“Countdown” #12-1

I’m going to be up front with you: yes, I did #12-1 in one go to get it over with. Ripping the bandage off, as it were. Can you blame me? Of course, that means more work for me, as 12 issues is quite a bit to recap as things are finally happening at a relatively quick pace. Oh well, here goes!

Issues #12-8 are almost entirely set on Apokolips, with nearly the entire main cast present. So, how did we get here? The Challengers were already there after being teleported by Nix Uotan. Holly, Harley, and Mary end up there shortly after Hippolyta mounts her attack on “Athena,” revealing her true identity to the Amazons (Granny Goodness, in case you forgot, though I’d certainly understand if you had). As Granny makes an escape to Apokolips via Boom Tube, Holly, Harley, and Mary follow her. Piper is delirious in the desert when he sees a bright light and mysteriously finds himself on the hellish planet. Brother Eye learns of Apokolips’ existence and decides to assimilate it, taking Una and Val with it. And Jimmy sees the words “to Apokalips” in the condensation on his mirror after taking a shower. This all happens in issue #12, the “oh shit, we have to get everybody into the same place to conclude the story in time” issue.

Now that the gang is all here, why are they all here? Clearly it’s all according to some kind of plan because Solomon the Monitor and Darkseid are playing a game of chess with pieces shaped like the various characters at play. I can tolerate the trope of adversaries playing chess against each other that symbolically represents their supposedly cunning machinations, and the trope of seeing various characters as pieces on a chessboard, but combining the two is extraordinarily groan-worthy.

Jason, in a moment of being somewhat smart, realizes he doesn’t really have a part here and wants to just get back to Earth. It was only a moment, though, as he decides to just say smell you later to the Challengers and head off on his own. I can suspend my disbelief about, say, Batman surviving on a literal hellworld, because he’s Batman and we just expect him to be able to do these things, but I think Jason is a bit outclassed here. While scurrying around Apokolips he comes across Val and Una, the latter of whom has been turned into an OMAC by Brother Eye. Jason at first helps Val fight the possessed Una, but upon being told Val doesn’t want to kill her Jason, again, goes off on his own. Without Jason’s help, Val is bested by OMAC Una, who takes him to Brother Eye to be vivisected so Brother Eye can find out why he couldn’t be OMAC-ified.

Shortly after arriving on Apokolips, Holly, Harley, and Mary find themselves in battle with Granny’s new Female Furies. They injure a couple, indirectly kill (?) another, and manage to get away. As they’re lost in Apokolips, Mary claims to be able to hear the voice of the gods and manages to track the sound to some kind of… machine? Where the gods have been trapped by Darkseid? To be fair, that’s pretty Kirby-esque, I’m not going to criticize it. With a good ol’ “Shazam!” Mary manages to break the gods free and they, understanding her previous crimes of torture and being an accessory to murder were a little “oopsie-daisy,” return her powers to her (and, just for funsies, give temporary powers to Holly and Harley). Holly, Harley, and Mary catch up with Granny. Before they can confront her, though, some guy we don’t see appears and blows her up, then flies away. Cool! Great storytelling!

So what’s going on with Piper? After at first thinking he’s actually in hell (which, fair), Piper decides that at this point he should just off himself by breaking open the bomb-rigged handcuff still attached to him (which, again, fair). Before he can do the deed, though, Desaad appears and finally reveals how Piper fits into this whole mess. Looks like he created the murder handcuffs and has been guiding Piper this whole time because he holds the keys to the Anti-Life equation, Darkseid’s ultimate goal. They’re interrupted by Brother Eye becoming one with Apokolips, and rather than playing a song to unleash the anti-life equation Piper plays one that blows up Desaad’s head and another that… I guess broke Brother Eye? Would you be shocked if I told you it isn’t explained well?

