After a week or two hiatus of the Lowdown, here is…
New Frontiers
here’s the lowdown…
- The Challengers are on Earth 3 taking on the Crime syndicate… no wait, the Crime Society
- The Challengers are about to get their tails handed to them when the Jokester (Earth 3’s hero version of the Joker) jumps in and even the odds
- After Bob determines that Ray Palmer is no longer on Earth 3, the Challengers teleport out
- Monarch shows up and offers the chance for the Society revenge and to be part of his multi-verse conquest
- Holly sends a letter to Selina dealing with what’s been going on in the Athenian Women shelters… it seems like the letter is intercepted
- Mr. Myxlplyx is ripped out of the fifth dimension by an unknown force (my bet is on Monarch)
- Eclipso finally gets Mary Marvel alone and promises her to be the mentor she needs
- Part of Eclipso’s seduction involved Mary turning three guards to stone
- Una and Karate Kid finally find Buddy Blank
- Cadmus labs starts to analyze Jimmy Olsen, and the experiment gets out of control as Jimmy’s body stretches and bloats out
- The Monitors turn their full attention to the Challengers and decide they must be stopped at all cost
- Origin of the Joker
So 21 issues down and 31 left to go… roughly… which means at $2.99 a cover that’s about $93 for the rest of the Countdown story. This is a tough pill for me to swallow given I’m only really interested in some of the Countdown players (Mr. Didio – please either kill Jimmy Olsen or never mention him again… either would be wonderful). Given the level of talent attached to the Countdown book (Dini, Waid, McKeever, Giffen just to name a few), every week Countdown should be blowing every fanboy and girl out of their seats… and the bottom line is… it’s not.
Truth be told, I can’t blame Dan Didio or Bob Wayne (VP – Sales) for being good business people. DC sold a weekly comic that for the most part was really ground breaking (52), they followed it up with Countdown, which parts of are very good and other parts are nothing more than filler. And we, the fan-populace have bought it. Out and out, we bought it. I had the pleasure of meeting both Mr. Wayne and Mr. Didio at Wizard World Chicago this year and listening into the DC Nation panel. It was made very clear that the whole DC family loves a good story / book but financially speaking if we keep buying it… DC will keep making weekly comics from here until the Final Crisis, Final Edition… or something like that, as long as it is financially reasonable for them to do so.
Before I make my requests, I want to applaud DC for several things in the last couple years. First, giving a great central story scaffolding that does impact all of the DC universe (Identity Crisis, 52, Infinite Crisis, Countdown, Final Crisis, etc.), it is a great thing to have all the stories pointed in the same direction and not having one story arc undo what happen six months earlier (granted I have heard some fans complaining about “undoing” Crisis on Infinite Earths… but that was a while ago). And then DC did what nobody (even some of the creators, according to their own blogs) thought they could do, every issue of 52 and Countdown so far has been on time, while keeping the majority of the other DC books in order also (thank you Ms. Jones). And then very recently, I think it was a great idea coming up with the 52 / Countdown spin-off books (The Four Horsemen, Countdown to Adventure, Countdown to Mystery, The Crime Bible, etc.), so I can follow what characters and stories I want to follow and catch up with the other less exciting story-lines online or in Wizard. Let it be known, that I think DC is doing a great deal right, I’m a DC-ite… but I just wish there was more substance to Countdown, which is the central story-line weekly book.
So, in short (I know, too late) this is a request of the DC family of creators… please don’t feed us crap-and-filler sandwiches just because we are hungry and have money in our pockets. And a request to the world of fanboys and girls out there, we need to start watching where our precious pesos go and be careful what we buy on a whim… the comic companies will sell what we are buying and what we buy determines future projects… case in point: Zombie Civil War ring a bell?
