only barely started.

The Challengers: If I was betting on a story to lead most directly into a Final Crisis, my money would be on this one. It's got scope, even if it got off to a rocky start with Jason Todd making pretty uncanny logical leaps to determine he and Donna are being hunted by the Monitors. Speaking of logical leaps, it would be nice if the readers were getting some clues as to what the trail of Ray Palmer is.

Overall, I'm okay with this story. Donna's character needs to be fleshed out a bit more (this is not a call for bigger breasts, folks at DC. Female characters can also have "well-developed" personalities), and hopefully the inclusion of Kyle Rayner in the group will contribute a little more in the way of personal dynamics. How they're getting Kyle out of his current state and into "Countdown" has got me riveted. I hope someone told Paul Dini that Kyle Rayner is, how you say, super evil right now.

And finally...

Jimmy Olsen: This storyline started out with promise and has sort of jumped the rails since. Jimmy investigated the death of Duella Dent for about ten minutes, then investigated the death of his friend Lightray for about ten minutes, then decided to take up sewing. I was excited at the possibility that lowly Jimmy Olsen was going to put together the puzzle of the Great Disaster, but what we've gotten instead is clear evidence why Jim is a photographer and not an investigative reporter.

But here's the thing about Jimmy.

As of right now, Jimmy is the only player in "Countdown" who retains ties to the superhero community. Everyone else is on the run from something or other. Narratively, this holds possibility. Big events are in the offing, and while the Big Five (formerly known as the Big Three) would be well equipped to stop them, all the puzzle pieces lie in the hands of outcasts and fugitives. If I was making a guess, I'd say Jimmy's story will idle in superheroic tomfoolery for a bit until something puts Jimmy on the run like the rest of the cast. I'm casting my vote now for a Jimmy Olsen/Forager team-up.

Overall, it's not as bad as it could be. It's sluggish, yes. The art has been inconsistent and the editorial gaffs really do have to stop; there are four editors currently on the title, one of them should be reading it. But on reading it all together, I don't hate it. In fact I kind of like it. This may be due more to speculation on what's to come on my part, but I'm pretty firmly on board, and the issues seem to be getting better as time goes on.

To contrast this with the quarter mark in "52", by that point I was in love with the series, had a firm grasp on several well-developed (personality-wise) characters and, rather than speculating, was anxious to see what the writers would come up with next. There were scenes that were out and out brilliant and most everything else was at a consistently high quality level. Four of the top writers in the industry with a universe-wide, year-long sandbox to play in will do that for you.

To contrast this with what's going on currently in the "Green Lantern" books, they took a bunch of characters I couldn't care less about (not a Corps fan, me) and had me on board within the first few pages. I'm buying books I wouldn't have even leafed through two months ago and they're at the top of my read pile. Clear motivation will do that for you.
Not that we're comparing.

Writer Tony Bedard promises everything will be batshit crazy by #30. Which is good, this title could use a little more batshit crazy. Not to mention the "higher caliber" artists Mike Carlin's teasing folks with ("52" got in a nice rhythm of competent art broken up by occassional guest work by guys like Jiminez and Robertson. Anyone approaching that level would get me through an extra month of "Countdown" even if the plot didn't pick up). And less ass shots. Please, again, enough.

#39- Cooties from the Future

2007-08-04T10:48:00.000-07:00

So apparently Val Karate is carrying a computer virus? How do I know this? Because Mike Carlin told me so over at Newsarama (which seems to have disappeared and been replaced with last week's). Unfortunately I can't find any mention of it in an actual comic, so the whole raid on Oracle's hideout was wasted on me. All I can think of is the conversation between KK and Starman a while back, when Starman mentions that Dr. Impossible is responsible for Val's condition, but that seems sketchy at best. The deadly virus from the future thing has been done before, of course: readers will remember the future tech virus concept from "DC One Million" and a whole lot of the Valiant Universe. Which is all I can say about the Valiant Universe without risking litigation.

Mike is also nice enough to explain how the Challengers are managing to follow Ray Palmer's trail. I was under the impression they were simply following the advice of that helpful monkeyman.

And when Carlin explains these things, they're simple enough to understand...so why don't any of these explanations make it into the comic?

(Incidentally, the Newsarama features have taken on such an antagonistic quality, they make for a riveting read. Sometimes more interesting than the comic, to be honest).

The Suicide Squad sequence seems like a forced beat, especially since we end up with the same cliffhanger two weeks in a row, Montoya about to round up the Rogues. I wonder how Trickster feels being surrounded by the sum total of DC's homosexual community (I'm assuming one of those shadows is actually Obsidian)?

