Countdown To Countdown 1 (52 Wrapup Part 1)

First, I'd like to say hello (and happy Free Comic Book Day) to all of you who've started reading in the few days since this blog was linked by Douglas at 52 Pickup and Heidi at The Beat. For those of you just joining me, the idea of this blog is to use DC's weekly Countdown series (which starts next week) as a springboard to talk about stuff pertaining to comics. Some weeks I'll be doing page-by-page analyses of the comic, other weeks I'll barely mention the content of the issue itself, but it'll always be relevant in some way.

The big Countdown news this week, of course, is the preview that is up at MySpace comics. I'll be going over that tomorrow. But today I want to talk about 52.

The last issue of 52 came out on Wednesday (Thursday over here in the UK), and I loved it. It has its flaws, of course (the Gotham Gazette on Earth-2 reminded me more than a little of Chevy Chase saying "Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead") but overall it was possibly one of the best issues of the series.

So, with that read, I decided to sit down and read the lot. I also read, along with every issue, Douglas' summary/review at 52-pickup and Al Ewing's Diary Of Ralph Dibny. I'll be posting as much as I can about my reactions to the series over the next few days, until Friday when I can pick up Countdown 1 (Monday is a bank holiday in the UK, which means both New Comics day and my payday will be a day late).

This first 52 wrapup post will cover something I think a lot of you will find extremely pretentious and silly. So do I, as a matter of fact, but I still think it's a fun idea to play with. More normal commentary of the "why did we not see Most Excellent Super Bat?" type will appear in the next few posts.

One thing that struck me about the series on reread, that I'd not been able to say for certain until the last issue (in case the writers tied everything together more neatly than they did) is how little the main characters interact. For the most part, there are several different storylines going on here independently of each other, each of which meets up occasionally then splits off again.

What interests me about this, in retrospect, is how simillar the structure of 52 is to co-writer Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers project (which Morrison was working on concurrently with the early parts of 52). Both involved largely unknown or third-tier DC Universe characters fighting (largely independently of each other) different aspects of the same larger menace while telling their own separate stories. 52 could very easily have been released as (say) a Ralph Dibny miniseries, a Montoya/Question one, a Mystery In Space series, a Steel and a Black Adam one, with threads from each recurring in the others (much as one sees the same scene from different angles in Klarion 2 and Manhattan Guardian 2). This is very different from the normal model for a superhero crossover story, where everyone gets into a team to fight one big bad baddie, then splits up to fight a few smaller ones, then get together again to fight the real big baddie behind the scenes. (Not totally different of course, but the superhero crossover is as formalised at this point as a medieval passion play, and even slight changes in the way they're done can appear shocking).

In many ways 52 (and Marvel's Annihilation crossover, which I've not yet read, and which was largely the work of 52/Countdown layout artist Keith Giffen) is a mainstreaming of the Seven Soldiers structure, and a sign that we can hope for more stories using this model (which I prefer to the normal linear model of crossover storytelling). Partly, no doubt, this structure arose because of the fact that four people were writing the story (and while according to the writers themselves everyone wrote bits of everyone else's stories, each writer definitely had their own pet characters). But I suspect it was very strongly influenced by Seven Soldiers.

Now, one of the things I found most interesting about this structure in Seven Soldiers is that it (possibly just coincidentally) ties into one of Grant Morrison's more ludicrous-sounding ideas, which is that he wants to make the DC Universe sentient, through some combination of magic(k) and science - he's spoken about the idea that intelligence appears to be an emergent property of some complex systems, and how sometimes stories seem to 'write themselves', and wanting to see if he can get the DC Universe complex enough to write itself (for example in this interview on Fanboy Radio ).

Now, in this context the way intelligence appears is something that matters. Intelligence (as far as we can tell) is an emergent property of only some kinds of complexity. In particular, the structure of the human brain appears to be a type of network known as a 'small world' network.

