Black & White & Red All Over

I've more or less avoided the Big Overarching Story in DC Comics over the last few months - since dropping the appaling Countdown with the tenth issue, I've made an effort not to read anything that tied itself in too strongly to that storyline. However, I've been looking forward intensely to Final Crisis, and I'll read anything by Grant Morrison, so I picked up DC Universe Zero with a reasonable amount of hope.

Written by Grant Morrison and Geoff Johns (who's shown signs recently in Action Comics and Booster Gold of actually being the decent, solid writer his admirers claim rather than the incompetent I thought of him as previously) and drawn by eight different artists, this is meant to be a fifty-cent preview of what's to come in DC's superhero titles for the next year or so, something you can hand to anyone and get them up to speed and interested in the titles.

On that score, it's a total failure. Because of the sheer number of different storylines it's teasing (along with a framing sequence), none of the previews could be comprehensible to anyone who isn't already reading those titles. It's a shame, because there's a clear attempt to give some unity to a fundamentally disjointed comic, but there's no way to tie all this information into a single narrative.

There's a framing 'story' here (Barry Allen is back... or is he? Or... is he? ) and some clear attempts to tie everything together thematically (the colours red and black appear a lot, and Morrison's recurring obsession with hands turns up again) - Douglas Wolk has provided a good set of annotations to this at http://savagecritic.com/2008/04/all-systems-intact-red-and-black.html - but it all seems forced.

The narration is on the level of "There is good, and there is bad. Bad and good. Dark and light. Shadows and some more light. Black and... red? (go with it) The dark and the light are in balance. Balance is important. It's in his hands now. He'll have to take it in hand. His left hand and his right hand. Two hands. For balance. Balance. Good Superman and bad Superman. Good me and bad me. Shadows. Black. Red. Like the suits in cards DO YOU SEE?"

Possibly not *quite* that subtle, but on that kind of level.

It's not really fair to judge this as a unified whole though - it's structured as a four-page intro plus a sequence of three-page previews (of stories in many cases not written or drawn by the people creating the comic) so it's probably best taken in that way.

Intro:

This manages to sum up quite effectively both previous Crises in a mere four pages, and assuming we need to know anything about that for Final Crisis it does a good job of bringing people up to speed. However, already I'm getting a sense that this has been put together with a lack of attention to detail. The image at the bottom of page three, of parallel earths exploding, probably looked fine as pencils. But someone's dropped a photo of the Earth in, repeatedly, with Photoshop, so now we have five earths breaking apart with giant cracks over their surface that manage also to be visible on the water, with no distortion whatsoever of the shape of the continents, and with giant plumes of flame shooting out as far as the moon while causing *no disturbance at all* to the atmospheric patterns from the previous panel.

Final Crisis: Legion Of Three Worlds
This preview has three pages, and two of them are taken up with a double-page spread of a fight scene. In the one page of narrative we get to see some Patent Geoff Johns Dismemberment and discover that Superman is in the 31st century, fighting what look like shadow demons with the Legion, and that's about it. It looks pretty, but gives no real reason to read the comic.

Batman: RIP
This is much more like it. The symbolism is actually at its most overt here, and the dialogue is frankly ludicrous (Batman actually getting lines like "Red and black. Life and death. The joke and the punch line.") but it works for Batman in a way it doesn't for other characters.

There is more in this three-page sequence than anything else in the comic. It's almost a textbook in how to construct a talking-head sequence in a superhero comic. It contains allusions to other comics, but in such a way that anyone who hasn't read them won't be missing anything, it stays with the established characterisation, and it makes great use of the page.

Sticking with the duality theme, Morrison has Batman on a checkerboard floor seen through red-tinted glass by the Joker, who's in the dark with only spot lighting. The panels are done as powers of two (first two panels with a four panel inset, then eight panels on the next page, then sixteen on the page after).