I'll need to check some "All New Atom" back issues, but isn't Ryan Choi supposed to be Asian? As such, should he really have blue eyes? I'm having trouble synching up the Searches for Ray Palmers going on here, in "Atom" and the upcoming "Countdown Presents" series, but for right now, Gail Simone's take on things is much more interesting. It includes a Jet Pack Hitler, which is better than monkeymen riding robot frogs any day.

I did enjoy Athena's "I'm just a god, my resources are limited" speech and I'm hoping her self esteem workshop comes off as a cross pollenation of a Dianetics brainwash session and a feminist response to Tom Cruise's Frank TJ Mackie bit in "Magnolia". That's a hope, mind you, not a guess.

For the second issue in a row, however, all the good stuff seems to be in the back. In three pages, we get an explanation of the Source Wall, Anti-Life, the Bleed and the shadow demons. Hooray for exposition!

If this week's review seems a little scattershot, it's only in reflection of the issue at hand. Over the next week, I'll be putting together a first quarter wrap up with page counts, summaries and comments on each of the story arcs. I'll be holding off on any sort of overall report card, but as many of these posts have probably indicated, DC is currently getting poor marks for Effort. These constant discrepancies would be minor if they were less commonplace, but it seems like an issue doesn't go by without a careless error (Ryan's eyes, Monarch's face, Montoya's bald cap), or an outright conflict between this book and other events in the DCU. In the immortal words of Archie Bell and the Drells, Tighten Up!

#40- Better Late Than Never

2007-07-31T18:06:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the delay with this post, I've been spending all of my computer time editing a friend's master's thesis. Which is roughly as fun as it sounds. Of course, part of the problem is there was not much in this issue that had been rushing to the blogotron.

The most awesome thing in this issue: My Three Monitors. Way in the back of the backup feature, we get a couple Monitors sounding off. "On my earth, people wear shoes on their hands and hamburgers eat people!" The pointy-ears on Vampire Monitor were pretty precious, but that hastily drawn-on mustache hanging under the nose of Industrial Revolution Monitor? Sooo cute!

Joking aside, this does bring up a question that's been in the background for a while now. Bob the Monitor is from a universe full of noble superheroes doing their darnedest, and he is pretty noble and doing his darnedest. The Monitor from the vampire universe is a vampire. Is it too much of a jump to suspect that the trouble makin' Monitor might hail from Earth-3, home of the Crime Syndicate of America? And if that's the case, that a predominately evil universe carries with it a predominately evil Monitor, don't you think maybe the other Monitors would kick this guy out of the clubhouse?

Getting to the issue itself, the search for Keith Giffen has finally ended! Which means the art on "Countdown" might hit a level of consistent competence it's thus far fallen short of. I wonder if the folks in editorial realized how easily they could avoid fans confusing this story with the most recent issue of "All New Atom" by simply dropping in a line from Ryan along the lines of "Hey, this tiny universe is oddly similar to the not nearly as tiny universe I was just in the other day. How odd". Problem solved. A new problem arises from the fact that Jimmy Olsen's costume looks strikingly like Ryan Choi's. So much so that if you were flipping through this issue quickly, you might miss the jump from the Palmerverse to Metropolis. Given the lack of action we've seen in "Countdown" so far, it might have been nice to see Mr. Action's debut a little more directly, but I'm not one to call for 22 page fight scenes.

For those of you without the energy to track these things down, the person spying on Darkseid is Forager, a member of the Bug underclass of New Genesis, who sometimes get tasked by the New Gods to run errands and generally, y'know, forage for things. He has all the abilities of a humanoid bug, which means he's the Spiderman of slave labor.

Maybe it's that I'm coming off two days of reading a paper on class, gender and race, but let's take a pause here and discuss the depiction of women in this series. We've got your scantily clad Athena recruits, your fishnet sporting Zatanna, your practically skirtless Mary Marvel and...Donna Troy. This issue we get the brief addition of Darkseid's concubine, with the throwaway line about the removal of vocal chords (prompting a pretty unpleasant discussion between the dudes over at CBR. Guys, after you've both stated you'd buy a Mary Marvel/Zatanna one-off just for the ass-shots, the "silence my concubine" jokes have got to go). And the only member of the big three who has yet to make an appearance, despite the putative importance of the Amazons in the DCU right now, is Wonder Woman. I've said it before, but let me stress it here: the inclusion of women in this series so far has amounted to poorly rendered cheesecake. This story presents multiple opportunities to develop strong female characters, and so far we have yet to see a single female demonstrate anything that even resembles agency. To run it down:

Donna- Roped into a mysterious journey by bad boy Jason Todd, who has found her doing such superheroic feats as staring at a gravestone and sitting contemplatively.

Mary- Has Black Adam's powers more or less inflicted upon her and is finding her personality overridden by them.

