37 and counting...

The tone of Countdown is evolving. No longer just a series of unconnected events, the story is finally moving forward. Karate Kid is told that whatever disease he has, it's either an alien virus or one from the future. Both, maybe?

This sets Una off, with under her breath mutterings about the coming of the Great Disaster. We're seeing a lot of recent indications that it's upon us, and I suppose it's about time. as I recall, when Jack Kirby originally created stories involving the disaster, it was supposed to have arrived in August of 1984. If that's wrong, it's my swiss-cheesed memory to blame. But I'd swear I once read a story back in the Kirby era that set the Great Disaster for August 28, 1984. Any verification -- or corrections?

By the way, Oracle appears to have an MRI unit in her hidden base of operations. Even for the ultimate data geek, this seems a bit much. It's not like she used to be a physician or something (and even if she had been it would be a bit ludicrous). Barbara Gordon was a librarian who wound up in Washington as a congresscritter. Normally members of congress aren't known for keeping MRI gadgets in their offices. Even Bill Frist passed that opportunity by.

Oracle comes up with the dossier on a 'mythical' biotech whiz named Elias Orr, who just might be good enough to help Karate Kid. I'm not sure why, but that name feels like it should be ringing a bell somewhere. Does anyone recall seeing a character of that name somewhere in the past of DC or it's ancestor companies? (Fawcett, Charlton, Quality, Wildstorm, etc?)

Mary Marvel and Zatanna arrive at Zatanna's ancestral home, which seems to be a mixture of the House of Mystery and Hogwarts. Her home, Shadowcrest, seems to be designed along the Tardis lines, that is, much bigger on the inside than the outside. I almost expected to find Skeeve and Aahz backing through a door while escaping some sort of pickle.

I have to note, by the way, that throughout this issue, the women all seem to have overly-large eyes and big heads. I know that neotony is a commonly-used way to make characters seem more cute, but it's done to excess here. Zatanna, on page 5, goes from a raven-haired Mary Jane Watson to someone who's had about three times too much botox in the course of two panels. What happened here? I'm suspecting that someone tried following Keith Giffen's layouts a bit too slavishly, without drafting the characters themselves, and wound up thoughtlessly following lines that were never intended for a final rendering. Whatever happened, it looks grotesque.

(I should probably mention that the art accompanying this article is NOT from this issue of Countdown.)
Who Dat?

Donna Troy, Jason Todd, Bob the Monitor, Jason Choi (aka The Atom) are now, I understand, considered to be the group Challengers of Beyond. The impression I'm getting is that, after Countdown, this may become it's own title. In the meantime, they've already announced some specials featuring the Challs.

Down at another level of the Palmerverse (which still sounds stoopid to me; anyone mind if I just settle for calling it the nanoverse?) they've found a group of, um, wizards who're performing some sort of ceremony. They chat with one (small) witch, who looks suspiciously like someone from the Levitz/Giffen Legion of Super-Heroes.

In short, Ray Palmer has been and gone, and now the Great Disaster is nearly here, which is why the wizards are scarpering off Right Now!

Piper and Trickster have a knack, doncha know, for being able to fall into a flower bed and end up deep in the fertilizer. That's actually an apt simile, because here they break into a greenhouse to steal vegetables (lo, see how the mighty have fallen) and discover it's the lair of Poison Ivy. As to the question, "what are the odds?", Trickster says it best. "This is Gotham! You can't swing a dead sidekick here without hitting a super-villain! We shoulda known the odds'd be pretty damn good!"

Speaking of Poison Ivy, her erstwhile partner, Harley Quinn is showing more signs that she's not over the thing that made her idolize and copy the Joker, she's just transferred her allegiance to Athena. There looks to be, possibly, a bit of a crush on Holly Robinson, as well.

Finally, Jimmy Olson is mulling over his attempt at joining the Teen Titans. Knowing it didn't go at all well, he tries to think through how his powers work. And, in mid-mull, he makes a discovery... He realizes that Clark Kent is Superman!

