Countdown 43: The being known as wonder girl is weeping, I believe

This is more like it. Countdown 43 is by far the best issue of the comic so far.

Which is not to say it's good. It isn't - it's competent. But competent is still better than this series has risen to previously. If every issue of this title had been this not-terrible, I wouldn't be dropping it. As it is, this level of mundane competence isn't enough to save it, but it is enough to make me feel better about the £1.50 I spent on this issue and the £1.50 I will be spending next issue (my last).

The responsibility for this surprising display of competence could rest with several people. The most likely possibility is writers Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti - those few issues of Countdown that have displayed some small sign of ability have been theirs, to the point where my opinion of them has risen while my opinion of everyone else involved has dropped. However, it may also be that new editor Mike Carlin has stepped in and insisted on the people involved pulling their fingers out a little - Carlin has some experience of delivering superhero comics on a weekly basis thanks to his editorship of the Superman titles in the early '90s (the 'triangle number' period where the four titles were essentially one weekly).

But another possibility is that Keith Giffen has finally come onto the title. Admittedly, he's not credited, but he wasn't credited for issue 3, either, and it was later revealed that he laid out that one. The storytelling is far stronger than in earlier issues, and it has many of Giffen's stylistic tics - six- and nine-panel grids, aspect-to-aspect movement and so on.

Either way, this comic has its share of faults, but at least someone seems to be trying. In particular, the comic feels a lot more organic than the earlier issues, thanks in large part to the funeral, which contrives to bring several of the 'plot' threads (such as they are) together. Of course, this in its turn brings in one of the worst problems with the issue, which is that the funeral is in response to a death that happened in another comic - the death, in fact, of a character who has not appeared at all in this series.

Having said that, the funeral is handled as well as these things ever are, and page 4 in particular is very well done - some quite subtle characterisation is put across in the different characters' silent reactions to the funeral. Although I can't help at this point but suspect that superheroes' funerals would be more likely to be like Metamorpho's in Morrison's JLA run rather than this stadium event.

pp10 & 11 - I wonder where Monarch got those from? That size army couldn't be assembled without anyone knowing.

p12 & 13 - I suspect that most women's refuges aren't quite like this... "The beds here are warm and soft, and very big... our life must seem very dull and quiet compared to yours - we are but eight score young blondes and brunettes, all between sixteen and nineteen and a half, cut off in this castle with no-one to protect us. Oh, it is a lonely life. Bathing, dressing, undressing, making exciting underwear..."
About a million questions present themselves here - like who is paying all the women performing massages and so on - but I suspect these are things that will be answered later. However, I don't think questions like 'how is this Holly character so dense as to not realise this is some sort of trap?' will be... or indeed questions like 'who is this Holly character and why should we care?'
However, for those who don't know, Harleen Quinzel is the alter ego of Harley Quinn, a Batman villain created by Paul Dini who had an obsession with the Joker but has apparently reformed as of her most recent appearances.

p18 - At the time Bart made this video, there had been three heroes named The Flash, and only one of the three had died, so getting killed 'in the Flash tradition' doesn't really make sense.

p20 - I don't know if Monarch's face is a colouring error or a clue...I am, however, reasonably sure that they're trying to make us think the woman Forerunner is after is Donna Troy - which means she almost certainly isn't.

Meanwhile in the back Dan Jurgens' History Of the Multiverse has become some sort of horrific bad-comic Orobouros - it's recapping the same stories that the History of The DCU he did last year recapped, down to almost identical choices of panels to reswipe, and those stories themselves happened so recently (less than two years ago) that anyone reading Countdown
must have read them. At this rate, expect a backup in Final Crisis - Dan Jurgens' History of The History of the DC Universe which just consists of panels drawn by Jurgens showing himself drawing himself tracing panels from Zero Hour.

Anyway, I'm almost regretting the decision not to buy Countdown as it starts finally to get readable, but this month's All-New Atom suggests I'll be able to follow the plot (if it ever gets one) by reading good comics instead. After the last storyline (which was just horrible - Ryan Choi getting revenge on his old school bullies and getting dumped again by the girl who wouldn't go to the prom with him) Gail Simone has started again giving us high adventure, comedy, dodgy pseudo-science, good characterisation and tiny men riding toads fighting snakes with swords.