Holly- Shrugged and okayed her way into the Athena's Bathhouse for Wayward Girls and almost kind of raised her voice when Harleen kicked a mother and her child back out into the streets.

Add to the list Wonder Girl's bloodthirsty rant at Bart's funeral, Forerunner who is bred to be a slave and the 100% personality-free-zone that was Duella Dent and you've got pretty much the whole female cast thus far.

I haven't yet read Dini's take on Zatanna in "Detective" but she seems to have grown into more than just a pair of legs, and "52" developed Montoya (I'm not ready to call her the Question just yet) into one of DC's stronger, fully realized female characters. I'm hoping with the addition of these two to the mix, the writers might actually show us a bit of heroism from the ladies.

Of course, it looks like all of the Monitors are dudes, so I'll keep my hopes in check for now. Talk to you kids on Thursday.

Short, but oh so sweet...

2007-07-28T00:11:00.000-07:00

So DC just announced that the Final Crisis "Countdown" is counting down to will be illustrated by JG Jones and written by Grant Effing Morrison.

It should be mentioned that Grant is quite possibly my favorite comic book writer and his attachment to this project has renewed my faith that "Countdown" must be going somewhere. Anywhere.

Apologies for not having written on "Countdown #40" yet. Most of this week has been spent arranging things so that I can go see Sonic Youth play "Daydream Nation" tomorrow night in Brooklyn and my computer time has been limited, especially since I want to actually break down this last issue a bit. Monday, I promise, once I recover from having my face rocked off.

Counting Off: The Lightning Saga

2007-07-19T18:24:00.000-07:00

So in the interests of completism, this column should discuss some of the books that form required reading for "Countdown". This is leaving aside the issue of whether or not "Countdown" should be self-contained. It isn't, and we can either continue to complain about it (which has its merits, don't get me wrong) or deal with it and move on.

Any entry labelled "Counting Off" will cover this territory. Like the last entry on the Flash and this one here.

In the case of full storylines (like "Amazons Attack" and "Sinestro Corps War" I'll be letting them play out at least to the halfway point before checking in on them, unless something really big happens in a particular issue.

I will also be upfront in saying some these comics I've obtained through downloading. I buy a lot of books and want my dollars to go both towards my local comic book store and to books I like. If at times, the interest of this column dictate that I read books I'm less keen on, there's a chance I may just torrent them. Which is to say, this is by no means an attempt to encourage everyone to buy every DCU book associated with "Countdown" which the folks at Newsarama have caluculated would cost you about $320. Nuff said.

On to "The Lightning Saga".

I'm not a big fan of the future. Or at least the far-flung future. A quick survey of the technological progress of just the past ten years should amply demonstrate the inability of the average person to predict the course of future events in the short term, so the idea of speculating what life might be like in the 30th century suffers from a severe disconnect with current reality. A disconnect some people are into. I'm not.

So I've never been a Legion fan, it's just a section of the DCU I have no interest in. The only Legionaire I've read much of is Thom Kalor, both in James Robinson's "Starman" and the current run of "JSA". As a result, I was not overly excited that a posse of Legionaires would be at the center of a JLA/JSA crossover.

What I ultimately liked about this story was that I never felt I was being pushed towards reading a Legion comic (with the exception of the mysterious face in the lightning rod). The writers use minimal exposition to tell us who the Legion are and play it for maximum effect by stressing their connection to Superman. Superman's time with the Legion forms the emotional crux of these stories: his affection towards them drives the two teams to seek out the missing Legionaires and the sense of duty and betrayal they have towards Supes necessitates the secrecy in which they finally carry out their plan.

The other aspect I enjoyed was the brief tour of the DCU, with a trip to Thanagar and Gorilla City. But again here, the writers are clever enough to show us these places through the characters they resonate with most. Vixen's reaction to Gorilla City and Red Arrow's take on Thanagar are perfect in-roads for the reader to what might otherwise be cold concepts of foriegn cultures.

But the strengths of this story only serve to point out some of the weakness of "Countdown" at this point in its run. All of the central characters in "Countdown" have longstanding, complicated relationships with established DC characters, characters who don't need to be explained. Put simply, the way to get us started caring about Jason Todd is to make it clear Batman cares about him. The same goes for Donna and Wonder Woman, Holly and Catwoman, Jimmy and Supes, and Mary and Captain Marvel. So far, only the latter two pairs have interacted at all (and unfortunately I'm so unclear about what's going on with Billy Batson at this point, the interaction between he and Mary came off like muddy exposition of a muddy situation). Launching Jimmy's story with Superman watching over him was a great move, it immediately attached the audience to a minor character by asserting that character's importance to a minor character. If Jason, Donna, Holly or Mary had been introduced in similar fashion, a lot of the "who is this and why should I care" reaction from fans might have been alleviated.

