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I know I said last month that I would review the first half of the DC Comics mega-event Countdown, but with the holidays last month, I only managed to read the first twelve issues of Countdown before I had to get this article out. Instead of doing two reviews, I'm going to do four reviews over the next four months.
Countdown is DC Comics' mega-event that spans one year and will lead to another mega-event in the middle of 2008. Countdown is released weekly and the first twelve issues cover a little bit of the Amazons Attack storyline that went through the summer of last year.
The books cover six different storylines in each issue. Sometimes they dedicate only three or four pages to one of the storylines, and sometimes there's an issue where they all cross.
The six storylines are as follows:
There's the Trickster & Piper storyline that looks at what these two villains are doing and how they are involved in the storyline going on in The Flash comics. There's the Donna Troy, Red Hood, The 'New' Atom and Monitor storyline who are traveling into the Palmerverse to find the former Atom, Ray Palmer, who left the superhero life after things happened with his wife and is now the key to saving the fifty-two universes from the impending doom. The Jimmy Olson storyline is up next; where Jimmy starts out investigating the death of a Teen Titan and after the death of a New God is developing strange abilities in stressful situations. There's the Mary Marvel storyline next, and in the first issue we see her checking out of the hospital after the events in last years mega-event 52. She learns that her stay has already been fully paid for and then she goes to find the person who paid for her stay. Along with that we learn that Mary no longer has her powers. Along the way she meets Black Adam and he transfers his powers to her. The next to last storyline is the Karate Kid storyline which covers his stay in the past trying to fulfill a destiny along with Una (the Legionnaire formerly known as Triplicate Girl). The last storyline involves Holly Robinson who has come to Gotham City to start a new life and is somehow involved in the whole mess with the Amazons.
The art on the books are good with no one artist taking on more than one or two issues. The interior art that I liked from this block of issues was issue number 41. The art in that issue has an almost realistic painted quality to it, and it is definitely not your average comic book style art. It was something that I could equate to the art in the Marvels limited series that was put out a couple years ago by Marvel Comics. I'll also say that the coloring on comics has improved since I last read a comic over fifteen years ago. It is amazing what they can do with computers these days that improves the art quality from the 1990's.
The covers are good as well, but sometimes they have little to do with what goes on in the issue. Take for example the first issue of the series, number 51; it has a gatefold cover with some of the better known DC heroes on it and yet we are lucky to see any one of those heroes in this issue.
The writing on the issues is enough to keep me interested and that is saying a lot. The writers do a good job of keeping things going and keeping continuity with the issues of regular series like The Justice League of America or Teen Titans. They also make readers want to go out and spend the extra money on the issues of other DC Comics just to know what in the world has been going on.
I'll give this series of twelve issues about a four out of five stars, but they need to really step things up a notch of they want to squeeze that final star out of me.
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