How? Dunno, but I'd guess it has much the same mechanism by which he knew who Jason Todd was when he saw the Red Hood.

The penciling in this issue is credited to "David Lopez with Mike Norton". Inks are "Don Hillman II with Rod Ramos" The only one here that's much familiar to me is Rod Ramos. I know he's better than what I'm seeing here. By and large I don't think the problem is with the inkers. The penciling, though, looks like someone just enlarged Keith Giffen's layouts and did a light penciling on top of them.

One strong indication is that a lot of things I'm seeing look much like Keith Giffen's type of raw layouts. A lot of the time, his layouts aren't so much drawn as cartooned, to give the person doing pencils an idea of what to draw. I'm seeing an awful lot of that bleeding through. Page 12 has a good example. In the first panel, Piper and Trickster are running, and Trickster is rendered like someone out of the old Mad, back when it was a comic. It looks like, instead of interpreting the layouts, they're tracing them and just adding detail, some of which isn't appropriate for a finished page. See again the Zatanna faces back on page 5.

Something needs to be done to prevent this in future issues. The art teams aren't having to race to do every issue, so why does the art look like it was done in incredible haste?

Final? crisis...

I've been enjoying Countdown, really I have. I'm enjoying it more since it's editorial change-over, but I have been liking it since the beginning. But...

Let's go back several years. We've got a DC Universe that's fairly cohesive and where things fit together. Problem is, it's more than a bit dark. I'm not really sure how this happened. After the original Crisis On Infinite Earths, things were much lighter in tone. We had the JLI, which was very light, almost to the point of being a humor book. This lasted a while, including various spin-offs, but eventually it was gone, replaced by the darker and more serious JLA. Which then broke up and was reformed. Which then broke up and was...

Batman, somewhere in here, lost his way, and he became almost the epitome of dark. New black costume, his back broken (by Bane), and his city destroyed, there was, for me at least, no reason left to read his titles any more. It was a relentlessly depressing and out-of-touch reality.

The "Post-Crisis" Superman was also lighter in tone, concentrating more on the mythic than on the dark. That started changing when we hit the era of the "Death of Superman". Somehow, once we were through that, things were never the same. The stakes had been raised, and things were ever-darker.

Green Lantern's city was destroyed in the course of the Superman epic, and it drove him mad. He, well, changed, and became the villain Parallax. As Parallax he tried to remake the universe. He partially succeeded. What came out of it wasn't the universe he'd wanted, but it was somewhat different, and darker still than the previous iteration. Eventually he redeemed himself saving the earth, and died, only to eventually become the Spectre. Actually his death caused Hal Jordan to become less dark. His Spectre was more a creature of redemption than of punishment. So, of course, that promptly ended and he went on to his not-so-eternal reward.

I could continue on, itemizing the roster of the DC Universe, but why? Hopefully by now you get the idea. As time went on, the universe continued to darken, and the heroes went from heroic to, well, I'm not quite sure how to describe it. Between personal tragedies (such as the new Green Lantern's girlfriend being murdered and her body stuffed into a refrigerator for him to find) to less-than heroic behavior (such as Power Company, the super-team that was just in it for the money).

Things hit their nadir when the "Identity Crisis" struck. Instead of a 'cosmic' type crisis, this one was personal and much closer to home. Sue Dibny, the Elongated Man's wife, was murdered in their home, and all indications were that it was done by one of the Justice League's villains. As things developed, we discovered that the League had been doing some less-than-heroic things for quite a while, mindwiping villains and making them more than a little bit ineffectual. THEN it turns out that they did it to Batman, as well!

The upshot was a further darkening of the DC Universe. The original, 1930's era Superman, who was still alive off in a pocket universe, was increasingly angered and disappointed in what he saw happening, and took steps to fix things. Of course, things didn't go to plan, but the world was once again remade in the Infinite Crisis.