Granted, these characters' distance from the iconic characters is important to the story, but a one page interaction ending in a severing of ties would have gotten the job done.

The other major problem is one of timing. "All Flash #1" makes it clear that the events of "The Lightning Saga" occur at the same time, within minutes even, of the death of Bart Allen, a fact hinted at in Guggenheim's Flash story. In "Countdown" we get Bart's funeral with Wally absent, a fact which it seems will never be adequately explained. We also get Karate Kid's escape with Una nearly a month after the same scene in "Justice League". Editor Mike Carlin has turned downright hostile when interviewed about these timing gaffs, which is hopefully a sign they were leftover problems from the previous editorial team. More importantly, readers shouldn't have had to waste time with KK or the Rogues in "Countdown" before the events in the JLA/JSA crossover and the Flash played out. These stories were big enough that if these characters had walked out of them and into "Countdown" for the first time afterwards, readers could have been caught up with minimal exposition and WOULD HAVE ACTUALLY CARED ABOUT THESE CHARACTERS FROM THE BEGINNING. It's pretty common knowledge at this point that Kyle Rayner is being put through the ringer over in GL before being dropped into "Countdown" and yet the writers have felt no need to drop innane conversations with Kyle and Guy Gardener into "Countdown". The characters should come into the story when the writer is ready to use them and hit the ground running. I think what makes the most recent issue of "Countdown" marginally more satisfying is the sense that some of the characters finally have.

Staying positive, though. Rumors have been dropped about shoe-in artists coming up in "Countdown" and something big (or "biggish") going down this week, and having given up on thinking of "Countdown" as a start-to-finish quality read, hope springs eternal every week that the story might jumpstart itself.

Counting Off: "All Flash #1" & the Death of Bart Allen

2007-07-19T16:34:00.000-07:00

Barry Allen is evil.

I guess there's probably a narrow slice of the reading public who've felt that way, but it so happens my first Flash story was the "Return of Barry Allen". As a teenager, it's no wonder the story had me riveted. Young Wally West, who has spent the last several years not just grappling with the loss of his beloved uncle, but fighting his way out from under the shadow of Barry Allen, is suddenly faced with Barry's return and Wally's outright dismissal by his idol. Who of course turns out to be Professor Zoom, but at the time, my introduction to Barry Allen was that Barry was pretty much a dick.

A lot of my foundational superhero experiences centered around the big upheavals at DC. The death of Superman, the breaking of Batman (each issue of Knightfall was read allowed to my little brother, who was left in a state of absolute panic for two weeks that Batman might be dead), the corruption of Hal Jordan. Torches were being passed every which way in the DCU when I was a kid and I was on board for all of it.

But my favorite superhero books, by far, were James Robinson's "Starman" and Mark Waid's "Flash".

I still think that these runs showcase one of the things DC has that Marvel doesn't. The idea of the legacy hero.

Peter Parker is Spiderman. This is an identity statement and is meant to be reciprocal. Spiderman is Peter Parker. If something happens to Peter Parker, Spiderman ends. Ditto for the members of the Fantastic Four, the individual X-Men, Iron Man and the Hulk. The only Marvel hero that could be considered for the title of legacy hero is the Marvel U's most recent casualty, Captain America, and so far Marvel is making the very clear case that Steve Rogers is/was Captain America and Captain America is/was Steve Rogers.

Incidentally, if no one's already told you you should be reading "Captain America", let me be the first. You should be reading "Captain America".

That isn't the way in the DCU. The Flash isn't necessarily Barry Allen, Green Lantern isn't necessarily Hal Jordan, Wonder Woman isn't necessarily Diana Prince. If Batman gets offed, there's a whole list of candidates to pick up the cape and cowl. I know plenty of people who aren't down with this, who want the Marvel costume=person equation to be enforced in the DCU, but books like "Flash" and "Starman" demonstrate how many amazing story possibilities the idea of a legacy hero opens up.

(I'll mostly leave off talking about "Starman" here, with an eye towards perhaps talking about Robinson's saga of the Knight family at a later date)

During Waid's run on the title, Wally West developed from snotty little ingrate into full-fledged hero through fighting through the influence of his predescessor. I remember a whole sequence around the revelation that Wally had limited himself because he didn't want to be faster than Barry. Not content to stop there, Waid introduced another father/mentor figure for Wally in Jay Garrick, a guru-type mentor in Max Mercury, another legacy in the Quick family and finally, a young ward for Wally in Bart Allen.