In this issue (which comes between Countdown 43 and 42), The Hunt For Ray Palmer continues, with Ryan visiting the South American area where Ray Palmer adventured in the 80s Sword Of The Atom series, ending up (for good and logical reasons) in the same costume Palmer had then, and getting involved in a civil war between Palmer-worshippers and those who think Palmer was the devil. But the best thing in this wonderful issue is the little fat masked alien scammer pretending to be Palmer - "I Ray Pama! Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! Trech-Ery Woman!"

I honestly can't imagine anyone liking superhero comics at all and not enjoying All-New Atom, but it's selling in miniscule numbers. Please buy this and support one of the funniest, cleverest comics out there.

In other Countdown-related comics, Paul Dini proves in Detective that he can write a good comic when he wants to. The plots in Dini's Detective run have often been contrived, but they play by the rules of both the superhero and mystery genres, portray the characters in ways that are consistent with their previous appearances while still occasionally showing new sides to them, include occasional new characters who are usable in future stories, and generally are the kind of good, solid, enjoyable but disposable fluff that should be the mainstay of the superhero genre but is currently as rare as a good metaphor in one of my posts. This story again relies on the villain leaving obvious clues in an obvious place, but it deals well with the relationship between Zatanna and Batman, gets Zatanna out of the death-trap in a way which makes sense and doesn't cheat, has that escape give Batman the clue he needs to look for further clues, and in general does what you'd want from a good Batman story.

I only bought Action Comics by accident - I'd actually forgotten there was meant to be an 'ongoing story' in here at all, given the sheer number of fill-ins this year, and I'd been following the fill-ins rather than the regular team (whose work I'm not interested in). I can't really say much about this story (part four of a story whose first three parts I've not read) but I will say that the delays to this title have shot the 'regular team' of Johns & Donner in the foot in a way they won't have realised until recently. Their next story, starting next issue (this story will be completed in an annual at some point in the future) is 'Escape From Bizarro World'. If that had come out late last year, as originally planned, it would have been judged on its own merits. As it is, it will be coming out only three weeks after All-Star Superman 8, which is about how Superman... escapes from Bizarro World. I'm going to be writing a proper post about All-Star Superman at some point in the next few days, but for now, let's just say "Bizarro am think Geoff Johns much better writer than Grant Morrison! Richard Donner am have lots experience writing good comics! Escape From Bizarro World am sure to be critically-acclaimed masterpiece, and not suffer at all in comparison!"

Countdown 45: Exposition Time!

They really don't want to give me a lot to write about, do they?

Countdown 45 is superior to many of the previous issues in that it is, at least, comprehensible on its own terms, without needing to have read any issues of any other comic, and without having to refer to creator interviews to fill in missing information. However, the reasons it's comprehensible are actually the biggest faults with the issue.

Firstly, behind the traditional Countdown cover of dozens of characters who don't appear in this comic all running in different directions looking constipated, is a comic with no plot.
This issue consists entirely of fight-scene and exposition. The exposition reveals precisely one plot point previously unknown to us - Forerunner is the creation of a breeding programme by one of the Monitors (although it's also stated that she was created because of the Monitor 'taking the Duela Dent matter into your own hands' - presumably Forerunner's race breed very quickly).

We also see in this issue, for the first time, that Monarch (about whom more below) is doing... something. Possibly this is to do with the something Darkseid is doing. Or maybe it's to do with the something the Rogues are doing. Or it could even be to do with the something Karate Kid is doing. As we're still not sure what, if anything, these characters are doing (or, more to the point, why we should care) it's difficult to say. Whatever it is, Monarch is definitely doing it, and those villains/heroes will rue the day they came into conflict with/teamed up with Monarch and his dastardly/heroic plans.

It's also stated that the members of the Legion of Superheroes (who have still not been identified as such within the pages of this comic, as far as I can recall) don't know why they're in the past, but as I'm not reading JLA or JSA I don't know if that information had been previously revealed.