Hands are used here as a means of expression - the Joker's body language reminding me in some ways of William Hartnell, who always used to keep his hands close to his face because the TV camera could then pick up both. The Joker barely speaks, gesturing to make most of his points, a creature of the body rather than the mind. Batman on the other hand only has his hands shown in two panels - the first panel in the sequence and one close-up panel of clenched fists when he gets angry and his emotionless facade breaks down. Instead we see only his mostly-covered face, or his body in silhouette. We know Batman only by his words, but the Joker only by his actions.Close-ups on Batman's eyes (another recurring feature of this comic) show nothing, of course, while the Joker's eyes are cracked, red and bloodshot.

The increasing number of panels, and decreasing number of words as the Joker appears more and more in control of the situation, ratchet up the tension, while allowing Morrison to homage several different comics (the situation is clearly referencing The Killing Joke, the last panel is meant to make us think of Watchmen, while the 16-panel last page is laid out in the same manner as The Dark Knight Returns).

This makes me want to read more of this story, and is by far the best thing in the comic.

Wonder Woman: Whom The Gods Fail
"She is peace and she is war" apparently. This seems like it could actually be teasing quite a good story (or a terrible one - tying real-world genocides into a superhero story could be a very tasteless decision) but the single-panel bits will only make sense to people who've been reading a lot of other comics. It might make people who read 52 want to read Wonder Woman but it won't bring in any *new* readers. And the last panel just says to me that someone wants some of that 300 money for themselves.

Green Lantern: Blackest Night Prelude
I have no idea what is going on here at all, having not been reading Green Lantern, except that I would be very surprised if the Black Hand (mentioned here, an old Green Lantern villain) and the Black Glove (the behind-the-scenes villain of parts of Morrison's Batman run, mentioned earlier) were either unconnected or the same character. The two-page spread of 'refracted light' is more-or-less incomprehensible, except that someone (or someones) are going to be followed. Given that Final Crisis is meant to tie into Seven Soldiers the colours-of-the-rainbow thing here might be interesting later on. This seems actually to tie in to some of the other stuff, but I'm left confused.

Final Crisis: Revelations
Nigel Blackwell said it best:
If you're gonna quote from the Book of Revelation
Don't go calling it the Book of Revelations
There's no 's', it's the Book of Revelation
As revealed to St John the Divine
See also Mary Hopkin
She must despair

Final Crisis
This, along with the Batman section, is one of the more comprehensible sections, and actually gives me a sense of anticipation. It appears to follow on from events and concepts from 52, with Darkseid being equated with Lady Styx in some way and with Libra trying to get the Secret Society of Super Villains to join the Crime religion. The foreshadowing suggesting that Libra is Barry Allen is so obvious that it must be a bluff.

As for that last page 'reveal', Mark Waid, the only one of the four 52 writers not involved in some way with this latest crossover, said just before this came out, about The Flash

"Tom will make that book shine. And he’ll do it on the strength of Wally, not on some creatively bankrupt, desperate stunt like bringing Barry Allen back to life or something."

While there appears to be no love lost between Waid and DC editorial right now, he still appears to be friendly with Morrison (and presumably Johns), and I don't see him using terms like that about an idea that would have come from those writers. So either the 'return' is no return at all (most likely as far as I can see) or it's been forced by editorial edict against the writers' will, or I'm completely misreading the situation. We'll see.

I intend to buy Final Crisis and possibly several of the other comics trailed here, so you can expect more regular posts from here on in. I think, though, that this comic would have been infinitely more successful had they cut out the Revelations and Wonder Woman sections, and maybe the framing material, and concentrated on the Legion, Batman, Green Lantern and Final Crisis sections. They all seem to fit together, and a little more work could have fit those four sections into a 22-page narrative with some actual point to it, rather than this collection of sketchy trailers.

I Don't Know Who He Is Behind That Mask, But We Need Him And We Need Him Now... Morrison (and others) on Batman Part 1

After that slightly-longer-than-expected hiatus, it's time for us to continue our look at the DC Morrisonverse. Today, I want to start looking at Grant Morrison's work on Batman.