In short, a Flash family, tied together by blood and speed. "The Flash" became not just one person, but a kind of floating concept, a sort of heroic idea that was open to particpation by any number of individuals, each of whom could bring their own style to the role of the Flash. Flashes could mentor each other, teach each other how to handle the powers they'd picked up.

This meant that the concept, the legacy, could be constantly reinterpreted and, therefore, reinvigorated. It's easy to say that DC got rid of folks like Hal Jordan and Barry Allen was for the sake of cynical money-grubbing, but there's also a distinct possibility that at the time, folks had just run out of stories to tell about Hall and Barry. But the red suit still looked pretty damn cool, a magic ring powered by will and imagination was still compelling, so what to do? DC has built in a system where, if a concept works but a character's gone stale, you just switch out the character.

If only Marvel was able to do this, we'd have been saved a load of unbearable Spiderman stories. It's been the case for years that no one's been able to think up a decent Peter Parker story, as evidenced by the fact that the most compelling Spiderman comic in the past ten years was "Reign", dealing with a retired and elderly Peter Parker.

All of which is meant to bring us to "All Flash #1". I think DC made an unfortunate move by offing Bart Allen; it seems to me there were plenty of stories left in the character and it's too bad that his brief run as the Flash was botched by an ill-fitting creative team. Credit to Marc Guggenheim for his efforts to salvage the character, even knowing Bart was doomed. But I'm thrilled at the pairing of Mark Waid and Wally West. If Mark can tell good stories about Wally West, then Wally's return is warrented and removing the character from the stage for a bit to change his context, to further allow for fresh storytelling, is laudable. The wringer DC put Hal Jordan through have made an interesting character out of what had been a narrative dead end, and even if you disagree with the Parallax-to-Spectre-to-GL course of Hal's career, you'd be hardpressed to argue that a lot of the Green Latern stuff near the end of Hal's first career was pretty crappy. The introduction of Kyle Rayner made a whole lot of people care about Green Lantern again and opened up the idea of what Green Lantern could be. And it means fans could choose their favorite. Back in the day, a Flash reader could throw his loyalty behind the zen parables of Max Mercury, the Greatest Generation steadfastness of Jay Garrick, the entreprenuerial zeal of Johnny Quick or the single synapse antics of Bart Allen. Hell, next month, Kyle and Hal are throwing down in GL. Evilness aside, I'm rooting for Kyle.

Some characters may be inexhaustible. There may always be new amazing stories to write about Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne, but having other characters take on the role (thinking here of Knightfall and Reign of Supermen) can give the audience and the characters the opportunity to reexamine what Superman or Batman could be. Comic books are perpetually caught up in stasis: characters die only to return, characters go decades without aging. But by rendering its iconic characters as roles that can be adopted, abandoned, in short, changed, DC allows at least the potential for change and, at the same, the assurance of permanence. Whoever's behind the mask, there's always going to be a Batman, a Green Lantern, a Flash.

Call me semi-old fashioned, but for right now and until it gets dull, I'm glad it's Wally West in the red tights.

#41- I Just Thought the Nanoverse would be...smaller.

2007-07-19T13:03:00.000-07:00

Maybe it was just an overflow of DC-related goodwill after readind "All Flash #1" (about which more shortly), but I really liked this issue. I really did! A little scattershot, sure, but there were jokes that were successful and I actually didn't feel that a single page was wasted. Let's get into it.

Two people falling out of a plane together is a great way to start a story. Just ask Salman Rushdie. While it's probably too much to ask that the "Countdown" writers move the Rogues storyline in a "Satanic Verses" direction (although a hospital for characters who've been written over would work perfectly here. Read your Rushdie, kids!), the flying boots save was nice, if predictable. And the "You wear one, I'll wear the other" solution is exactly the kind of begrudged teambuilding this storyline is going to need to make it work. The image of Piper and Trickster walking down a Gotham street in ridiculous, soaked costumes in broad daylight is pretty brilliant and since the villians teaser image links Trickster and Penguin, it'll be interest to see what comes out of their meeting.

Thank god for these two Jimmy Olsen pages. I was starting to worry that Jimmy's story was going to move in a serious direction. Not that the inherently silly Silver Age material can't be used in serious storytelling, butit takes the gentle hand of a talented writer to carry it off. Since Mary Marvel's clearly marked for the grim and gritty treatment, I'm all for Jimmy spending a couple weeks as Mr. Action, with the amazing superpower of narrowly avoiding getting killed. Granted, this power seems limited applications, but the narrative possibilities of a character who only has superpowers when he's about to die are practically endless. Jimmy dropping himself out of a plane above a kitten stuck in a tree, maybe. Should we assume Clark can see Jimmy's costume? I remember reading a rather amazing article regarding the operation of Superman's x-ray vision that suggested Superman, having grown up with the ability to visually penetrate surfaces might have developed an entirely different concept of "surfaces", such that objects would not be so much encased in visual "shells" as they'd be a series of perceptible layers. Which is to say, looking through Jimmy's clothes would be somewhat natural and not superpervy.

