MARVEL CHECKLIST

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Paul o'Brien:

COUNTDOWN is DC's new weekly series, following on from the enormous
success of 52. It's a countdown to, well, something - so it's starting
with issue #51, and working back from there.

DC have learned from some of their mistakes. This series will have
rotating creative teams rather than collaboration by committee. The
usually-reliable Paul Dini serves as head writer, with a group of
collaborators handling individual stories. The "real time" gimmick has
gone as well, partly because this book has to tie in with the whole DC
line, and partly because it created real pacing difficulties that
weren't worth the hassle.

Of course, doing it this way, DC open themselves to a different problem
- their key books have been so plagued by delayed over the last year
that to tie them all into a weekly series like Countdown seems a real
hostage to fortune. DC proved last year that they could deliver a
weekly book on time; they also proved that they couldn't do the same
with a monthly. To make this work, the whole line has to run to
schedule, and fill-ins won't help. I don't believe DC can do it - not
unless they've learned a ton of lessons from the fiasco of the last
twelve months. I'm willing to be proved wrong.

At first, I wasn't planning to bother with Countdown. I'd read 52 and I
didn't feel the urge to take it any further. But after reading some of
the early reviews, I was sufficiently baffled to give it a look.
Surely, DC couldn't really be doing what the reviews seemed to suggest?

But no, there it is on page three: "I see the time fast approaching when
existence itself shall be recreated, and Darkseid shall be its
architect..."

AGAIN?!?

Does this company have no other ideas? The DC Universe is starting to
feel like a world that gets re-created six times before breakfast. And
while that's all very well for these big, sweeping cosmic stories, it's
a disaster for the other titles that are just trying to get on with
telling their stories. Reboots need to be handled very, very carefully,
because they undermine the basic principle that What Happens Matters.
If you have a universe where the basic principle is that everything gets
rebooted all the time, nothing has any weight. It doesn't matter
because it won't stick. You can get away with it as a continuity
house-cleaning exercise at very infrequent intervals, but that's it.

Even if DC aren't really planning a further continuity reboot, it's
sheer folly even to tease one. They've only just had one. They need to
bed it down and make it work. If they want to bring back the
Multiverse, fine - do some stories with the Multiverse. Have some
characters go off and explore the other universes. But for heaven's
sake, steer clear of rewriting reality. It's the one story that they
shouldn't even be hinting at for the next four or five years, and here
they are putting it front and centre. I despair of this company.

The actual story involves the Joker's Daughter being attacked by a rogue
Monitor. Apparently she's now a character from a parallel universe,
which is presumably supposed to explain away her nightmarishly
convoluted continuity - except, of course, it's an explanation that only
became valid after the Multiverse was restored, and so it doesn't
explain the previous stories after all. Or does it?

Hanging around with her is a character who I gather is the Red Hood,
although helpfully, nobody actually names him or explains who he is.
(Duela addresses him, once, as "Little red robin hood", and that's as
close as it gets.) I don't know who the bloody Red Hood is, and this
book apparently can't be bothered telling me. Near the end, somebody
finally identifies him as Jason Todd, who I know used to be Robin, but
I've got no clue why he's wearing this costume or what it's supposed to
signify.

You will probably not be surprised to learn that, at around this point,
I throw my hands up in despair and give up. This is everything I'd
feared from Countdown. It's got a continuity obsession and, from the
look of it, little besides. I'd hoped for more from Paul Dini, who is a
gifted storyteller, but there's nothing here of any serious interest to
anyone who isn't already a devoted hardcore DC fan. The rest of us will
be alternately baffled and bored.

Rating: C