Another Countdown Ends

This past Wednesday, DC's latest weekly comic stumbled and fell across the finish line, completing a journey that now seems largely wasted. This 51-issue series that has been almost universally-panned by fans and critics alike, managed just one noteworthy feat: like 52 before it, Countdown provided a new issue to the reader each and every week, like clockwork, for (essentially) one solid year.

DC had originally planned Countdown as a 52-issue run which would employ reverse numbering, starting with # 51, then # 50, and so on down before finally wrapping up with a (Jimmy Hinckley-friendly) final issue, numbered zero. Partway through its existence, however, plans changed, and Countdown # 0 morphed into DC Universe # 0 (which is out next week, for a bargain basement price of a mere $0.50), meaning that this particular weekly series came up one week short of a year.

So, yes, Countdown came out reliably, and I give DC a non-trivial amount of credit for that. It's a tough act to follow one year-long weekly comic with a second one, but they did it. But was it any good? Frankly, it was almost without exception quite crappy! There were a few issues in the second half of the run that actually got me interested, but even they didn't really go anywhere. We got to see the events leading up to Kamandi's tale (the last boy on Earth), but so many plot holes were left unfilled that it might as well have been an Elseworlds story (which, given the use of the DC Multiverse, I guess it sort of was). I didn't buy Mary Marvel going bad for a minute, and yet here we are now, stuck with a "Black Mary" character who I couldn't care less about. I was sick of Jimmy Olsen by the second issue, and hadn't changed my opinion of him one iota by the time the series wrapped up. None of the recurring characters were engaging, in fact. And other than killing off the New Gods - which, I believe, actually happened in the Death of the New Gods mini-series that ran alongside Countdown - I'm not sure anything of any import happened in the 51 issues. That's approximately $150 of the consumer's money, for... what? 51 reliable installments of pretty bad comic stories.

I have higher hopes for the third DC weekly, Trinity, but if it doesn't deliver then I'm dropping it. And yes, I said the same thing about Countdown before it started up, but I also asked to have it reserved at the comic store, after which I felt obliged to stick with it (since at any given point during the last year, the next 3 months' worth of issues had already been ordered by the store and I didn't want to leave the owner holding the bag, as it were). No such "pull order" has been placed by Your Humble Blogger on Trinity, as I'm not about to get burned like that again!