One of the complaints a lot of the more intelligent comic-bloggers make is that most online comics criticism seems to take comics as a branch of literature rather than as a medium in its own right (the pedant in me cringes at that sentence and its mixture of singular and plural - the one real reason I can see for wanting to get rid of 'comics' as the name for the medium). They're right of course, but to a large extent they're beside the point.

Disregarding for the moment the regrettably large number of internet 'reviewers' who in fact are just preparing book reports, listing the events in the story rather than dealing with it as a piece of art (and I know I've done capsule 'reviews' like that myself, but I hope my longer posts do contain something approximating analysis) , one would at first thought assume that most comics reviewers would have at least as much to say about the art in comics as the writing.

The problem is, while comics as a whole have room for as many different types of art as there are people in the world, superhero comics, which are the bread and butter of most comic blogs, have traditionally allowed only a small fraction of those styles to be used. With some exceptions, almost every artist working for Marvel or DC (or the other companies feeding on the crumbs from under their table) would fit into the bottom left corner of Scott McCloud's "Big Triangle" .

In fact, for superhero comic artists, rather than a 'big triangle', almost all fit into a 'little square', defined on one axis by the number of tiny little lines and on the other by how distorted the anatomy is. Roughly the four corners of this square would be Jack Kirby (no little lines, ultra-distorted anatomy), Darwyn Cooke (very few little lines, relatively accurate anatomy), George Perez (millions of little lines, relatively accurate anatomy) and Rob Liefeld (millions of little lines all over the place, wrong number of knees).

Anything outside this box would not get published by the mainstream companies, and despite the obvious differences in ability between those four gentlemen, there's really not a huge stylistic difference between them when compared to the full range of possibilities out there. Korn don't sound much like the Beatles, but both sound more like each other than like Edgard Varese.

Comic art also has a relatively low entry threshold. Given its low rate of pay compared to commercial art, and given that every fan thinks they could write the perfect Green Lantern story and submits it to DC, but most have a more realistic assessment of their drawing skills, the talent pool on which the big companies are drawing is relatively small, and mostly made up of amateurs, be that in the true sense (working in comics for love when they could earn more in other fields) or in the pejorative (barely competent).

Most superhero artists, therefore, are concentrating firstly on making the thing they're drawing look something like it's meant to, and secondly on their panel-to-panel storytelling, ensuring the reader can follow the story. It's actually only exceptional artists (two examples off the top of my head are Frank Quitely and J.H. Williams III, but there are others) who go further than serving the story and actually try to create something that has an aesthetic value in and of itself, something capable of producing an emotional reaction independent of its context within the story - something, in other words, worth criticising on its own merits.

This means that even the more visually literate comics reviewers will often treat a comic as if it were essentially a prose work, because they have nothing really to say about the art. However, this results in reviews that are unintentionally dishonest.

The treatment of the recent Club Of Heroes storyline in Batman is a perfect example. Most reviewers have praised this story to the skies, and (either explicitly or implicitly) compared it with the earlier Morrison-written issues of the title, with the latter suffering in comparison.

And this is a good assessment of them as comics, but that's not the fault of either Morrison or of Andy Kubert, the artist on the earlier issues, but rather of their pairing. Grant Morrison is a writer who, more than any other non-drawing writer I can think of in comics, takes advantage of the visual aspect of the medium by making details matter.

Generally speaking, comics writers working in full script have one thing happen per panel. Sometimes there'll be a background detail or two for world-building or as a joke, but even Alan Moore, who's known for his incredibly detailed panel descriptions, tends to work in foreground/background terms. Watchmen is made infinitely richer by the background detail, by the way panels echo and reflect each other, but only rarely (the scenes by the newsstand in issue 11, for example, when all the plot threads come together) does the background detail or figure placement convey information about the main plot itself.

Compare and contrast this with, for example, Morrison & Quitely's All Star Superman #1. In this, there's a whole series of intricately choreographed moments which require paying attention to every detail. Most superhero comic readers have been trained to see the figures of the major characters as foreground and everything else as background. You can't do this with Morrison & Quitely's work and have any hope of following what's going on.