After reading the most recent issue of "Blue Beetle" (which was a kick and has me planning to pick up more issues), I'm a little confused about the Eclipso storyline. In "BB" Jean is trying to pull a David Bowie by Eclipsoing a magic baby (there's a sentence I never thought I'd write) because Eclipso's weakness has always been the moral flaws in its hosts. Maybe Mary isn't morally flawed just yet, but you've got to think that vacuuming someone into space for robbery doesn't necessarily go down in the ethical plus column. Eclipso better get to seducin' if she wants to catch Mary in the innocent phase.

I am so far from understanding the cosmology and politics related to the Wonder Woman/Amazons Attack stuff that I don't feel I should even touch this storyline just yet. Yes, having the power of Athena on your side is a good thing, but can anyone sound off on where Athena (or any other member of the Greek pantheon) fits into the "Amazons Attack" story?

Bob the Monitor, Jason, Donna and Ryan go down the Rabbit Hole of Mutual Appreciation. You want to know why I like the fact they named the Monitor Bob? Because he's travelling with superheroes named Jason and Donna. It's a post code-name team-up! Throw Kyle in there in a couple issues and you'll have the least exciting line-up names ever. Jason, Donna, Kyle and the unimaginable power of Bob! Together, they are the Challengers of Suburbia! When Bob was talking about the Nanoverse (I will not call it the Palmerverse, I just won't), I kind of thought it would be...well, supertiny. Not that "slightly smaller than a blade of grass" isn't plenty tiny, but I wanted atoms to look like pumpkins. If "Honey I Shrunk the Kids" taught me anything, it was that shrinking to slightly smaller than a blade of grass does not lead to transuniversal travel. Ryan must be getting tired of being assaulted by tiny frogriders at this point in his short career, but wait...these folks are riding BIONIC frogs. Much more terrifying.

I keep trying to read up on the history of Legionaires (a word I can't use without thinking of the disease and the Decemberists' song), but I get through about a reboot and a half before my head explodes. Karate Kid's storyline finally catches up to where it should have been a month ago. Note to DC Editorial: since you've started printing the Countdown numbers on tie-in titles, readers might start to expect some sort of correspondence, maybe. Anyway, we get a replay of the escape to the future from the last issue of Justice League and the new fact that KK's partner will be Una the Singular Girl. Wait, if we've got an Una and a Troia...oh forget it. I spend a part of this afternoon trying to figure out if one-third of Triplicate Girl had any kind of powers at all, but the above mentioned cranial explosion occurred.

I've already heard complaints about this issue being too scattered, that a couple storylines should be backburnered for each issue to give others room to breathe, but frankly, I would be happy with this style of pacing so long as each two or four page check-in advanced the storyline in question. This issue felt quick, light and was fun to read, which is more than can be said for a lot of the previous issues. I'm waiting til thirteen issues in to give a first quarter evaluation, but if this is the end of the first act, I might be willing to forgive a lot of the initial pacing missteps. If this is Mike Carlin's hand at work, someone give that man a raise.

Oh, and DC released yet another teaser image. It's a poorly rendered portrait of some of the big DC heroes (Supes, Bats, WW, Flash, Hawky and GL) looking big and heroic. It confirms that we're counting down to something called "Final Crisis" which pretty much anyone who cared knew already. It sports the tag line "Heroes die. Legends Live Forever." Which I'm not mentioning because I think it's a good tag line (it isn't) or because the teaser gives any hints related to "Countdown" but because it segues into the post I'm about to write on "All Flash #1". And I do love me a good segue.

#42- Snakes on a Plane (sorry, I'm undercaffeinated)

2007-07-12T10:21:00.000-07:00

Just in case you've been having "Countdown" and no other comics shipped to you under a rock, this issue opens up with a kind-of replay of the death of the Flash. Leading into yet another gratuitious Mary Marvel crotch shot, with Mary's unmentionables occluded only by the shadow of her own ass.

Seriously, guys, this is ridiculous. Cut it out.

Not much to comment on this week. Oh how I long for the days when Keith Giffen layouts were packed with little clues and references to decode. All of our plots move ever-so-slightly forward, except for the Karate Kid plot, which seems to move slightly backward from where we saw him at the end of the "Lightning Saga". Jimmy's contemplating being a hero (again). Donna, Jason and the Mutton Chop Monitor pick up the All-New Atom and finally head into the nanoverse, which may also indicate them moving out of "Countdown". Mary Marvel uses even more excessive force against Clayface, sending him whirling out into orbit for robbing a bank, leading her to...well, not quite question the nature of her powers. But almost. And the Rogues get chained together and thrown out of a plane.