Now, the small world network is also the way that most social interactions happen - the structure of the social network that connects you with your friends is structurally very simillar to the structure of the neural network in your brain. So if you were a comic writer attempting to bring a comics universe to sentience, one way to do that would be to make the structure of the social networks in the comics similar to the structure of real-world societies.

There was actually a study done a few years ago of the structure of the Marvel universe's social network (which we can assume is simillar enough to the DCU to generalise from). It showed that the MU had a very simillar structure to a real-world social network, but with a few significant differences. Mostly these were - characters were more likely to team up repeatedly with the same people in the MU than in the real world, characters collaborated in general with fewer others than in the real world, and a few important characters were far more important in the MU's social networks than in the real world.

So if you were going to go for a more realistic social network, the way you'd do it is get rid of a few of the major players ("a year without Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman"), raise the importance of some minor characters, and create a lot more links between otherwise-disconnected bits of the DCU. You wouldn't do this in the standard team-up manner, but in a series of encounters between peripheral characters. In short, you'd do what both Seven Soldiers and 52 do.

I'm not saying this was definitely the conscious intention of anyone involved, but it seems possible given Morrison's statements that it could be. But one thing that seems to suggest there's more to it than that is Mister Mind's final fate. There are a lot of different resonances to be found in what happens to Mister Mind - most obviously the way it connects with what he did earlier to Daniel Carter, trapping him in the same type of time loop (but a loop of 52 seconds rather than 52 weeks) - and Jog as always manages to find a lot of connections between this and other themes set up in the comic. But one thing it reminds me of is the 'strange loop' that Douglas Hofstadter claims lies at the basis of consciousness.

Of course, I don't think that the DCU is actually becoming sentient. Nor do I think this was in the minds of any of the creators of 52 with the possible exception of Morrison. But the fact that this kind of thing can be found in there suggests that 52 is worthy of more attention as a comic (as opposed to just as a comic-industry phenomenon) than has been paid it.

Countdown To Countdown 2

Sorry for the delays on today's post - I've been working on a paper that took a little longer to sort out than I thought. To make up for it, I'm going to do two posts today - the usual one going over this (last) week's 52 and DC Universe stuff, and then later I'm going to talk about Bryan Talbot's incredible new graphic novel Alice In Sunderland.

After the horrible disappointment of 52 50 and World War III, 52 51 is much, much more like it. I've accepted for a while that 52 isn't going to have a satisfying end as such - the middle was much too flabby and 'decompressed' and now the writers are rushing to try to get as much in as possible in these last few issues.

This issue manages to resolve quite a few different bits from the storylines I'm most interested in, now that the tedious Black Adam nonsense is over and done with. There's still three pages of moping about Superboy being dead (given that only a month or so ago Black Adam killed over twenty-six million people, this suggests a certain lack of proportion among the people of the DC Universe, but anyway...) but otherwise this issue nicely wraps up the Space Odyssey storyline and sets us up for the big reveal next issue (you know, the one Dan Didio spoiled a few weeks back).

The big twist - Mister Mind's whereabouts - had been guessed by a few people a while ago, but was done very nicely. But it's the little details that made this issue - Starfire coming from across the universe to make sure Buddy gets his jacket back. And it's nice that in the space story at least, everyone (for now) has had a happy ending.

Is that a... Countdown on the cover, incidentally?

I don't have much more to say about 52 except that I'm looking forward to Thursday (I'm in the UK, in a strange timewarp where we get our comics... a day late! The horror!) and I intend to take a day out at some point and read the whole thing from beginning to end.

One of the things I'm hoping for in Countdown, and something I've only got occasionally in 52, is the creation of ideas with far more potential than the creators realise. This kind of thing happens more when creators are pushed against impossible deadlines. Half the reason Jack Kirby was so great was that he was so productive - during the time he was working on the Fourth World stuff, he was producing four comics a month (correct me if I'm wrong - I don't think any of them were bi-monthly) - essentially writing and drawing a weekly comic by himself.

As a result, a lot of Kirby's stuff has resonances he was quite possibly not aware of himself. That's not to say the power of his work is accidental - obviously he was a craftsman with decades of experience working on something he considered his masterwork - but there are resonances there that might not have been there if he'd had more time to think things out more coherently.