A major goal of this partial reboot was to 'lighten up' the tone of the heroes, and to return them to being, well, more heroic. In some ways it worked. The Justice Society disbanded and then restarted, this time with the idea of 'making better heroes'. It made incremental differences in Batman, returning him to gray and lightening him up a fraction. Others, though...

In the run-up to the crisis, Wonder Woman killed a villain, Maximilian Lord. Not by accident, but intentionally. That didn't change in the soft reboot. The intention was there for the universe as a whole to lighten up, but somehow the changes rapidly went by-the board. The first year after the crisis was skipped over, in favor of showing a 'One Year Later' universe where the changes had shaken down. Regrettably, they basically settled down to the status quo ante. Aside from the characters involved in 52 you'd have hardly known a year had passed. Out of 52 we learned that the changes in Infinite Crisis were more extensive than we'd thought, though not 'here at home'. There were 52 different but identical universes. Mr. Mind, though, managed to disrupt the fabric of spacetime, and all the worlds changed -- so we now have 52 parallel universes.

In Countdown, we're seeing something -- something? -- going on that's going to change and redefine the DC Multiverse. Again. And we already know that following Countdown is Final Crisis.

I'm really hoping that Final Crisis is, in fact, final. We've had several years of flux that's taken a well-ordered universe, albeit one which is way too dark, and created an amorphous mish-mash of realities. It was roughly twenty years between Crisis On Infinite Earths and Identity Crisis. Since Identity Crisis it's been a headlong rush from crisis to crisis.

I believe it's getting past time for some closure. What I want to see coming out of Final Crisis is a well-ordered universe that can be used as a good sandbox for telling stories. After several years of flux, it's getting tiring to try and keep track of who's who and what's what. I think DC is at the point of diminishing returns with the whole "Crisis" concept. It's time to wrap this up and move on to other kinds of stories.

If they want to do another cosmic redefinition, how about putting it on the schedule for, roughly, 2028?

38 and counting...

Mister Action! Robin! Hero versus Her... um. Never mind.

Once again, Jimmy manages to make a fool of himself. Oh, it's not that he doesn't have the powers, it's that he hasn't taken the time to think things through. So, he goes and applies to the Teen Titans for membership. Only thing, it didn't occur to him in advance that his powers only work when his life is in danger. So, no powers when he tries to demonstrate. Ouch.

I'm assuming his powers somehow know whether an attack is going to be life-threatening. Does that mean there's a sentience behind the powers? Otherwise, how exactly would this work?

Mary Marvel and Zatanna find their cruise ship under attack, and find themselves fighting Slig, of the Deep Six. Things don't turn out well. We do get our first glimpse of Eclipso, though. For anyone who's forgotten, she's also known as Jean Loring, the person who set into motion the whole sequence of events leading from Identity Crisis to Infinite Crisis to 52 to Countdown and, next spring, Final Crisis.

Pied Piper and Trickster have their confrontation with Batwoman and The Question, and they don't end up looking too good. On the other hand, they do get let go once The Question decides they're morons who would have been incapable of killing the Flash.

We get a brief look-in at the Monitors, who've realized that Bob, Jason Todd, and Donna Troy are missing from the multiverse, along with Ryan Choi. One of them ties this in with the missing Ray Palmer, Ryan Choi's predecessor as The Atom. For folks who are supposed to be nigh-unto omniscient, and who have theoretically been keeping their beady little glowing-red eyes on Jason and Donna, they certainly mucked this one up.

Oracle (Barbara Gordon) is simultaneously fighting the Calculator in two different arenas. First, there's the attempted hack on her database servers, and secondly there's a global virus attack (intended to sew chaos and distract her from fighting the hack). Need I mention that she shuts both down cleanly, mightily pissing off Calculator in the process.

