Countdown to Final Crisis: Eleven


countdown 11As we saw last week, all of the major players of Countdown were either given specific instructions to head to Apokolips, or headed there instead out of blind instinctual luck. They’re all parts of the biggest game of chess since Deep Blue defeated World Champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. Only, this game has cosmic influence, and, hopefully, this time around, the robot will lose. Wait, neither of the players are robots? Oh well.

So, who will win, if it can’t be a robot? Darkseid or Monitor Solomon? Did I even mention last week that they’re playing chess? If I forgot, which I think I did, yeah, they’ve been playing chess since issue 51, which I guess explains why all the characters on this shit series do and say things that don’t make any sense (they’re being manipulated by the cosmic chess game!).

Anyway, what goes down in this issue? In a nutshell, OMACs, Parademons, and Female Furies, oh my! Goddamnit, that’s the tiredest joke ever. I’ll make it up to you before this is over, I swear.

We start with things on Apokolips, where the OMACs and Brother Eye have arrived and are immediately attacked by Darkseid’s Parademons. This prompts Monitor Solomon to evidently put Darkseid in, “Check.” Either way, it’s two swarms of annoying bad guys fighting, so we all lose.

Elsewhere, the Challengers also arrive on Apokolips, and they start trying to figure out what to do. Red Robin leaves them behind, because he’s tired of their whining (his narration is so dumbed down, it’s laughable), and he’s decided to find somebody who will give him a way back to his Earth’s Gotham City. Ok. In the hands of a competent writer, I think Jason Todd could still be salvaged from this trainwreck. That new costume is pretty cool.

Somewhere else on Apokolips, Granny Goodness sets loose her Female Furies on the team of Holly, Harley, and Mary. One of the Furies dies, and I guess that’s all. The fighting is really disorienting, and you can’t really tell what’s going on most of the time, but the three main girls win, so there’s that.

Surprisingly, Jimmy Olsen and Forager don’t go to Apokolips, though. They make a quick stopover somewhere else, referred to as “The Habitat,” in order for Jimmy to enlist the aid of some group of really terribly designed characters. The main one has long brown hair, a goatee, a yellow headband, a blue tunic that goes down to his knees (with a yellow shirt underneath it), gold bracelets, a belt made up of pouches, and then big giant blue boots that come up to the base of the tunic at the knees, with gold-tipped toes. He also has lots of earrings. I don’t know who these guys are, but a quick check of Jimmy’s Wikipedia page leads me to believe they’re The Hairies, a group of technologically savvy hippies.

Read that last sentence again.

Jack Kirby’s work does not stand the test of time. At all. Leave it alone.

I digress. The “main” thing that “happens” this week, happens on Apokolips with Karate Kid and Una. He’s healthy, fighting OMACs, talking about how bad it would be if Brother Eye got a hold of him, and then, instead, Una turns into an OMAC. Raise your hand if you’re sick and tired of anything and everything related to OMACs.

I couldn’t finish the rest of that paragraph because I couldn’t type, due to both of my hands being raised high in the air.

The more it “ramps up” all of its big stories, you see how anticlimactic everything is turning out to be, and this series just keeps getting worse and worse. It’s pathetic, really.

Oh, and about that cover. Pied Piper gets a page on Apokolips where he decides to kill himself (since his Boom Tube of hope brought him to Apokolips, of all places), but somebody off camera says he shouldn’t.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if something actually happened in this shitty series? Every week these days, they show us a whole bunch of different characters about to do something, and then the next week, that thing is done, and they get ready to do something else. It’s so goddamn annoying.