This brings us to the first - and most serious - problem with this comic. Two important threads in Countdown - the Rogues' plot against the Flash and the... whatever... with Karate Kid - got tied up this week. But they were tied up in, respectively, The Flash and JLA. These resolutions (which apparently tie into each other - the Legion bring back Wally West while the Rogues kill Bart Allen) were not mentioned at all in Countdown. As I don't read JLA or Flash at the moment, this means the only reason I know those plot threads have been tied up is because I read various comics websites. Countdown has been promoted as being a stand-alone story, but it's now absolutely apparent that it's anything but. If you're not prepared to buy every single comic DC are putting out, you have to resign yourself to missing chunks of the 'story', such as it is.

As I've pointed out, this issue is comprehensible because of the huge chunks of exposition in it, explaining the 'plot' of the previous issues. Incidentally, this exposition is handled as well as possible, and reflects well on Palmiotti and Gray, the writing team for this issue. But I suspect (and this is only my suspicion) that the reason for all this exposition reflects a fundamental disconnect between the comic the Countdown team think they're producing and the one they're actually putting out.

This first came to mind when reading Mike Marts' latest interview on Newsarama. As always in these things, Matt Brady threw in a very soft question, asking about Countdown's pacing so far - " Mike, with 52, there was always talk of the first few issues setting the stage, and then, things really taking off once all the players were where they were supposed to be. Is that similar to what we're seeing in Countdown's first few issues?"

Now, the answer I would expect for that question would be along the lines of "Yes, we've been doing a slow-burn to start with, but you'll see things start to ramp up over the next few issues. Especially 42 - you won't believe what hit you in that one. All I'm saying is fans of Mr Terrific will have something to talk about!" or words to that effect. Instead, the answer Marts gave, which I'm still boggling at days later, was "No, with Countdown we took a different approach—we decided to blow #%&! up from the very first issue and never allow readers to catch their breath."

Now, if they think that they're not allowing readers to catch their breath - if they think they're putting out some sort of roller-coaster ride of a comic - then the comic they think they're putting out is not the comic that's getting released. And that makes me wonder if they do think they've been putting out a self-contained easily-readable comic. Because this is the seventh issue. Comics these days are usually written in 'arcs' [sic] of six issues, for release as trade paperbacks. The exposition in this issue only really makes sense if they're imagining this being released in trades, with this issue being the first issue of trade number two. If this is their plan, I pity anyone buying this in trades - the fragmented, incoherent nature of the story so far would read as absolute gibberish when divorced from online commentary and without the other comics that week.

I'm beginning to wonder, in fact, if the huge rash of new announcements DC made in the various conventions they attended last week were not a form of damage control. I can't see this title lasting the full 52 issues - I don't believe anyone, even the most die-hard of DC anoraks, will stand for 45 more issues of this drivel. I don't have access to the sales figures (I know some retailers read this site - anyone have any idea of sales?) but this title appears to be haemmoraging readers at a ludicrous rate. It would not surprise me at all if this title were to be cancelled sooner rather than later and the remaining plot parcelled out between various other projects.

However, those announcements have done their job with me at least - after the announcement of McDuffie on JLA and Waid on Flash, to go with the previous announcements of Giffen on Four Horsemen, Milligan on Infinity Inc and so on, I'm positively drooling at the prospect of all the comics I'll be reading this year. So much so that I'm going to carry on reading Countdown for now, even as we head into our third mis-solicited Giffenless month, even as there is no story to speak of, for at least another month. DC editorial are getting enough right right now that I still have some trust in them. But if within another month I'm not seriously blown away, I'll be dropping Countdown, and also dropping any title that ties into it enough that I need to read Countdown to understand it.

Anyhow, on the assumption that they are eventually going somewhere with this, a couple of interesting points. First, Jimmy Olsen apparently doesn't know the difference between the Tomorrow People and the Forever People, even though he knows the secret identities of everyone in the world. And secondly, there's yet another reference to an 80s action/SF film, this time Terminator. A few people have suggested that these references - all pre-Crisis - might actually be a plot point. I hope so, because otherwise they're horrifically annoying.

I was going to write in this post about Monarch, and why he's important, and why you should never let Dan Jurgens near a crossover, but I think this post is long enough. I'll write that post on Wednesday.

