Countdown to a Proper Burial

You want to know what's really sad? This is probably the best issue of the entire series.

The ludicrous Jimmy Olsen-Darkseid smackdown/Kirby homage (or whatever) advertised on the front cover turns out, mercifully, to be a red herring. The real fight this issue is (spoilers on) a father-son matchup between Darseid and Orion. First, the good news: the fight looks amazing. Every Scott Kolins issue of Countdown looks sensationsal, obviously, but he really pulls out all the stops here. There are more Kirby dots per square inch in this comic than, perhaps, in any comic actually illustrated by Kirby himself. (BTW: Someone needs to hook a fanboy or two up some kind of blood pressure/heart rate monitor and then show them slides of images with and without Kirby dots--I'm pretty sure it will bear out my theory that Kirby dots are actually physiological stimulants.)


So, CWCID: great looking issue.

The totally mindnumblingly not-at-all-surprising bad news is that, like every single issue of this misbegotten travesty of a series, good writers once again produce risible work. For instance: Superman's response to the showdown between Darkseid and Orion in the middle of Metropolis:

Green Lantern: Superman, I don't care what Orion says--we've gotta do something here!

Superman: This is between a father and his son, Kyle. [portentously] This is between Gods.

Whaaa??? Huuuhhhh?????? One of the "Gods" is Darkseid! At least the Flash was running around saving people on page 1, not standing on a roof eating popcorn with the impossibly lame "Challengers of the Unknown." Normally, I don't care much about this kind of hiccup in my suspension of disbelief, but it's so egregious here that it seems as if Paul Dini and Sean McKeever (good writers both) have just said, fuck it. Let's put this baby to bed. And you know what? I can't say that I blame them. Does anyone really care anymore--if, indeed, anyone ever did? Don't we all, much like poor Brooke White on Tuesday night, just want this damn song to be over and done with so that we can get on to something new and pretend it never happened in the first place?