Take Darkseid. Darkseid is one of the characters with a major role in Countdown, and one of my all-time favourite characters. Darkseid was for a long time over-exposed, used every time a lazy writer wanted something really bad to scare our heroes (parodied exquisitely by 52/Countdown breakdown artist Keith Giffen in an Ambush Bug miniseries in which every issue ended with a splash page of Darkseid doing something innocuous with our hero exclaiming "Darkseid!"). But in preparation for Countdown DC have wisely taken him off the board for a while, using him only in Seven Soldiers in the last few years.

Many comics bloggers (myself included) tend to assume a familliarity with characters and creators that is perhaps unwarranted (whether this is a cause or an effect of the increasing tininess and incestuousness of the comics fan community is left as an exercise for the reader). I will probably make that mistake time and again, but I would like this blog to be readable by those who do not have a Masters in Kirby Studies and a PhD in Ditkology, so I'm going to try to provide links to anything necessary for understanding these posts. (Not always possible - some of the ideas here are from a conversation I had with my songwriting partner Mr Tilt Corazón Araiza, and I can't link to that - but where possible I'll link it).

Those of you who don't know who Darkseid is should, of course, read Jack Kirby's original Fourth World comics (wait for the forthcoming colour reprints - the current black & white paperbacks lose a lot of the impact of art that was intended for colour). But as a quick primer you could do worse than check out Newsarama's Counting Down To Countdown article on the Fourth World. Greg Morrow has provided a more entertaining explanation, but Marc Singer has provided the best summary of why Darkseid is such a great character. As Marc puts it " imagine a Hitler who's both physically intimidating and not the slightest bit insane. Darkseid is what Hitler wanted to be, the visions he sold to himself in his sleep made real. A walking dream, or nightmare, of total control."

As someone with an interest in cybernetics, the phrase 'total control' makes me prick up my ears. What's really interesting to me, though, is that Darkseid is, in order to gain this control, after the Anti-Life Equation. The reason this interests me is that in real life there is, in effect, a real anti-life equation - and it is precisely that that stops Darkseid getting control.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is usually expressed as "in a closed system, entropy will always increase" or (as Flanders & Swann memorably put it) "Heat won't pass from a cooler to a hotter. You can try it if you like, but you far better notta". While this seems a fairly trivial result, it is possibly the most important single statement about our physical reality, underlying almost all of modern science. It is the rule that states why we can never have a true perpetual motion machine.

That rule essentially says that everything must decay eventually - columnated ruins domino, civilisations fall, bodies fall apart. It's essentially the law that says time's arrow moves forward to the heat death of the universe.

But it's this law that says Darkseid can't win - Darkseid can never have the absolute control he wants. The Second Law of Thermodynamics, as well as turning up in physics and statistics, has two secret identities. One is Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety , the fundamental principle of cybernetics. This states that to control a system, you need as many options as there are things that can go wrong. This means that to control the population of the universe - Darkseid's desire - he would have to have as many options as there are actions that everyone could take. This is clearly impossible. He would also need perfect information about every event in the universe. The Second Law, in its disguise of Shannon's Tenth Theorem - the most important theorem in information theory - says that he can't have this either.

So what Darkseid is doing when he searches for the 'Anti-Life Equation' is searching for a way to overrule the Second Law Of Thermodynamics. If he can control the universe, he can avoid decaying - he can avoid death. Darkseid is so terrified of his own mortality that he wants to make the universe in his own image in order to stop it killing him.

So why is this equation - the source, after all, of immortality (by my interpretation - I've not seen this stated explicitly in any comics, though some writers seem to imply this) - anti-life ?

Well, because the only way to get what Darkseid wants is to stop the universe from changing in any way. Grant Morrison understood this when he gave Darkseid the slogan 'Darkseid Is'. For Darkseid (or anyone) to have absolute control will mean an end to time. An end to change. Darkseid is - and always will be, unchanged and unchanging. An end to life, in short. As Kirby put it in Forever People 5 - "if someone possesses absolute control over you - you're not really alive."