Countdown 46: Nice And Sleezy Does It

So, as I said in my last post, I am going to pick at problems with this comic as I go through it, but I don't want people to think that this means I disliked this issue. It's actually an above-standard superhero comic, though still patchy. If this had been the general standard of this series, I would have been much less scathing than I have been.

In fact, I advise anyone who hasn't been reading Countdown, who's in two minds about it, to pick up this issue. This is as good as it's been so far, and it does a good job of filling in the information needed to understand the story.

The cover is horrible. It's not badly done or anything, but that early-90s Image style art, all tiny noses and scratchy lines, is ugly as sin. It's also nothing like the art on the inside - Jesus Saiz' pencils coupled with Jimmy Palmiotti's inks actually look more like a less-detailed Rick Veitch.

The art is actually the best in the series so far. Saiz' poses look stiff - sometimes they look traced from photos rather than drawn freehand, there's a general lack of dynamism there - but the storytelling is clear, there are subtle shifts in the art style in the different sections (almost ligne claire in the Rogues sections, dirty and gritty in the Suicide Slum sections (the pages that first brought the Veitch comparisons to mind, looking very like Veitch doing Eisner in Greyshirt).

p1 - You'd think if Amazons Attack were 'the hottest story going', and given that it was the big cliffhanger at the end of the last issue, it would be dealt with in this issue in some way. Having said that, this page does a good job of delivering a lot of exposition in a relatively unforced way, and of showing the relationship between Jimmy and Lois.

pp2-3 - Ten thousand? Assuming she's using Beijing as poetic shorthand for 'the other side of the earth' so she can feel every thunderstorm happening on the earth, assuming as well that her figure of 44,000 thunderstorms a day is accurate, and that the average length of a thunderstorm is about half an hour, there should be just under *one* thousand happening, not ten...

p4 - "Five pregnant women on the roof of a hospital praying in pentagram formation beneath a floating rock while singing Echo And The Bunnymen's Killing Moon". I don't know what's funnier - that image or the fact that Mary Marvel knows the song...

p5 - OK, a demon made of dead babies. That's revolting.

pp6-8 - Oh dear. These pages are terrible. Alan Moore talks in Writing For Comics about how Eisner taking ideas from Orson Welles in the 40s was an innovative idea, but people still using those panel layouts and transitions in the 80s was unimaginative. In the same way, Garth Ennis writing dialogue in obvious imitation of Tarantino was entertaining in Preacher. Just copying the argument about tipping from Reservoir Dogs is both unoriginal and passe.
Secondly, the writing for Mirror Master has been uniformly awful in this series. In general, there's a problem when comics try to represent any form of dialect phonetically. Even the greats get it wrong - Dave Sim managed perfectly to capture the rhythms and vocabulary of Liverpool dialect (and more specifically the rhythms of Alun Owen's screenplay for A Hard Day's Night) in his Harrison Starkey and Richard George characters in Guys, but his attempts at rendering the pronunciation phonetically were hopeless. In less skillful hands the results are much worse - no-one who has ever heard a real Australian speak could ever read a comic featuring the original Captain Boomerang .
Mirror Master's dialect, in every issue in which he's featured, has been just horribly wrong. And worse than wrong, it shows a contempt and a patronising attitude to non-USians that I find offensive. It's as if I were to write dialogue for an American character and have them saying "Howdy pardner, ah'm a good ole cowpoke from a li'l ol' village name o' Brooklyn, New York, in the great state o' Minnesota, y'all". It pulls me out of the story, and gives the impression that the people writing this stuff don't actually care about getting details right - everyone not from the US is just a funny foreigner.

pp9-12 - These pages are well done, apart from the "Yoda" reference (another fault in Countdown has been the film references. This was bad enough with Karate Kid, but at least there the comic character came first. Saying Sleez looks like Yoda is just pointing out the derivative character design and breaking suspension of disbelief). However, I'm unhappy that they brought back Sleez at all.
For those who don't know, Sleez was part of John Byrne's comprehensive plan to slime up the Superman mythos (the plan that ended with Superman becoming a murderer). Sleez came from Apokolips, and psionically controlled Superman and Big Barda into appearing in a porn video together.
Sleez was killed off many years ago, and the story seemed to be one of those 'we shall never speak of this again' moments, which I was more than happy with - as far as I was concerned, it was Zero-Hourased/Superboy-punched/eaten by Mr Mind , and it never happened This section of the comic brings Sleez back, thus establishing the story firmly in current continuity, before killing him again.