Shortly after these events the nearly the entire cast is united (the “how?” doesn’t matter). Una has been turned back to normal after the seeming defeat of Brother Eye, but Val is on death’s door after being cut open for examination by the super-intelligence. As far as Ray is aware the Great Disaster that has been foretold has nothing to do with Darkseid and everything to do with the mysterious disease that Karate Kid his carrying. While Ray wants Val to be cured, he’s willing to let Val die if it means saving the multiverse from the plague he’s carrying (while most of the heroes don’t like this, Jason is basically chomping at the bit to kill him now). Jimmy finally arrives with the Forever People in tow (if you don’t know who they are, don’t worry, they are not particularly relevant to these final few issues at all), with the brilliant idea of taking the fight to Darkseid.

Before they can follow through with Jimmy’s idea to fight basically the biggest bad of the DCU with Jimmy’s unreliable powers Solomon appears before the heroes to basically tell them how stupid an idea that is. Besides it being a bad idea on its face, Solomon also reveals that Darkseid has been using Jimmy as a receptacle of godlike powers as he has been killing off the New Gods (which, again, isn’t happening in this series). Once the rest of the New Gods are dead, Darkseid will reclaim the powers he has been “storing” in Jimmy and become the ruler of a new Fifth World. Having revealed this, Solomon teleports the heroes away to Earth. Supposedly he has a reason for this, but having finished the series I’m not 100% certain what that is.

After a while it becomes apparent that the Earth our characters have found themselves on is not quite their Earth. For the most part everything appears the same, but with one key difference: every single one of our main characters appears to have never existed. Deciding to put this issue on the backburner, the party takes the seriously ill Karate Kid to where Jimmy remembers a Cadmus lab being to see if they can cure him or at least isolate his virus. After dealing with some security robot/monster things, the party is greeted by lesser-known Jack Kirby creation Dubbilex, who reads the party’s minds to confirm their stories before mentioning that, by the way, Val is already dead.

What follows is a bizarre couple of issues, #6 and #5. These two issues have no dialogue, and are narrated entirely by a Cadmus scientist at this lab named Buddy Blake (if that name sounds familiar, it’s the name of the original OMAC). Buddy narrates how Cadmus scientists were unable to develop a cure because the virus being a) intelligent and b) from the future means it can keep ahead of any cure they can come up with. At one point the virus manages to escape the clean room, and although Kyle contains it within 20 seconds, 20 seconds is enough. We soon see its effects on one of the Cadmus scientists: while it just made Val feverish, apparently the real power of the virus is that it turns people bestial and makes animals human-like. That’s… weird. And even if it hadn’t escaped in Cadmus we soon learn that some areas of this Earth were infected while the heroes were putzin’ about. This raises the question why the heroes themselves aren’t infected (maybe that was explained in a throwaway line of dialogue, but I’m not going back to check). In a hard-to-pin span of time, this Earth is soon plagued by human/animal monsters and hurtling toward ruin.

When Buddy decides to dip out on Cadmus and reconnect with his daughter and granddaughter, Una forces him to let her come with him for reasons I cannot begin to fathom. The odd couple travel to the apartment of Buddy’s daughter and find his grandson, but are then attacked by the family dog, who is now a weird looking little manlet. Una fights the weird man-puppy while Buddy escapes to the roof, only to find himself confronted by his own daughter, who is now a (lower-case c) catwoman. Before Buddy is sliced open by his own daughter Una shows up and holds her off, slipping Buddy her Legion flight ring before her and the cat lady are eaten alive by a bunch of tiny ratmen. Buddy flies with his grandson to this world’s Brother Eye, which is a satellite orbiting Earth, and observes as the madness going on Earth deteriorates into nuclear holocaust. This plot line ends with this awful, Playstation-1-cinematics-looking page where Buddy bemoans making his grandson the “last boy on Earth:”

So that’s it! That’s the Great Disaster we’ve heard so much about. It’s just a setup for Kamandi. Also Buddy got OMAC powers, but whatever, that doesn’t play a factor in the plot at all. I guess the heroes just kinda sat there in the Cadmus bunker watching all this unfold and then teleported away at the end using Jimmy’s powers? Not very heroic if you ask me! We later find out through some comment by Solomon that this was once again Earth-51, and that Nix Uotan had managed to recreate it (for whatever reason leaving out the “Countdown” protagonists) only for this to happen to it. Whatever.