Because Darkseid isn't scared of literal death (which he, after all, inflicts on others on a regular basis) as much as metaphorical death. To quote from Alan Moore's masterful examination of the tarot in Promethea:

Though this card sounds a funeral knell
It has another tale to tell
Death, our eventual, awful fate
Means nothing more than 'change of state'
One state must end ('tis common sense)
Before another may commence
This card permits, then, a fresh view
Death of the old that births the new.

Compare and contrast Mister Miracle. While Darkseid is the embodiment of order, Mister Miracle is the embodiment of chaos. He's the random element that can never be accounted for. No trap can be designed to hold him, because there's always one degree of freedom left for him to take advantage of. In both his Scott Free and Shilo Norman incarnations, he can get out of anything. One other way of phrasing the Second Law is "imposition of order = escalation of chaos" - every attempt to hem Mister Miracle in is doomed to failure, as is any attempt at control.

In Grant Morrison's Mister Miracle miniseries (part of his Seven Soldiers set of interlocking minis, which I consider possibly the best superhero comics ever created), Morrison shows an understanding of this. Shilo Norman eventually escapes from 'the life trap' and dies, but is resurrected. By accepting change, he overcomes it.

The only true death is stasis. Darkseid in his quest for immortality wishes to doom himself and the rest of the universe to this death, while Mister Miracle has overcome death by embracing change and the new. Mister Miracle adapts to the universe, Darkseid tries to deny the existence of the universe, of anything except himself and his own will. He is doomed to fail in this, but his great tragedy is that, because he's blocked himself off from anything he doesn't want to hear (an inevitable result of his kind of authoritarianism - control closes off lines of communication, by both Ashby and Shannon's formulations) he will never know.

In other news, there's apparently going to be a DC Countdown Myspace...

Countdown to Countdown 3

Having last week discussed how comics can use their shared universes and continuities to their advantage, it is almost my duty to speak about how they can be used badly.

Happily, this week 52 Week 50 and the World War III event came out, providing me with the perfect example.

52 itself is merely bad this week. The Black Adam plot has always been the least interesting thread in the story, and this issue brings it to its tedious conclusion. It read exactly like an issue of Infinite Crisis and it's depressing to note how quickly comics are recycling themselves these days, Justiniano and Wong's art highlighting the similarities of this issue to the Day Of Vengeance mini, part of Infinite Crisis that came out only about eighteen months ago. But it came after one of the best issues of the series yet, and it hints that the next one will be something incredible (Booster Gold returns after 3 months), so I'm OK with that.

World War III, on the other hand, has absolutely no reason for existing. Other writers have pointed out exactly how bad these comics are (Douglas at 52 Pickup going for the point-by-point dissection while Jog gives a more general overview of what is wrong with them), and I'm not going to belabour the point - I could literally spend days pointing out problems with these comics ranging from continuity (since when can Bulleteer fly?) through characterisation (J'onn J'onzz sitting round moping rather than taking action), tactics (I suspect Sun Tzu never said "Get every powerful individual in the world, plus some people like Green Arrow who will be totally useless, and get them to stand in one spot, looking dramatic and giving the target ample
warning"), character design (Andrew Bates and Amanda Waller are drawn as absolutely identical), importance of the story (why would these characters feel so threatened when less than a year ago someone had nearly destroyed th' entire rang-dang-do multeyeverse?), storytelling...

But the reason the WWIII comics are so dreadful is that they have literally no reason for existing.

When 52 started, the idea was that it would explain the 'One Year Later' changes many of the characters in the DCU went through. As the story progressed, the plans changed somewhat. This is more than understandable - 52 is a story of a type never before done by one of the main comics companies, and the writers are very obviously realising that while 52 issues seemed a lot at the start of the story, an extra three or four would be very useful about now. This has led to things like James Gordon's return to the Commissionership of Gotham, which in the Face The Face storyline last year seemed to be an interesting untold story, being reduced to one panel and 'welcome back Commissioner' in 52. These things happen.