We also get to see some of the other heroes fighting the chaos. Superman, Power Girl, and Supergirl keeping aircraft from colliding. We've got Green Lantern rescuing a space shuttle whose computers are down. The JSA recaptures escapees from "Stryker's Island" in Metropolis. Okay, Metropolis is loosely based on New York (as is Gotham City, for that matter), but is it really necessary to have stupidly named and thinly-veiled versions of New York's landmarks? Stryker's Island? As opposed to Ryker's Island in New York? Shgeesh. It's a name that might have worked in the forties or fifties, but nowadays it's enough to pull you out of the story. At least it did for me.

Oh, and we saw Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters stopping some nuclear-tipped missiles from successfully launching. It seems they thought that dropping nukes on our allies would be a Bad Idea. Silly heroes. They should have checked first with George W. and Dick C. They wouldn't have been distressed by an accidental nuke or seventeen.

Finally, we have the start of the postponed meeting between Oracle, Karate Kid, and Una. We don't find out much new, but what we do discover... if true, it's a big one.

Oh, yeah, just one more thing... Darkseid. We're starting to get a clue of his plans, and I'm beginning to think he's been a prime mover behind the scenes for several years now. He's working on something called the New Multiversal Dynasty. This sounds double-plus-ungood.

39 and counting...

Countdown 39 (from DC Comics, in case you haven''t been paying attention) doesn't flow quite as well as the past few issues, but it's still a big step above the early issues of the series.

Karate Kid and Una break into Oracle's 'inner sanctum, only to find that someone is doing a fair job of hacking her system. This is a bad thing beyond what you might expect, since she's got one of the world's most comprehensive databases of information on superheroes -- including their true identities. Ouch!

Piper and Trickster are still hiding out beneath the Penguin's Iceberg Lounge. After a nice meal (courtesy of Penguin) they're interrupted by the Suicide Squad. Plus, Trickster suffers another attack of homophobia. Their squabble ends abruptly when they're confronted by the Question and Batwoman.

Traveling deeper into the, um, Palmerverse (no ego problems there, either, I guess), Donna Troy, Jason Todd, Ryan Choi, and "Bob" end up in what looks a lot like Frank Brunner's version of a Doctor Strange dark dimension. I guess they shoulda taken a left turn at Albuquerque.

Mister Action seems able to handle street-level crime easily enough, but he's not really too attentive to the details. Getting distracted by the grateful -- and somewhat passionate -- thanks for saving a woman's purse, he begins mulling joining a team. In the process he forgets about the perp, who rapidly (and cautiously) slinks away. Jimmy's got hero potential, but he's also got potential to become a joke.

Holly Robinson is starting to see through Harley Quinn's facade. Yes, she's no longer idealizing the Joker and emulating his behavior, but she now seems to be devoted, in the same unhealthy way, to Athena.

Athena explains to Holly that her facility isn't designed to be able to handle persons with family responsibilities. Holly's "somewhat dubious" about all this, and Athena invites her to sit in on a "self-esteem workshop". I'm wondering just what goes on in the workshops. I guess we'll find out shortly.

By the way, as you may have notices, I'm generally not covering the back feature, the serialized History Of The Multiverse. Mainly this is because it's not really a story. It's basically an illustrated discourse on how we got from the original Crisis On Infinite Earths to the present. As such it's a fairly good precis. As a story, though, well, it's a dead zero. The way it's structured we have the Monitors standing around telling each other what they already know. It's pure exposition with no real story attached. As such there's nothing really to go over. I'll probably mention it if there's anything new that's worthy of note. It'll be ending soon, anyways, as the back feature turns to biographies of the villains.

40 and counting...

And Keith Giffen finally arrives. It's noticeable, and a definite step up for the art.

Countdown 40 is again moving the plot forward. Whatever caused the stagnancies in the early issues appears to have gone. My presumption is that the difference is the change from Mike Marts to Mike Carlin in editing. Mike Marts is a good editor, but he doesn't seem to have had a good handle on how to do either a weekly comic (the pacing) or a crossover event (what to include where). Mike Carlin has experience with both, and it shows in the finished product.