So with one of the major threats seemingly having reached its conclusion (there had been some comments about this disease being a threat to the multiverse that are never brought up again), the team is back on New Earth. Jason, Holly, and Harley decide they’re done with this wild ride and head back to Gotham and don’t do anything else meaningful for the next few issues. Mary heads back to her apartment but finds an unwelcome guest: Darkseid, just chilling in a chair in her room. Darkseid offers Mary her old powers back. After all, it wasn’t the powers themselves that were bad, it was Eclipso’s malign influence! Sure, she has some power now, but it’s not as much as it used to be because the gods, who have been very unfair to her, don’t trust her. All Darkseid asks for is one teeny-tiny favor.

As a quick note, at this point I’m okay with Mary being tempted by the power because we’ve already established that this is who she is now. It wasn’t really earned earlier on in the series, but at least this is consistent with how she has been characterized in this specific book.

Not long afterward Mary shows up back in black to take Jimmy off Kyle and Donna’s hands, assumedly as her favor to Darkseid. Why couldn’t he get Jimmy? Whatever, who cares. Mary fights the two for a bit but pretty handily absconds with everyone’s favorite ambiguously young photojournalist. Before Darksied can retrieve the powers from Jimmy (killing him in the process most likely) Superman appears and the two duke it out a bit as the two usually do before Darkseid gets the upper hand by manipulating Jimmy’s powers to turn him into walking kryptonite. While this fight is going on, though, Ray is inside Jimmy’s body and finds the device allowing him to control Jimmy’s powers and smashes it. With his powers his own now, Jimmy transforms into a giant monster man straight out of the Silver Age and the final battle begins.

Darkseid and Jimmy fight for a while, and while it seems like Jimmy might have a chance at first it turns out just being a big scary monster isn’t quite enough to best the god of all evil. Darkseid is about to finish off Jimmy and claim his powers when Ray comes back to normal size, having found the vessel within Jimmy that contained these powers and shattering it. Darkseid is about to kill Ray and Jimmy in his fury, but suddenly who comes to save the day but Orion! You know, Orion, Darkseid’s son! He appeared literally once in this series and it was such a minor appearance that I didn’t even mention it. The two fight and talk a bit about the events of “Death of the New Gods,” but not enough to really explain anything that went on in there, and eventually Orion kills his dear old dad. That’s it. That’s the climax of “Countdown.”

The final issue, #1, is mainly a waste of time. It’s standard winding-down-the-plot type stuff, nothing that really salvages the mess this whole series has been. By far the funniest scenes, however, involve Kyle, Ray, and Donna. They’re certainly not funny deliberately, and they’re not even so-bad-it’s-funny. What’s funny is knowing in hindsight how absolutely meaningless they are. Justly concluding that the Monitors can no longer be trusted, and with an extremely awful “Watchmen” reference in the form of “Who monitors the Monitors,” the three decide that they will dedicate themselves to making sure the Monitors never allow a mess like this to happen again. I’m pretty certain this is never followed-up on again, and in fact could not be further explored because Morrison got rid of the Monitors at the end of “Final Crisis.” Guess Dini et al. didn’t get the notice.

I know I completely ignored the art, but as I was concerned with at the beginning of the series it just feels unfair. Derenick has a pretty good issue at one point, but for the most part we’re in the home stretch and the art is usually a mess as the various artists are clearly pushing themselves to make deadlines. Even Kolins, whose loose dynamism allows him to “cheat” a bit and not show wear as badly as some artists do looks extremely rough in the climactic issue #2. Besides, I can’t deny that these gave up all pretense of being true “reviews” a long time ago and are more just pure recaps with snide commentary at this point. How else could one treat a beast such as “Countdown?”

So, 51 issues later, what have we learned. Not much! “Countdown” was an absolute waste of time, and as I mentioned when I first started this I can’t imagine how ripped-off I’d feel if I had spent roughly one hundred and fifty United States dollars on this mess only for it to a) be terrible and b) not have any particular relevance to “Final Crisis.” Please learn from my mistake and do not read this mess. It isn’t worth it! There’s a reason “DC Universe” #0 pretty much completely ignores it to set the stage for “Final Crisis.” Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to read some good comics.