Which was actually pretty cool.

I'm working off the assumption that Deadshot and Multiplex are working for the Suicide Squad, since they go all governmental and make an arrest. Not that it matters, since they manage to incarcerate Trickster and Piper for approximately five minutes. Two major questions come up in this issue, one posed out loud by Holly Robinson: what is Athena's motivation for gathering up scantily clad, acrobatically advanced women from all over the world. Is the Goddess of Wisdom hip to the fact there may be some deity vacancies opening up and getting set up for a power play?

More interesting to me is a little quirk in the backup feature, where Superboy's name is studiously avoided. There were rumors floating around that DC no longer had the rights to use the name Superboy and that this might have motivated the offing of Connor Kent. PsychoSuperboy's new moniker as "Prime" seems to back this up, although DC has on occassion stopped using characters that had any kind of legal entanglements, a policy which has kept much of Grant Morrison's "Doom Patrol" run out of print even after DC won a lawsuit filed by Charles Atlas regarding Flex Mentallo. I hope for DC's sake that no one from Malibu Comics knows they're using the name Prime for a kid in a cape.

In other news, DC has announced that Jim Starlin will be writing a "Death of the New Gods" miniseries in October, running for eight issues and probably finishing up at the same time as "Countdown". Meaning that one more "Countdown" storyline will be resolved outside the book itself. I find myself simultaneously happy and angry about these types of things. If I'm going to read a New Gods story, sure, I wouldn't mind having it penned by Starlin. Gail Simone was writing the hell out of the "Search for Ray Palmer" and I consistently enjoy Ron Marz's writing on Kyle Rayner. These stories are ending up in the hands of highly qualified talents. But there remains the nagging question: "What is 'Countdown' supposed to be doing?"

As a complete aside, if you're looking for a mindblowing comic to read this week, please pick up "Madman". I caught maybe a fourth of a third of Allred's visual references and fully intend to go back to this book panel by panel, but it's one of the most visually impressive superhero-ish books I've read since the tarot issue of "Promethea".

#43- Crowd Noise

2007-07-05T15:59:00.001-07:00

Well, if you ever needed convincing that making a heartfelt video for post mortem viewing is not such a hot idea, here you go. Robin and the Teen Titans decide that the best place for a first viewing of Bart Allen's last words is in front of a stadium of Keystoners. Lucky for everyone involved it was a speech on heroism and fun times, rather than Bart confessing his unrequited love for Beast Boy.

On the subject of odd choices of venue, hadn't Bart relocated to Los Angeles after his return? It speaks pretty well of the people of Keystone that they can rally up by the stadium-full to mourn a Flash that wasn't even in residence.

More importantly, shouldn't this whole thing have gone down in "The Flash"? After all, Bart never even appeared in "Countdown". And where is Wally, or the rest of the JLA for that matter?

Anyone want to speculate on what it is that Rose Wilson is holding? Maybe it's just the color, but it reminds me vaguely of something I found under my girlfriend's bed once that filled me with a sense of inadequacy. It would also be nice if the Robins didn't all sport the same haircut.

The funeral as framing device/backdrop can be wonderfully executed. James Robinson's portrayal of Ted Knight's funeral at the end of "Starman" manages to showcase character, using small talking head panels that gave a sense of each speaker's movement within their eulogy. And the eulogies themselves allowed Robinson to move in and out of the funeral's events to recount the week leading up to the funeral. Here, the perspective zooms around haphazardly, giving no sense of where anyone is in relation to anyone else. The most aggregious example is on pages three and four, where Rose Wilson is shown sitting both to the left of Beast Boy and to the right of...that one that wears the hood. Also, the funeral barely skips a beat when two of the suspects bolt down the center aisle and are shot at out in the parking lot.

The bloodthirsty portrayal of Wonder Girl here is completely out of line with any prior characterization. It seems implausible that the same girl who spent an entire year trying to resurrect her boyfriend, well aware that his killer was still alive, suddenly goes Charles Bronson after losing another friend.

Enough. There are positive points here, so let's get to them. The Monarch storyline has actually become (wait for it) a storyline! While an army of...somethings...led by Forerunner is significantly less terrifying than the newly formed Sinestro Corps (and let me join everyone else in saying that the "Sinestro Corps Special" is a pretty nifty bit of storytelling), it at least constitutes an understandable plan. All you need to set up is a purpose, with a motive, and the means to achieve that purpose. Monarch and Forerunner want to stop the Monitors. Purpose. The Monitors, via an unidentified female proxy, have wiped out all of Forerunner's people. Motive. They have an army right out of "Attack of the Clones" set up in the Bleed. Means. See, it wasn't that hard after all.