But as 52 is coming to an end, there are a huge number of OYL-related changes that have not been explained even in this cursory fashion. So what DC decided to do is put out a four-issue mini, all four issues coming out this week, showing what happened to every character during 'World War III', which this big fight scene has suddenly become.

Leaving aside the minor objections (why four issues rather than just one giant size one, for example) , this leaves the major one - there's no story here.

World War III is not a story - it's a fight scene. And furthermore it's one that many of the OYL changes don't even tie into - the major events in Aquaman, Manhunter and Supergirl's lives just coincidentally happen this week as well. Each of these changes is given between a panel (Hawkwoman being glad Dr Midnight made her non-giant off-panel) and two pages, observed by J'onn J'onnzz for no good reason, with no attempt to tie them together into anything like a narrative.

Not only that, but far worse, these changes have no narrative impact by themselves. Even assuming a familiarity with every character (dangerous - I read my fair share of DC comics and didn't recognise more than a few) and their pre- and post-Infinite Crisis stati quo, the impact of these changes is somewhat muted by them just standing around expositing to each other.

The original impact of the One Year Later jump came from the idea that there was a year's worth of stories we'd not yet read! Comics aren't history books, supposed to record dryly the facts of a character's life, much as some of the more obsessive element of the fandom seems to want them to be (hence the popularity of universe handbooks and the like). Just saying "Father Time changed from black to white because he got his face ripped off and grew a new one" is not in any way interesting or exciting.

Some of these changes held the possibility of being good stories (I'd have liked to have read of Harvey Dent's year in Gotham, for example) while others should just have been forgotten. But this is trying to turn universe handbooks into narrative, much as the History of The DCU backups were in the early issues of 52.

Once it became clear to the creative team that the story they were telling wasn't 'the missing year of the DCU' - which according to DiDio was as early as the second issue - there were several options open to editorial. One would be to put a little text explanation at the end of the comics, instead of DiDio's 'DC Nation' thing, saying what had happened over the missing year in that title. Another, probably even more lucrative than this way and certainly more satisfying, would have been to bring back annuals for one year, and have the regular creative teams tell the story. Hell, have them be '52 Specials'. They'd have sold.

So if you want to know how not to deal with a shared universe, it's this. Don't do a four-issue crossover between every single one of your comics which can only be understood by someone who reads all of them, which contains little or no new information for such a hypothetical reader, and has literally no reason for existing.

In other 'news', Newsarama, a comics website mostly devoted to promoting Marvel and DC stuff, has five 'countdown to countdown' articles on its front page, covering the histories of the characters we're going to see in Countdown. The more I see about this, the more enthusiastic I get - I've always found the Kirby characters and the Marvel family more interesting than the 'legacy characters' and Bronze Age characters DC seems to concentrate on at the moment. While I'm not expecting this to be Seven Soldiers good, it looks like it will have more of that flavour than of World War III, and that can only be a good thing.

Countdown to Countdown 4

As pretty much everyone interested in superhero comics is now aware, DC Comics have announced a new weekly maxiseries, Countdown, to start the week after their current weekly maxiseries, 52, ends.

Now, one of the most interesting things about 52 (which is one of the most fascinating projects in superhero comics of recent years, second only to Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers) has been following the reactions among fans - reading 52 Pickup has often been as interesting as the comic itself, and Ralph Dibny's Diary is better than most issues (and is, as far as I'm concerned, canon). I think it will be interesting to see if Countdown holds up as well to real-time analysis.

Of course, 52 and Countdown are very different projects. Every issue of 52 is (supposedly) written by the same four people (supposedly as some issues seem very much the work of individuals), while Countdown is being written by a team under the supervision of Paul Dini. This should, paradoxically, lead to a higher overall level of quality. While 52's writers are 'superstars' (in comics terms - only Grant Morrison has any sort of presence in the mainstream, and even his is limited to a sort of pseudo-counterculture following) they have very disparate levels of ability, and very different writing styles. The people working on Countdown, though, are writers who are (with no disrespect intended to them) solid mid-listers, reliable writers of not especially-popular titles. They're being led by Dini, who is known for solid, crafted superhero tales that don't break out of their genre but are enjoyable for what they are (this is high praise indeed - Dini is practically the only person writing decent pure superhero stories for either of the major companies at the moment) and who also has experience as a TV head writer.