p13 - We really did not need an upskirt shot of Mary Marvel's panties. Mary's 'darkening' is more than conveyed in the captions. The sexualising (or increase thereof) of the character is both unnecessary fanboy pandering and conveys/reinforces some pretty horrible messages about female sexuality.

p14 - Devil Day Care is a nice phrase.

pp15-16 Jason Todd and Donna Troy hold my interest not one iota. There appears to be no reason for them to be in Washington other than to promote DC's hot new miniseries Amazons Attack, on sale at a comic shop near you...

p17 - Forerunner to go with Harbinger? What's next? Precursor? Augurer?

Incidentally, seeing Sleez killed off by the Continuity Cops (bring back Jonni DC!), the conjunction of continuity-fixing death and Fourth World character, made me think of something that no-one else appears to have mentioned, which I think may be a big part of the plot to Countdown.

It's been established that the Monitors want to destroy 'anomalies' - people who shouldn't be in the universe they're in; continuity errors. Now, I think I know how the Fourth World characters fit into this - the Omega Beams.
For those who don't know, one of Darkseid's established powers is the Omega Beam, which can be used to kill or teleport victims. But it's been established in the past that the Omega Beam can make it so that the victim never existed in the first place.
Now, doesn't that sound like something the Monitors might be interested in?

Countdown 50 and scheduling

Well, that wasn't very good at all, was it?

Countdown 50 is a badly put together comic. To all the errors pointed out in the previous post and comments, we can add:

• Grocer's apostrophes
• The fact that the Batman/Karate Kid fight is given no context whatsoever anywhere else in the comic - apparently if you're not reading JLA or JSA you're not meant to be able to know what's going on in this, despite the various protestations of those involved.
• "Who wouldn't want to hit some Kryptonian?" - no Scottish person has ever spoken like this
• Attempts at 'topical humour' that are three years out of date, that wouldn't have been funny at the time, and that also wouldn't have been funny in the DCU, where the 2004 presidential election was completely different to the one on Earth-Prime.
• General new-reader-unfriendliness
• Having worked on several different psychiatric units over the years, I have never seen a straitjacket in use, and my understanding is that they're very strongly deprecated. However, even when they weren't, a straitjacket with no crotch-strap would be utterly useless - it could be pulled over the head with minimal effort.

More annoyingly, we get confirmation that contrary to all the initial publicity Keith Giffen is not involved in the first several issues. This is incredibly annoying - it means Countdown, unlike 52, will not have a consistent sense of storytelling. While here Calafiore does an admirable job (despite my crack in the earlier post about only being able to draw one woman's face) he doesn't have the chops of Giffen. The whole issue feels flabby and disconnected, full of little details that should have been caught. The 'Chewbacca defence' link getting Jimmy Olsen to speak to the Joker was unnecessary - Duella Dent referred to herself as Joker's Daughter, so go and speak to the Joker. No need for the logical disconnect pulling us out of the story.

The Batman/Karate Kid fight especially galls. Not only because it's four confusingly-laid-out pages recapping a fight scene from another comic, but because it goes against the public statements made about its very inclusion. Dan Didio has said :

One of the things we’re doing in that case specifically is that we didn’t want to take it for granted that someone is reading Justice League of America or assume that someone is only reading Countdown. Also, that scene is so key to Karate Kid, and Karate Kid is one of the ongoing characters in the story. So – one of the things I wanted to be sure we did was establish who Karate Kid is very clearly. If that scene played very closely to the scene in Justice League, then so much the better, because we wanted to be very clear about where the story is taking place in conjunction with Countdown.

So, two stated aims:
1) 'establish who Karate Kid is very clearly'. Done by... er... giving people no clue whatsoever who this character is meant to be or why Batman is fighting him.
2) 'Play very closely to the scene in Justice League'. Done by deviating from the story in ways that add nothing and could have been avoided.