Unfortunately, this kind of work requires a particular type of collaborator in order to succeed. It was revelatory, for example, to see Morrison's script and thumbnails for Arkham Asylum in the 15th anniversary trade a few years back. Dave McKean's art, while gorgeous, was utterly unsuited to the story as written. Important plot points in the script were simply not drawn, resulting in the finished work being incoherent and coming across as a lot more pretentious than the script would suggest.

It is entirely probable that the comparative lack of response to Morrison & Kubert's Batman has a related cause. I'm not suggesting that Kubert didn't follow Morrison's script to the letter, and nor do I think he's a bad artist (while his style isn't to my taste, he's one of the best of that type of artist out there), but his style is fundamentally unsuited to Morrison's work.

Andy Kubert is in the ultra-distorted, millions of little lines corner of our hypothetical square, and that style isn't suited to the type of subtlety Morrison's scripts require. To parse the action correctly, we need to take in a minimum of visual information. The extraneous detail that Kubert adds actually detracts from our ability to process the image at a glance. I can't speak for anyone else, but to me those little lines paradoxically make me gloss over the image - everything in the picture is of about equal importance, and thus equal unimportance. A lot of detail in Morrison's stories also comes from characters' body language and facial expression, and Kubert simply isn't a nuanced enough artist to show these things. He's great on action (which is why the most impressive sequence in his run on the title is the fight in the museum), but his 'actors' are all scenery-chewing hams.

I suspect that further down the line, we will discover that (much as in his runs on Animal Man, Doom Patrol and especially New X-Men) Morrison has planted a number of time-bombs in his scripts, subtle details that will make us look at these early issues in a new light. And they will be there when we go back and look at the issues, but the art style will have stopped them registering with us.

So Morrison's pre-Club Of Heroes issues are, overall, at best qualified successes as comics. But that's not the fault of the writer, or of the artist, but of the system by which mainstream superhero comics are produced. While the production-line system exist, there will be occasions on which talented people, doing their best to produce good material, end up working partly at cross purposes.

But they are still better than the vast majority of superhero comics being produced at the moment, and they've provided an intriguing basis for the work that's followed. I'll look at them (and the Clown At Midnight issue and Club Of Heroes) in more detail in my next few posts.

Capsule Reviews For The Last Two Weeks

The personal problems alluded to in the post before last meant I was unable to get to a comics shop for a couple of weeks, so I'm now going to review two weeks' worth of comics (and skip the weeks previous) in an attempt to catch up. Almost all of these are DC titles, and I'll discuss their relevance to Countdown-the-event (which is still metastasising little mini-Countdowns - the most recent of which is the newly announced Countdown: Arena) tomorrow, but for now I'll just be talking about their quality in and of themselves.

Booster Gold #1 by Geoff Johns, Jeff Katz, Dan Jurgens & Norm Rapmond (DC) was the biggest positive surprise I've had in a long time. I'm normally not a fan of Johns' writing at all, but I've noticed he's capable of very good work when co-writing - he had a few good moments in 52 and his Up, Up And Away in the Super-titles last year with Busiek was excellent - so I gave it a try.

It's actually a very competent, fun superhero first issue, although it did feel a bit like a 52 hits medley - Supernova! Booster pretending to be selfish when he's really being good! Rip Hunter's blackboard! Time is broken! I also wonder how long the title will be able to run given that the only plot that current writers appear able to conceive of for Booster is act selfishly - have a change of heart - become good but get no credit.

It's also a worrying sign that this comic contains more snide digs at other comics - including ones written by Johns himself - than any other I've read recently. Most of these (including the new title for this blog for the next week or so) come from the mouth of Rip Hunter, so I wonder if this is some kind of meta-thing, but still, there's only so many times characters in a comic can point out how bad other comics those characters appeared in are before the whole suspension-of-disbelief thing collapses in a jumbled mess like this sentence.

