Countdown: Forty-Six

I’m giving Countdown a stay of execution. While the series didn’t improve much this week, the Jimmy Olsen story alone is going to keep me around for at least one more. So, let’s go through the quick and dirty.

This week, Jimmy Olsen decides to do some investigating after he receives an odd note at the Daily Planet. It brings him to Metropolis’ Suicide Slum (what a terrible name–nobody is going to want to move there!) where he meets up with Sleez, former servant, aide and counsel to Darkseid. Unfortunately, as he’s about to tell Jimmy how to take Darkseid out once and for all, the roof of the building they’re in collapses, somebody says some ominous words, and Sleez is shot through the chest with some light ray. Light ray. Hrm. Anyway, Jimmy sums up my thoughts perfectly when he posits the question, “What the hell is going on here?”

Elsewhere, Mary Marvel enjoys her new powers and beats up some demon made out of dead babies. Yep. Over in Keystone City, the Rogues get into a little squabble that ends about as abruptly as it began, and, in Washington DC, Jason Todd meets up with Donna Troy. Jason seems to know way more than he has any right to, which is odd, and the Monitors dispatch their personal Hit Woman, Forerunner, to take care of them, which she pretty much does. It’s a nice little bit of continuity that Jason and Donna think there’s only one Monitor. It goes against this “Every character knows everything that’s ever happened” mentality that’s been going around lately.

In a series where not much of note has happened, the introduction of Forerunner should have been quite a home run, but it simply isn’t. She’s a generic looking elven type thing with purple hair and blue skin. Actually, she looks a lot like Duela Dent, only a little bit different. She could have been a lot cooler, or, even better, the Monitors could have used a character that we’re actually familiar with so that we could be impressed by the fact that DC can make old characters that have lost our interest, well, interesting again.

That’s my real problem with this series so far. Nothing is interesting in it. There is absolutely no reason to care about anything going on so far. While continuity issues certainly are confusing, they don’t detract from the story for me nearly as much as the story detracts from itself through its sheer awfulness. I mean, at the end of 52, didn’t it strike you that Black Adam really wanted his powers back, so that he could continue World War III, so that he could kill everybody who was responsible for the loss of his family? Why would he just give them up at the beginning of Countdown? And to Mary Marvel? What a lame character to give such enormous power to. DC accomplished something with 52–they made me care about characters I had never cared about much previously. To just throw one of those away so soon, with no reason given, in this series just makes me incredibly annoyed.

I’m giving this series a shot. It just seems like DC is going out of its way to make me decide otherwise.