But still, I enjoyed the issue, despite everything. Page 18, in particular, sums up everything I hope for once Countdown finds its feet:

• the Citizen Kane by way of Eisner establishing shot
• "NO guns, coins, umbrellas, plants, water, playing cards..." - this is just the kind of little detail that I was hoping for.
• The "What do 4-D beings look like?" bit, which works both as a great example of Morrisonesque weirdness and a parody of the same. I hope this is setting up one of the big plotlines for the story (or even better, playing a long game and sowing seeds for Morrison's big story next year).

The last page, as well, is just lovely, being very reminiscent of All-Star Superman (or indeed the Zucker-Abrams-Zucker comedies that All-Star sometimes seems to be inspired by in its staging), having all the main action happening behind a completely oblivious foregrounded Jimmy Olsen, and leading to a perfect closing panel. The quality of the last quarter of the comic is extremely good stuff, an just throws the first three-quarters into sharper relief. Overall, I enjoyed the comic, but I can't say, yet, that I think it's good. But there's enough good stuff in this issue to let me hope that the bad stuff is just teething troubles.

I picked up two other DC Universe titles this week - Action 849 and Batman 665. I don't have much to say about them as comics - Action is a perfectly serviceable Superman story, while Batman is adding more layers of mystery to a story that I'm enjoying but which I suspect will only come together several months from now.

But both comics are symptomatic of the problem of lateness, which was brought to everyone's (where 'everyone' = 'people who talk about comics on the internet') attention this week with the release of the latest issues of All Star Batman and Authority (neither of which I'm reading). I'm in two minds about the whole issue of lateness in comics. Some comics are so good that I'll just be happy whenever they come out (for example All Star Superman) - those comics are generally ones that will have most sales in trade paperback form anyway. Twenty years from now, no-one will be worried that there was a big gap between All-Star Superman 5 and 6.

Other comics, for example Seven Soldiers, are hurt but not killed by delays - I wish Seven Soldiers 1 had come out closer to the other issues, because the delay meant the story lost impetus, but at the same time you can't hurry art and it was worth the wait. At the other extreme, junk-food comics don't matter to me as a reader - if I want to read a Superman story and there's not one out this week, I'll just read an old one. These delays are, however, harmful to retailers, as Brian Hibbs points out , and thus ultimately to comics as a medium.

But the one type of story that is really hurt by delays is the 52/Countdown model. If Countdown misses an issue, much as if 52 had, the comic is effectively destroyed. The problem comes when that title is interwoven with other comics.

The delays caused by Civil War last year were bad - it held up release of a significant portion of Marvel's line, and may well have actually put retailers out of business - but delays to Countdown could be catastrophic for DC. The problem is that Countdown is tying into other comics. While 52 was set in its own year, Countdown is supposed to reflect what's happening in the other titles. The question is, how is that going to be possible? Action's supposed main story is so delayed that there have been whole fill-in 'arcs' between issues in the main storyline. While they're getting the title itself onto something like a regular basis (another fill-in issue is out next week), there will have been a four-and-a-half-month gap between issues by what is supposedly the regular writing team by the time the next issue by Johns & Donner comes out (and they're only back for one issue before another fill-in).

Batman is less late (only a two-month gap since the last issue by the regular team) and I'm willing to cut it a lot more slack because it's such a good comic,but it's still at a point where issue 667 (the first issue of a new storyline with the Godlike J. H. Williams III on art, for which I've been drooling in anticipation since it was first solicited) will actually come out before issue 666, which wraps up the current storyline.

If a comic with a crucial plot point comes out even a week later than allowed for, that could set a whole row of dominoes falling. DC have now committed themselves to a course of action that will, no matter what (either by late comics, spoilers appearing outside the main titles, or fill-in writers and artists), lead to a huge amount of criticism and probably lost sales. I hope it turns out that the comic they're hanging all this on will be worth it, for them and for us. As Sir Humphrey would put it, doing Countdown was a very courageous decision.