Way down in the, um, Palmerverse, we've got Donna Troy, Jason Todd, Ryan Choi, and "Bob" the Monitor in what's similar to, but not the same as, the Amazon jungle from Sword Of The Atom. Confused yet?

After a fight with the locals, they discover they're all on the same side (gee, where have I heard that plot before?) and they get some leads on where to head next to find Ray Palmer. Plus, here's the first real substantial connection back to Identity Crisis. I'm hoping they'll develop this further. Otherwise, the motivations behind his actions seem pretty empty. Why did he vanish? Grief? Despair? Embarrassment? So far we don't know. I'm looking forward to finding out.

Mister Action's uniform still looks kinda doofus to me, but based on his first outing, this might just work. Jimmy Olson is obviously trying to base his costumed persona upon Superman, but we'll see how effective is imitation. And Lois is right when she says "So it's true-- all the good names are taken." Jimmy could have been a bit more imaginative in choosing a name. Oh, I know it's because in a previous incarnation of the DC Universe he was "Mister Action" for (if I remember rightly) WGBS News, the station's sort-of-ombudsman.

We have a look-in on Mary Marvel, who's looking for help from Zatanna. Mary really does have some serious anger issues, though I have to admit having shared similar feelings towards hecklers.

Holly Robinson is getting a bit uncomfortable with some of the policies of the Athenian Women's Shelter. We're starting to see a few cracks in their facade -- just what is their real agenda?

Darkseid is making a bit more of an appearance here. He shows a few unexpected depths, though he really doesn't want anyone to know. I mean, he really doesn't want anyone to know. Plus, we see someone whom I think is Bug, though I had thought he was killed a few decades ago. Then again, on "New Earth", who knows?

Piper and Trickster follow through on their idea to enlist Penguin's help in hiding -- at least briefly. We get a connection (finally!) to the events of 52, as well. Where's that going to lead? Well, that's the question.

41 and counting...

"Seriously. Nice work."

That's the opening line to Countdown 41, and it's also a fair review of the issue, as well.

At last, as we've seen in the past few issues, the story is finally starting to move forward.

Trickster and Pied Piper find a (somewhat damp) way out of their predicament, but find themselves in a bit of a different pickle, ending up in Gotham City. They're (as they put it) "public enemies numbers one and one-A!" Trickster seems to have an idea, though, as to where they can go for help. Seems he's buds with the proprietor of the Iceberg Lounge.

Jimmy Olson is trying to implement his idea -- to become a superhero -- and, by this point it seems like he's got a truly doofus plan to achieve it. I dunno, in the end it might all work out, but to me it looks like it's mainly got potential to humiliate him beyond all description.

Mister Action?

Mary Marvel just gets a look-in here, as she questions the changes to her personality since she gained Black Adam's powers. She's not as oblivious to what's been happening as it's appeared. It looks like she's about to pick up a mentor, welcome or not. Can anyone say Eclipso?

Donna Troy, Jason Todd, and Ryan Choi, along with Bob the Monitor (you had to be there), have left for the Palmerverse, in search of Ray Palmer. First stop, the jungle land from the long-ago Sword of the Atom.

Back in Gotham, at the Athenian Women's Center, Holly Robinson has to restrain Harly Quinn from trying to demonstrate their peacefulness by breaking a few heads. While she might be off her infatuation with Joker, she certainly hasn't lost the violent edge she had as his girlfriend. Question is, is she still homicidal?

Finally, the Legionnaires tell Karate Kid that he's not to return to the 30th Century. This is the 30th Century Legion, right? Doesn't look much like the 31st Century one. Then again, there's been so many reboots of the Legion that I've lost count. He stays behind with Una, one of the parts of Triplicate Girl. Without her counterparts, I'm not sure just what, if any powers she has. Umm. Maybe this is the current continuity explanation of Duo Damsel?