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catlord posted:I would love to read about the Countdown spin-offs, because everybody knows how terrible Countdown itself is and why, but I hear very little about like, Arena and Salvation Run. I loving love the Countdown spinoffs because they make mistakes you would not even think possible. Like, here, I'll do it, I'll be That Guy who admits he read every single issue of Countdown at the time. Do you know how loving much Countdown there was, all together? 52 main issues + 40 issues of spinoffs (4 Arena, 8 Adventure, 8 Mystery, 6 Search for Ray Palmer, 6 Lord Havok and the Extremists, 8 Death of the New Gods which I'll admit wasn't technically Countdown-branded but was heavily cross-promoted...) + a bunch of poo poo that dove in and out of the pages of Countdown (Amazons Attack and Salvation Run both wove in and out of the book early on, an entire plotline was following off of a Legion of Super-Heroes arc I never could be arsed to read)... it was a sprawl. I think someone did the math and Civil War has it beat in terms of tie-ins, but keep in mind I'm also only counting things which had "Countdown Presents" on it, DONG aside. But hey, people have covered Countdown proper in a lot of places, and you asked about the tie-ins, so here, let me tell you how (almost) everything that touched this series hosed up in astounding ways. Disclaimer: I haven't re-read any of these since they came out. I'm probably horsing up finer plot details. I do not care. Countdown to Adventure was kind of the ultimate comparison point if you want to try beating that old "Countdown is 52 done right" quote to death some more. Remember how Buddy Baker, Adam Strange, and Starfire traveled across a lunatic cosmos in the wake of Infinite Crisis to get back home? Let's have them do that again except this time, we're going to throw in relationship drama between Buddy and his wife (please recall this man has JUST COME BACK FROM NEAR-DEATH for his wife in 52), a bizarre, not entirely consistent space plague that's also a mind control meme, and oh just for the hell of it, we're going to give you eight issues of what everyone wanted from a backup story: The Adventures of Forerunner. I think anyone reading this knows, but let me tell you about Forerunner. Forerunner is why  exists. (Yes, I saved that over 2 dead hard drives for 6 years.) She was basically a space-Goku working for the Monitors who they all secretly feared because h- you know what she's literally Goku, her entire race was wiped out by her new boss Meanwhile, the main story involved Cliff ogling Starfire every other page, Maxine nearly dying a lot, and Ellen ignoring her super-faithful husband's pleas that he didn't want to bang the space princess so there was 'drama'. I know Rann was involved somehow but I've totally forgotten how since Adam Strange just came to Earth near-instantly anyway to join up with the rest of the cast. Spoilers: the same villain they wiped out in 52 (Lady Styx) was also behind the whole drat thing again. I really wasn't kidding about this being like a crappy sequel to their 52 plot. Countdown to Mystery is the only one I'm not going to poo poo on. It was supposed to transition into a new Dr. Fate series from Steve Gerber, but his failing health meant that it wouldn't come to pass. He actually passed away in the middle of making these 8 issues, and the final one was various other writers offering their tribute to the man/interpretation of where the story might have finished. I remember it having some clunky bits, but nothing worth calling out. Say what you will about anything else that goes in this thread, I think this is the only one you can point at and go "Yeah an actual human's illness-turned-death derailed everything about the project". RIP, Steve. Countdown: Arena was "Remember when you all phoned in to kill Jason Todd? Let's do that on a larger scale", the comic. If you don't know what happened here, the gimmick was that The Monarch (no, not the Venture Bros. character, the guy mentioned earlier in this thread as being Captain Atom in planning, Hawk in execution) was finally Captain Atom, and he wanted to make his own Justice League out of the best, nastiest dudes in all the multiverse: the hardest-core Superman, and Batman, and... etc. So a website was made which put up 4 of each for voting by fans, to determine who was going to win the fights in the book. The huge problem with this is that Arena was basically one of the biggest sources of continuity making GBS threads the bed in Countdown - which universe was what number might change randomly from book to book, or contradict stuff laid down prior to the series, or- you get the gist. It also took the blank template 52 left (a multiverse with 51 other universes we could poke at later, left open intentionally for people to create new ideas and fill in those gaps over the years to come) and went "Nope, about 20 of them are now just old Elseworlds stories which are no longer in print/gimmick worlds." Did you know that one of the "old" 52 universes was straight up just "it's New Earth but genderswapped"? Because that happened. You also need to realize a lot of characters/universes debuted in this book and were instantly murdered. Because it was fan-decided, it meant that anyone new on the roster was basically going to get trashed so that Vampire Batman didn't die off since that was an existing character people had some nostalgia for, as opposed to a blank slate nobody was invested in. Sure, it sucks that we didn't get to find out what the deal was with the Green Lantern of the Batman Beyond universe, but that was literally all we knew about him: "Comes from the Batman Beyond universe. Is Green Lantern. Currently unnamed." Anyway, in the end, this series was moot on three levels. First off, because we kept checking in on the Monarch in Countdown itself, a lot of the fights were set in stone or written around because he was already siccing his goon squad on the multiverse/Monitors in the main book and it locked in some of the victors. Second, almost everyone escapes in the end anyway, so the winners of the fights are also nullified when it comes down to "only the folks who WANT to kill Monitors stick around, not necessarily the people voted on" (who were only voted on in a 'who would win if 1, 2, 3, and 4 fought' fashion anyway). Third: he didn't give a crap because his plan was actually "have all the Captain Atoms in the universe attack him, at which point he would absorb them all to become a Captain Atom with the power of 50 Captain Atoms". NO, REALLY. And then Superboy-Prime killed him anyway, ripping his suit a teeny bit and making all his Atom juice explode out, destroying an entire multiverse. Even in getting wiped out he was still trashing worlds so that other writers couldn't use them. (Fun fact: remember Nix Uotan from Final Crisis? His universe was the one that Monarch wiped out. From memory, they reused the number twice due to crappy editorial control, so his universe actually died TWICE in the pages of Countdown, once via Monarch exploding, once via I forget.)  