Monday, June 25, 2007

DCU's COUNTDOWN: What the...?

(This post may contain SPOILERS for the series COUNTDOWN, so if you care about that sort of thing you are officially warned off, fangirl!)

I was rushed on Saturday, so didn’t go to Comic Quest after working in Lake Forest. Sunday, Donna and I did some grocery shopping and after lunch I decided to try a place closer to home.

You can’t see Nuclear Comics & Skateshop from the street, so I didn’t know it was there until checking the phonebook. Ken, the store’s owner, is really nice and couldn’t have been more pleasant to all the customers in the shop. We will ignore the fact that guy would be Central Casting’s choice for a role in “Baywatch: Laguna Beach.” When it finally got around to my turn he took several minutes to ask what I read, or rather what I used to read when I was a regular comics buyer.

It was a surprise to have him actually recommend I NOT buy several titles, since it would have made him more money. He directed me to the new DC title COUNTDOWN, telling me that I could probably skip 52 and wait for it to be collected in TPB. I bought all the issues so far (#51 – 45), and have already read a few. I’ll try to get around to reviewing, or at least commenting on them more once I get my feelings straight.

Part of the problem, of course, is that having not read a since the hardcover edition of INDENTITY CRISIS two years ago, I’m sort of confused. When the hell did the Multiverse come back? Who are some of these charaters on the covers? There’s more than one Monitor?? Finally, how sad was it that I could still recognize all but three characters on the fold-out cover of #51?

Since when is Captain Marvel, Jr. blonde? That is Freddie, isn’t it? I thought the Red Hood (if he is called that) was a bad guy. Should I feel bad that certain characters are already being killed off even if they are former Titans? Lastly, just because the next Batman film will feature The Joker, shouldn’t mean the DCU version shouldn’t have been killed off along with Lex Luthor and Darkseid. Haven’t all three been used way too much over the past decade?

I’ll only say that Paul Dini, the series chief writer, is doing a nice job filling in some things. I don’t know if somebody totally unfamiliar with the DCU could figure things out, but there was enough so that I didn’t feel totally lost. It’s good to be reading comics again.

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