Monday, July 02, 2007

44 and counting... (Finally!)

Here we are, with a much-delayed look at Countdown 44. Many thanks to Piper for picking this up for me.

This week I'm not going to do a page-by-page review of the issue.

From the start, I've been a supporter of the book. It started off with what I considered a really good kick-off. The story took a character whom nobody cared about since she was created by Bob Rozakis, and made us care about her -- and then promptly killed her off.

Not that I'm happy about the death of the Joker's Daughter, but it was well-done and started the series off with a bang. And it was well followed-up upon, what with Jimmy Olson visiting the Joker himself.

There was lots of character bits and plot set-up. And it's been good. But we're about eight weeks into the series and nothing much has happened here. Oh, things have happened, such as the death of Flash IV (Bart) at the hands of the Rogues, or the revival of Flash III (Wally) at the hands of the Legion of Super-Heroes, the attack on Washington, DC by the Amazons, etc.

But they've all happened offscreen! Here in Countdown we've seen the build-up to some of it, and the aftermath of other parts, but not the actual events. Granted, the place for the death of the Flash was in his own title, but here it feels so peripheral that it hardly justifies Countdown as being the "spine" of the DC Universe.

(As an aside, the death of Flash II (Barry) was done within the pages of Crisis on Infinite Earths, but in that case the Flash Comic was being canceled, and the story there ended immediately prior to Crisis.)

The problem with Countdown, it seems to me, isn't with the writing -- everything I've seen appears well-written, but it's poorly paced, and it appears (so far) that most of what Countdown consists of is interstitial material. Nothing that's critical to other series', but material that kind of fills in the blanks from other stories.

Now, there's story throughlines in Countdown that appear to be specific to the series -- Mary Marvel, Jimmy Olson, and (possibily) Holly Robinson. Everything else, though, seems to be just filler material for other series. Even Forerunner appears to be there to provide a lead-in to her own feature.

Head writer on Countdown is Paul Dini, so the slow (some might call it "lack of") pacing seems puzzling. Paul is a much better writer than this. I'm inclined, at this point, to ascribe the problems with pacing (and ill-handled interconnecting to the universe) to the book's editor, Mike Marts. I know he's basically unfamiliar with the DC Universe, but the principles of storytelling should be pretty much pan-universal.

I know there's a LOT of dissatisfaction with the book among fans, and I'm guessing that it has translated into flagging sales for the series. Given one thing that was announced last week, it looks like the Powers That Be at DC have taken note and are doing a mid-course correction.

Starting with the next issue (this week's forthcoming Countdown 43) Mike Carlin is joining as co-editor, and over the next dozen or so issues Mike Marts is transitioning off the book. Mike Carlin is experienced at the weekly thing, since he was editor of the Superman books some years back when the franchise was run as a de-facto weekly comic. Anyone remember the "corner boxes" (actually triangles) that showed where the books fell in sequence?

No disrespect intended to Mike Marts, but I'm guessing that he wasn't well-suited to doing the weekly-comic-with-lots-of-interconnections-to-other-editors-books thing. I'm certainly expecting the pacing to improve dramatically as Mike Carlin's vision begins to have a presence in Countdown.

And, oh, by the way, haven't we had enough crotch shots of Mary Marvel? We get the idea. Lets move on.