The other difference between the two projects though is that while both involve the whole 'DC Universe', 52 takes place in its own isolated year of continuity, while Countdown will be interacting with the regular comics.

Now, many reviewers have complained about this, and about Countdown generally, seeing it as another example of the short-sighted commercialism that is making the major companies run one crossover after another back-to-back, aiming to sell more and more comics to an ever-dwindling number of ever-ageing devotees, who don't even enjoy them any more and are buying them to fulfill a misguided compulsion. And of course, that is exactly what it is.

But it could still be a brilliant idea as well. I have argued for years that there should be a weekly Adventures In The DC Universe title, which this appears to be, something that can introduce new readers to the sheer wealth of material that is in the DC Universe (or indeed the Marvel universe, but due to my age and location I was primarily introduced to USian comics through the British Invasion of the 80s and so my attachment to the DC characters is greater).

Because while I agree with the ideas of Dave Sim (the only time you'll read that phrase in this blog) about creator-ownership, creator-owned comics, as good as they can be (and I'd put Cerebus, Lost Girls, A Disease Of Language, Roarin' Rick's Rare Bit Fiends and many others up with any work in any medium) miss what I think is the truly great thing about the two big comic companies - the shared universes, which are the real creations which make the comics worth reading.

So while many individual comics in those universes are poor, they're still interesting because they add to (or at least maintain) the mythos. This is , of course, why the recent fad of killing, raping and otherwise rendering unusable characters who don't have their own title is such a bad idea, quite apart from the comics themselves being very unpleasant. Before Identity Crisis , you could tell an infinite number of stories about Ralph & Sue Dibny. After it, you could only tell one (which 52 told extremely well).

Grant Morrison is currently engaged in trying to make the DC Universe sentient, something which, if nothing else, should make for interesting comics. But even if he doesn't (which is rather likely on the face of it), a more coherent DC Universe will make for better comics - but only if that coherence takes the form of opening up new story ideas, rather than closing them off . On the face of it, Countdown appears more likely to do the former than the latter.

However, this comes at a price, as the more pessimistic among us acknowledge. Not all the comics Countdown ties into will be very good. In fact, the first crossover that has been announced involves three titles that I do not buy. It is my fervent hope that it will not be necessary to buy these titles in order to follow the story in Countdown - and from what's been said so far it won't be.

But what this means is I'm going to review Countdown in a different manner to the way in which 52 has been looked at. I'm going to look at the comic every week and review it, make predictions, say what's interesting about it, but I'm also going to post brief reviews of the other DCU titles I'm reading, and look at how they tie in.

However, I do not read anything like all the DCU titles, and in fact miss some of the key titles that will tie into this - looking over DC's solicits for the next few months, the only 'real-time' DCU titles I'm planning on buying are Action (only some issues) , All-New Atom, Detective, Dr Fate, Superman, Batman, Blue Beetle, Shadowpact and Firestorm. Anything that doesn't take place in those titles I'll have to guess about or read on other people's blogs.

But what I'll also be doing is using those comics as a launching pad for rants on whatever subjects seem to fit - mostly comic-related, but I might decide to talk about the application of cybernetics and information theory to the New Gods, with reference to the Anti-Life equation, Mister Miracle and Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety. Or I might say that Rob Liefeld sucks. Whichever. How closely they'll relate to the issue in question depends on how interesting the issue is to talk about.

Either way, I plan at the moment to keep this up for the length of Countdown, posting once a week, but can't guarantee this. I have a tendency to start projects I can't finish, and also I'm not going to commit to buying 52 comics in advance without any knowledge of the contents. But for the next few weeks, at least, expect a post by Sunday evening UK time.