But there's a lot to like about this title (Johns & Katz are doing nothing original - the relationship between Booster and Daniel, for example, is straight out of Hero Squared, hardly the most original comic in the world itself), and the hints about future issues suggest Booster Gold could be a great source of rip-roaring light-hearted adventure through time and space. It's a flawed first issue, but suggests the series has a lot of potential.

In particular, I liked that Batman was portrayed as the only member of the current Justice League of B-Listers to have some faith in Booster Gold and some decency. I'll be talking soon about how Batman has been portrayed post-IC (and in particular how the revamp of his character has been seen as much in his guest appearances as the main titles), but it's very consistent with Morrison & Dini's ideas of how the character works.

Batman #667 (by Grant Morrison and J.H. Williams III, DC) is a perfect example of this - Williams throughout draws Batman to look like the Dick Sprang version (although coloured by Dave Stewart to highlight the similarity between the Sprang and Frank Miller interpretations), even laying out the double page title in a variant of the old Batman-head logo. This is a Batman with a sense of humour and a desire to socialise, very different from the Dark Avenger of Darkness and Vengeance who Wreaks Terrible Vengeance in the Dark because the world is Dark but he is Darker of recent years.

Morrison's Batman has so far not had the impact one would expect, and I suggest this is largely down to the choice of Andy Kubert for the art. Kubert's art, while popular, is stronger on atmosphere and dynamics than on clear storytelling, and Morrison is telling the kind of story that relies on readers being able to pick up on some quite subtle details in the art.

Thankfully, J.H. Williams III is on the title for a few issues, and as regular readers will know I consider him easily the most inventive artist working in comics, who can tell a story with the utmost clarity while at the same time making each page a thing of beauty in itself. This storyline appears to be a riff on Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (originally published under a title I won't repeat here), but featuring international versions of Batman, thus continuing Morrison's ongoing theme of identity, and showing us yet again who Batman is by showing us who he isn't.

Incidentally, I'd love to know how the Knight's appearance here works with his JLA Classified appearance, and if his surname is a reference to Morrison favourite Rupert Sheldrake. We shall have to wait and see, but this was a promising start.

Brave & Bold #6 (by Mark Waid & George Perez, DC) is the end to the first story, and thus impossible to review on its own - the issue only makes sense if you read the first five. I would find it difficult to review anyway, as this series simply hits too many of my buttons. If someone asked me to explain what I meant by superhero comics, I would give them the first six issues of this series, as they're quite close to being the Platonic Ideal of superheroics.

In precisely the sort of universe-spanning story I was hoping for from Countdown, these six issues have gone from a locked room mystery to an interplanetary war being manipulated by cosmic beings in order to remake the universe to their own ends in a thousand years. The story has taken in Batman, Green Lantern, Supergirl, Lobo, Adam Strange, Blue Beetle, the Legion of Superheroes, Destiny of the Endless, and the Challengers of the Unknown, and done so in a way that lets even those readers who know nothing of these characters grasp their essential details, and doesn't conflict with anything in other titles.

It's not the best comic ever or anything, but it does what it does as well as it's possible to do it. I simply can't imagine anyone liking superheroes (at least anything published by DC or Marvel between say 1970 and 1990) but not liking this.

Action Comics #854 (by Kurt Busiek & Brad Walker, DC) is something I'm going to discuss in more detail in the 'Countdown roundup' post, as it ties in with Countdown, but suffice it to say it's a story of Jimmy Olsen and Krypto fighting Titano, which should tell you instantly whether it's the kind of thing you want to read or not.

What I will say though is that the last year or so of Supertitles have increased my respect for Kurt Busiek enormously. Busiek's work on Superman has been wildly variable, and has ranged from extremely good (some issues have been almost All-Star Superman good, though these have been the exception rather than the rule) to the fairly poor (the various religiously-infused stories). But they've always been readable, and more often than not enjoyable.

But the thing is, Busiek's been trying to tell one shortish (six part or so) story, Camelot Falls, for most of the last 18 months. But in that time he's produced what must be close to thirty Superman titles as writer or co-writer. He's had his story interrupted by art problems and had to do fill-in stories, he's had to cover Action, whose supposed regular permanent writing team have produced I think four (maybe five) issues since Infinite Crisis, and he's even had to do fill-in stories when his fill-ins got postponed (the original Krypto story he wrote). And then on top of that he's having to tie all this in to a mega-crossover.