No, really, that page right there destroyed an entire universe. Speaking of crapping all over Elseworlds stories, The Search for Ray Palmer was Kyle Rayner (who was also a key component in fighting the Sinestro Corps War at this exact moment - I don't think we ever got an explanation on how that worked), Donna Troy, and Jason Todd traveling the multiverse with a Monitor named "Bob". The entire plot for this crew was that they were looking for Ray Palmer, the Atom, who could supposedly prevent a Great Disaster, which was why he was on the run from ??? and had vanished a while back. He was leaving clues for whoever might want to find him in the form of giving Atom-logo tramp stamps to various people in the multiverse. The book had some of the worst art you'd see in the pages of Countdown by a large margin given that every issue was a different universe/artist trying to match the style of the original work being tampered with. This was from the Superman: Red Son universe. I swear to you, this art is not stretched poorly or crunched down, this is how it appeared on the page in the books.   This series ended with a wet fart in the form of visiting that gender-swapped universe I mentioned, wherein they arrive just as the events of Amazons Attack are playing out (and this time... the Amazons all have dicks). Spoiler alert: the ending still blows, but this time they meet with the she-Atom who goes "Oh, you're looking for Ray? Yeah, he was here, tattooed me, and I promised I wouldn't tell anyone this or where he went at all." So the cast go back to Countdown proper to look for Ray some more. That's right: the search for Ray Palmer doesn't make a single bit of progress or conclude at all in the series named after the guy. Okay, this one is my favorite for all the wrong reasons: Lord Havok and the Extremists is a story revolving around characters who were tertiary villains in old Justice League stories years ago, who now have their own universe in the multiverse, and oh, they had been dead for two months (our time) by the time this miniseries hit the stands. This book was solicited and ordered by shop owners months in advance, and then in Countdown proper they just loving died. All of them. So the miniseries began with "This takes place before Countdown #20-something" and ends with OOPS KYLE RAYNER AND HIS BUDDIES ARE HERE LORD HAVOK. Literally the most unnecessary tie-in in all of Countdown. Now onto the ones that make my head hurt. Death of the New Gods is a huge tire fire in and of itself, but it also covered stuff that was in Countdown and I want to say at least one other book going on at the same time? My brain tells me that we had no less than three seperate instances of Darkseid being killed within a month of each other, and none of them matched up. Anyway, the plot's pretty easy to guess: something's killing the New Gods. Now, in Countdown proper, Jimmy Olsen is banging a bug-woman and trying to solve this mystery himself, but in DONG, Superman and Scott "Mister Miracle" Free are working the case, with the latter occasionally using the Anti-Life Equation to bring people back from the dead and still not learning who did it in the process. That happens, by the way. Again: not making this up. It turns out in the end the Source did it. Remember the Source Wall? Well, once upon a time, the Source murdered all of the Old Gods (the Third World) and tried to get it right with attempt #4. But in the process, the Old Gods spat in its face with their dying breath, and made the Source Wall, to divide the two halves of the Source from one another. And one was white and 'good' and the other was black and 'evil', which we know because apparently one was made of Anti-Life and the other was Life. So those turn into that alien from the old Star Trek episode and begin fighting the final survivor of the New Gods, Darkseid.  Spoilers: that dude won. Kind of. I think Darkseid runs off in the end, and instead of finishing the drat job, they just go "Well, we got him to leave Apokolips, so that works", and merge New Genesis/Apokolips into one planet: the Fifth World. Then Superman goes home. Yeah, he was there for this entire thing too, just kinda going "Sorry, y'all, this is God Stuff, I've gotta sit this out." for the last half of the miniseries. I am only mentioning Salvation Run because the dude I quoted wondered about it: Salvation Run is more interesting for the nature of its creation than the actual book. I guess the original pitch for this miniseries was an Elseworld that George R. R. Martin tried to hit DC with years prior, where he went "Okay, so Arkham Asylum and Iron Heights and all those places never really work right as jails, do they? So what say the world's governments decide on a more permanent solution for the supervillain problem: you teleport them, one-way, to another planet, and then bam, that solves the whole thing." It was supposed to follow them arriving, trying to colonize the harsh world, settling down to their new lives, and eventually just sort of living out their lives, with some appreciating what they ended up with, others never stopping in finding a way to get "home", so on. I want to say the pitch mentioned multiple generations, too, so imagine Catwoman and Joker's kid or whatever as later leaders. The basic concept was used, sure, but the problem with not making it an Elseworld is... we all know that if you send actual villains (which they did) to the planet, they get home in the end. Lex Luthor, Vandal Savage, the Joker, Gorilla Grodd? You're not just getting rid of them forever! We all know it. In the vein of Amazons Attack and other "twists" over the course of Countdown Year, Desaad was partly responsible for the whole plan, making sure that the Earth governments sent them to an Apokoliptian training planet, so by about the midway point, Parademons keep screwing with everyone. Lex, Sivana, Grodd, and Vandal Savage end up making a portal device to get them all home, they all get home, and nobody ever mentions how Martian Manhunter got left on the planet but then came home to Earth in time to die in Final Crisis. And now I never want to dredge up details of this crap from my brain again.
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Jul 8, 2014 08:53
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 21:59 |
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