Before I finish this post, I would like to say how pleasantly surprised I am both by the number of people visiting here and by the intelligence of the majority of the comments. I know this entry has not had much to say compared to some of the others, but I'm hoping to do some more discursive essays in the near future (I have one on Jimmy Olsen half-written).

Countdown 50 preview

Well, DC have posted a preview of (the first few pages of) Countdown 50 (unfortunately you have to be a member of MySpace and a 'friend' of their comics community to read it), and it's a definite improvement on the first issue - more happens in these few pages than in the whole of the previous issue. But it's not all necessarily good news.

These pages throw up a ton of apparent plot holes, continuity errors, inconsistencies and stupidities. Please note the word 'apparent' there. While some of what I have to say about this issue might be pointing out real failings, a lot of the following may well be deliberate on the part of the issue's writers. Given that we're talking about a story dealing with multiple universes and inconsistencies in the timeline, I think a lot of slack is called for. That said, let's look at the preview in detail...

Page 1 - If you were Superman's pal, you wouldn't open your own door either, would you?
Page 2/3 - This didn't need to be two pages. The second page adds nothing. It's possible that the second page is meant to show that Superman is no longer around, but if it is, it's terrible storytelling, and I suspect it isn't. Interestingly, in the credits Keith Giffen is again not mentioned. The layouts are a lot more imaginative here than in the previous issue, with more of Giffen's feel to them, so it seems odd that the person who has been mentioned in every piece of pre-publicity about these comics isn't given any credit in the comics themselves. Either DC have been seriously misleading customers about the creative team on this comic or (far more likely) there's a very serious omission in the credits that should be rectified straight away...
Page 4 - This is the big problem that everyone has already noticed - Jimmy Olsen knows who both Jason Todd and Dick Grayson are, which means that unless he is the stupidest person in the universe he also knows Batman's secret identity. Now, there are a few possible explanations here. The most obvious one, but the least likely, is that this is a massive cock-up that will never be referred to again. I doubt this - if something's stupid enough that a dozen readers on MySpace notice it within minutes, it's stupid enough that it would be picked up by editorial. It's also possible that it's a massive cock-up for which an explanation will be quickly rationalised and inserted into a future issue in the manner of the Cult of Conner slip-up in 52. But I suspect it's a hint at something bigger.
Of course, what I hope is that Jimmy and the rest of the Daily Planet staff have always known everyone's secret identities for years, and have just been going along with the pretence to humour Clark:
"Oh look, Clark, an alien invasion fleet... that's OK, I know they bring on your stomach trouble, you get along to the toilet. I'm sure Superman will be along to fix this any second..."
page 5 - while it's not absolutely clear, it certainly appears from both the art and narration that Jason has just killed at least eight people. He's certainly killed more. Given that Superman knows exactly where he is, it's odd that he didn't do anything at all to prevent this. For that matter, Jimmy seems very unfazed by the whole thing. But then, that's Jimmy Olsen for you - he's cool like that.
page 6 - Wasn't Jason involved in the Crisis? I would have thought he would recognise a Monitor.
"If you want answers for questions beyond reason, there's a guy in Arkham asylum who wrote the book on crazy" - is it me or does this make no sense? "Something odd happened, so go and ask an insane serial killer". In fact the total non-sequitur pseudo-logic here reminds me of the Chewbacca defence:

Why would a Wookiee, an eight-foot tall Wookiee, want to live on Endor, with a bunch of two-foot tall Ewoks? That does not make sense! But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does not make sense!

page 7/8 - Apparently Calafiore can only draw one woman's face. And that looks nothing at all like Mary Marvel. Still, always nice to see Madame Xanadu.

The rest of the preview is taken up with a context-free fight scene. We're given no explanation of why this matters, and the dialogue doesn't help. I would be completely clueless about what Batman is referring to if I hadn't read Steve Flanagan's review of the most recent issue of JLA - it appears this is the same scene that took place in that. Except it isn't - compare these two images

There is just no way to reconcile the action, dialogue and figure placement in these two pages. Civil War was (rightly) excoriated for this kind of inconsistency with its tie-ins, and one would hope that those involved in putting Countdown together would have learned from that.

See you in a few days for a review of the whole thing and some of the issues it's brought up.