In the circumstances, the stories having any kind of coherence at all would be an achievement worthy of praise, but the fact that at his best Busiek has produced some of the best Superman comics of recent years, while at his worst he's produced competent enough journeyman work, shows a rare level of professionalism.

JLA: Classified #41 (by Pete Milligan and Carlos D'Anda, DC) is part five of the disappointing Kid Amazo storyline. D'Anda's art style is too cartoony for this kind of material, but even were it not Milligan is just going through the motions here. Someone needs to decide what the point of JLA: Classified is, exactly. Early on, it was simple - almost 'All-Star Justice League'. The best creative teams tell stories free from continuity, using any era of the League. Sometimes these could be file stories (as in Ellis and Guice's New Maps Of Hell), but even so the first twenty or so issues of this title were extremely good - Morrison's Seven Soldiers prologue, I Can't Believe It's Not The Justice League and New Maps Of Hell were all excellent, interesting work, and Engelhart's Detroit League story, while bad, was at least different.
But since then it's settled into a comfortable mediocrity, with competent creators writing stories about the League as it was immediately pre-Infinite Crisis, with most of the stories following the same patterns. The only exception was Slott & Jurgens' Red King Rising story, and that was better in the concept than the execution (which may well have lived up to the concept had Slott written the whole thing rather than only plotting the last few issues).
A rotating-teams, non-continuity title like this can't survive on reader inertia, and JLA:Classified is getting dangerously close to trying to do just that.

Modok's Eleven #2 (by Fred Van Lente and one or more artists who might be any or all of the nine other people credited but without their job titles in this comic, Marvel) is a decent but not great issue by itself. This comic is sticking very close to the traditional heist movie plot, and so this issue is the planning section, which doesn't work so well as a single issue. But I'm sufficiently intrigued that I want to pick up the rest of this series to find out how the story goes. Plus, it's Fred Van Lente, so it's subsidising stuff like Action Philosophers. And there's a They Might Be Giants reference.

The Boys #9 (by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, Dynamite) is exasperating. Ennis appears to be trying to tell what could be an extremely good story about non-powered people hitting back at the super 'heroes' who show no concern for the collateral damage they cause. This story is livened up by Ennis' trademark dark and often scatalogical humour. When the balance is right, The Boys works. However, when, as in this issue, the balance tips too far toward the kind of humour Ennis uses in comics like Kev or Dicks, it just becomes tedious. Even back when applying gross-out humour to corrupt superheroes who aren't anything like their public image was a new idea, when Rick Veitch was doing it in Brat Pack, it wasn't especially funny. Now, someone getting caught short and having to go to the toilet on the floor of a Batcave-analogue is tedious and unoriginal, and distracts from the genuinely good stuff. A weak issue.

Much of what works in this issue is Darick Robertson's art, which has some extremely subtle facial expression work (see for example the bottom tier of panels on page 14). But even here, Robertson appears to be inking in a notably more slapdash way than his other work (see the bottom tier on page 12). This may be an aesthetic choice, but if it is it's not one I would have made. If not, it may be because Dynamite can't pay the advances Wildstorm can, and so Robertson can't put in the same time he did on the earlier issues. I hope the latter is not the case.

About Flash 231 and Shadowpact 16 I have little to say by way of review - both are competent and enjoyable but forgettable comics. I will, however, discuss both in the Countdown-event post tomorrow.

V For... Batman?

J. H. Williams III , my favourite comic artist working at the moment, has posted some samples of his work on the next issue of Batman, number 667 (666 will be coming out after 666 due to DC's incredibly sensible and not at all screwed up system of getting books out on time).

Now, I know it's meant to be Musketeer, and it's only one panel, but I can't help thinking this resemblance is deliberate, and I wonder what that means for the story...

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).