Countdown is DC's new weekly series, following on from the enormous success of 52.  It's a countdown to, well, something - so it's starting with issue #51, and working back from there.

DC have learned from some of their mistakes.  This series will have rotating creative teams rather than collaboration by committee.  The usually-reliable Paul Dini serves as head writer, with a group of collaborators handling individual stories.  The "real time" gimmick has gone as well, partly because this book has to tie in with the whole DC line, and partly because it created real pacing difficulties that weren't worth the hassle.

Of course, doing it this way, DC open themselves to a different problem - their key books have been so plagued by delayed over the last year that to tie them all into a weekly series like Countdown seems a real hostage to fortune.  DC proved last year that they could deliver a weekly book on time; they also proved that they couldn't do the same with a monthly.  To make this work, the whole line has to run to schedule, and fill-ins won't help.  I don't believe DC can do it - not unless they've learned a ton of lessons from the fiasco of the last twelve months.  I'm willing to be proved wrong.

At first, I wasn't planning to bother with Countdown.  I'd read 52 and I didn't feel the urge to take it any further.  But after reading some of the early reviews, I was sufficiently baffled to give it a look.  Surely, DC couldn't really be doing what the reviews seemed to suggest?

But no, there it is on page three: "I see the time fast approaching when existence itself shall be recreated, and Darkseid shall be its architect..."

AGAIN?!?

Does this company have no other ideas?  The DC Universe is starting to feel like a world that gets re-created six times before breakfast.  And while that's all very well for these big, sweeping cosmic stories, it's a disaster for the other titles that are just trying to get on with telling their stories.  Reboots need to be handled very, very carefully, because they undermine the basic principle that What Happens Matters.  If you have a universe where the basic principle is that everything gets rebooted all the time, nothing has any weight.  It doesn't matter because it won't stick.  You can get away with it as a continuity house-cleaning exercise at very infrequent intervals, but that's it.

Even if DC aren't really planning a further continuity reboot, it's sheer folly even to tease one.  They've only just had one.  They need to bed it down and make it work.  If they want to bring back the Multiverse, fine - do some stories with the Multiverse.  Have some characters go off and explore the other universes.  But for heaven's sake, steer clear of rewriting reality.  It's the one story that they shouldn't even be hinting at for the next four or five years, and here they are putting it front and centre.  I despair of this company.

The actual story involves the Joker's Daughter being attacked by a rogue Monitor.  Apparently she's now a character from a parallel universe, which is presumably supposed to explain away her nightmarishly convoluted continuity - except, of course, it's an explanation that only became valid after the Multiverse was restored, and so it doesn't explain the previous stories after all.  Or does it? 

Hanging around with her is a character who I gather is the Red Hood, although helpfully, nobody actually names him or explains who he is.  (Duela addresses him, once, as "Little red robin hood", and that's as close as it gets.)  I don't know who the bloody Red Hood is, and this book apparently can't be bothered telling me.  Near the end, somebody finally identifies him as Jason Todd, who I know used to be Robin, but I've got no clue why he's wearing this costume or what it's supposed to signify.

You will probably not be surprised to learn that, at around this point, I throw my hands up in despair and give up.  This is everything I'd feared from Countdown.  It's got a continuity obsession and, from the look of it, little besides.  I'd hoped for more from Paul Dini, who is a gifted storyteller, but there's nothing here of any serious interest to anyone who isn't already a devoted hardcore DC fan.  The rest of us will be alternately baffled and bored.

Rating: C

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