Broken Frontier

Everyone is back home, but will they stay there? The Countdown is finally over, and at this point, I am willing to join everyone else with a resounding, "Thank goodness."

For the most part, I enjoyed Countdown. Yeah, I know, weird, right? I like that there was an attempt to make everything fit into one cohesive shared universe. It was exciting to me and even though the cracks started to show early on... I still have to believe that Batman and Detective happened on two different worlds... the big things happening excited me. The reveal of Granny made even Amazons Attack bearable for this reader, but as I stated last week, issue 6 on were painful. Really, my enthusiasm began to dissipate when the convergence happened. The unified story was never as good as the separate stories.

There is no way to just review this issue, it is nothing but loose end tying and not very comprehensive at that... I mean wasn’t Apokolips OMAC’d? Don’t you think that would be a pretty big deal? Nothing, nothing at all. It’s a shame really. This book did, in its own way set up the rules for the new Multiverse, but it ends with a whimper and so many things that make little sense. Did Buddy turn into 70's OMAC? Why don’t the Monitors just crush the Challengers and be done with it? What did the crazy bug chick and Jimmy discuss before going to Ray’s house? Why doesn’t Ray talk to Ryan Choi? The status quo at the end of the series is no better than it was before it began. What’s worse is that as a story it doesn’t function on its own, it depends too much on the tie-ins and peripheral minis.

As much as I enjoyed the ride, in the end, it wasn’t worth the effort of standing in line. It reminds me of when I was 12 and went to Disney World for the first time. I stood in line for 2 hours to ride 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. In the end, I could see the sky from the pilot’s seat and it was just a bunch of statues in the water. I’ll give Final Crisis a chance, and eagerly anticipate next week’s DCU #0 - hoping against hope that there is a satisfying ending to this mess, but my days of enjoying a well managed shared universe on a large scale may have lost their innocence. Oh, I’ll keep reading the books I dig - Batman, Action, and Green Lantern don’t have to worry about being cut anytime soon - but I may not be picking up every DC book as I did for the last year marveling at the site of a grand epic story.

The art provided by Tom Derenick is fitting of the book. Jimmy and Ray look the same. I swear I saw Apocalypse on the Source Wall. He is definitely of the new house style DC has developed. He resembles Norton, Williams and Batista, but he’s bad.. Very bad. Things just look wacky, off and stilted. Even Andy Kubert’s cover is less than inspired. It’s like everyone involved was tired and said just this last one.

The past several months I have read comments from Keith Giffen that made me think this thing was less than fun by the end. In interviews and his column on another website, he seemed to be taking shots at Countdown . If this is truly how it all ends, I understand why and apologize to those I chastised in the beginning of this year. 52 weeks ago, I claimed that Dini would not waste our time. Today, I admit I may have been wrong and for me the world of comics was made a little dimmer this week.