Bye bye, Countdown

Bye bye, Countdown

Jun 08

Maybe it’s just the fact that my fucking boss made me fucking angry this morning by asserting that comp time ISN’T company policy, and that if I didn’t want to travel FOR WORK all weekend, I should have said so and NOT gone on the trip. Yeah, I’m sure THAT would have gone well.

But I’m crabby, and so I’ve just dropped Countdown. It’s going nowhere yet, it’s not getting there all that quickly, and there’s enough annoying moments for me that it’s just a bit of a drag, to be honest.

With 52, I was drawn in by the sheer novelty of it, and that kept me interested even when the storytelling flagged. Working without a net on a weekly book, the four talented writers were driven into flights of fancy that I don’t think they would have attempted if they had the time and forethought that they would get on a monthly book.

Countdown just feels…lumpy. Flaccid. It lacks a certain spark. So all you’re left with are relatively disconnected scenes surrounding relatively uninteresting characters.

If it gets better–or rather, if the voices in the Comics Multiblogoverse say it gets better–I will probably return, and fill the gaps via dollar bins. Or at least pick up the trades. But right now, that’s $12 a month I’m saving.

(I also dropped Amazons Attack, for similar reasons, although it has a spark thanks to Will Pfeiffer’s scripting and Pete Woods’ pencils. It just makes little sense to me, there is WAY too much death and destruction for its own good, and it’s kinda jarring to be reading this big-ass apeshit event happening at the same time as Countdown. Bleah.)