Jimmy Olsen resolves to use his powers! Again!

Mutton Chop Monitor turns out to be sort of a whiny little wet blanket. It looks like he'll be playing chaperone in the wacky romantic comedy section of our story. Of course, it looks like Kyle Rayner's got bigger problems than getting his woman stolen by Zombie Jason Todd.

The introduction of Harley Quinn was nicely done, glad to see she's recovered from Morrison's "Batman" work. If any of that is actually in continuity.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but my favorite advancement of the plot this week involved the Rogues. Piper and Trickster falling into the hands of another band of villians actually catches my interest, although Piper's need to pay his respects to Bart is totally insufficient reasoning for both characters to walk into a stadium full of angry superheroes and vengeful Keystoners.

I'm finding my faith in this series' ability to pull itself out of its current slump is reaching near-religious stature. For the moment, I'm picking up the book for three basic reasons. The first is this little blog thing, which when you come right down to it, there are probably better ways for my to use my time. In fact, my editor was just mentioning something along those very lines. The second is that there is something about the relative botching of this big ticket project that's facinating in a kind of car-wreck way. But third is that I really like big, sprawling stories and DC is giving every indication that they're building up to one. I just wish they'd up and get started already.

Hope from Without

2007-07-03T15:37:00.000-07:00

Once again, the marketing campaign surrounding "Countdown" proves much more interesting than the book itself. This week, DC released the second teaser image, the villians equivalent of the image that preceded "Countdown". At around the same time, Dan Didio explicated the first teaser image in a manner I won't even attempt to parse. But if you've ever played the gym class team-building favorite, "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (at least that's what we called it when we were kids), the standard "touch the ground and you're dead" rules are in play. Except for the safe zone that Supes and Wonder Woman are on.

A couple people have already pointed out the similarities between this image and DaVinci's "The Last Supper", which would jive well with the obvious appropriation of pieta imagery in the last teaser. For the most part, this doesn't yield any clues, except that it casts J'on in the Judas role, with the Joker as Peter and the Kingdom Come Superman as (doubting) Thomas. And let's be honest, those are really the only apostles any of us know anything about.

Other things to note: Trickster is carrying Piper's pipe and KC Superman is either holding a yellow power ring or the Atom. Black Racer's ski gear, a broken arrow (Connor? Ollie?), a motherbox, the Kirbytech from the last teaser and the Crime Bible are all scattered on the ground, Granny Goodness and Desaad look pretty cheery considering who's statue they're standing on, and Catwoman is about to get more than just advice from the Joker, if the buzzer in his hand is any indication.

And for the record, I dig Lex's old purple and greens. I think they should fight Aquaman's old costume.

The two big questions are where are we at and who's the man in black? As for Supes, we've seen the black togs in the "Return of Superman" and the "Emperor Joker" storylines, but search me as to how it fits in here. The sky could be the kind of flamepits Intergang tried to let loose on Gotham in "52", but it seems more likely, especially after the events in "Sinestro Corps" (which I have been unable to get a copy of, but feel like I've read) that we're seeing the Anti-Matter universe. Or the Anti-Matter Multiverse. Or the Anti-Multi-Matter-Verse.

So again, DC has tried to rally fans to its big projects through the marvels of marketing rather than the books themselves. With sales flagging on "Countdown" and never really getting started on "Amazons Attack", one can only hope a campaign of in-house ads will have some effect.

More likely to have an effect is the ouster of editor Mike Marts in favor of Mike Carlin. Carlin shepherded four Superman books a month (that's one a week, folks!) through some major events back in the day and managed to coordinate them with other titles pretty seamlessly. I'm not convinced that the problems on this book can all be traced to editorial decisions, but Marts was clearly not cut out for this position. His editorial stint on the X-books was most notable for the lack of crossover between books, as creators like Grant Morrison and Joss Whedon built sandboxes for themselves and went about constructing beautiful and self-contained castles within them. The multivalent nature of "Countdown" not to mention the fact the book is helmed by less-than-visionary writers, puts extra pressure on the editor to take control of the book, but "Countdown" thus far is lacking in pacing and direction. Maybe switching Mikes will help.

#44- Family Feud

2007-06-28T13:39:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-21T11:03:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-14T14:51:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-06-14T12:10:00.000-07:00

"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"

2007-06-14T11:13:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-14T09:25:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-14T08:33:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-11T20:15:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-11T14:46:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-11T11:26:00.000-07:00

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

2007-06-11T10:48:00.000-07:00

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.