Countdown: One on One

Clearly, the Monitor and Darkseid ...

are fans of this:

You've got to understand, baby, time out is what I'm here for.

Thanks to Chris for the H2O image.

Enter: The Legionnaire Part 2

The team-up that began in Karate Kid 15 continues in Kamandi 58!

As we left off last time, Karate Kid was being loaded into a machine that would project his consciousness into a film, and both he and Kamandi were about to become a part of the Bruce Lee classic, Enter the Dragon.

While the fighting continues, Kamandi provides Karate Kid with some hasty exposition, letting the Legionnaire know that they are indeed starring in a movie that has already been made. Soon, the scene shifts from fighting to something more Karate Kid's style:

It seems, from Kamandi's above assessment of cinematic history, that the only movies to survive the Great Disaster were those in Chris Sims's collection.

Meanwhile, Canus and Bloodstalker are fighting the lobster men in an attempt to free the heroes. During their fight, however, they accidentally bump the projection equipment, sending the heroes into a quick succession of different movies:

Lucky for them, one of the movies was not Audition.

This causes the lobster men to react in the same way as the audience did at the last Halle Berry movie I saw:

Indeed, Perfect Stranger lacked both "movin'" and "groovin'".

Karate Kid and Kamandi manage to escape with the help of Kamandi's posse. Karate Kid is still stuck with the dilemma he had when the story started, though: he needs to get back to his own time to find a cure for "Diamondeth."

Luckily, Kamandi's friend Pyra has the powers of deus ex machina, and literally creates a new time sphere out of "vortex energy" to return Karate Kid home. Conveniently, this expense of energy makes it impossible for her to cure Diamondeth as well.


I don't have the issues of The Legion of Super-Heroes where Karate Kid returns to the 30th century, so I don't even know if the Iris Jacobs/Diamondeth plot is resolved. The next time I saw her was in Brave and the Bold 198, where Karate Kid makes the ultimate dick move by returning to the 20th century to invite Iris--who, we must remember, participated in dicy experiments that turned her into an indestructible killing machine in order to impress Karate Kid--to his 30th century wedding with Princess Projectra. That is cold!

Enter: The Legionnaire!

With the Great Disaster currently looming in the DC Universe, and with Karate Kid's adventures in Countdown somehow connected, I can't help but think that these two comics, Karate Kid 15 and Kamandi 58, may be the most important back issues around right now:
I also think we can all agree with Karate Kid here that, with its record-breaking blizzards, Carter Administration, Jonestown Massacre, 3 Popes, and birth of Ashton Kutcher, 1978 needed a good punching.

Right around the time that these two comics were published, DC cancelled a whole bunch of titles in what quickly came to be known as the "DC Implosion." For most Implosion titles, the cancellation came swiftly and without warning (much like the gastro-intestinal distress I felt from the chicken salad I made yesterday). With Karate Kid , readers were warned of the oncoming cancellation in the title's letter page (much like I should have been warned by the large amount of curry powder I put in the chicken salad). To close out Karate Kid, then, writers Bob Rozakis and Jack C. Harris, along with editor Allen Milgrom, put together this crossover featuring two 30th-century heroes from alternate futures.

Ironically, Kamandi would meet its premature end in the following issue, 59. That month launched the highly touted "DC Explosion," where DC raised the price and page count of its regular titles, with most series taking on 8-page back-up stories. Kamandi's back-up was another Jack Kirby creation, OMAC, written and drawn by Jim Starlin.

Karate Kid 15 wraps up a storyline developed over several issues, where Karate Kid's 20th-century girlfriend, Iris Jacobs, tired of always being rescued and jealous of her super-powered rival, Princess Projectra, volunteers for some dodgy experiments at S.T.A.R. Labs, the DC Universe home for ethically questionable scientific practices. These experiments go horribly wrong--or wonderfully right, depending on your perspective--and Iris is turned into a mindless, indestructible killing machine called "Diamondeth." After subduing her, Karate Kid decides that only 30th century science can cure her, so he loads her in his time sphere for a return trip to his home era.

Meanwhile, the Lord of Time and Major Disaster--two villains who have been screwing with Karate Kid from issue 1--continue their dickish ways and send him on a detour to an alternate future: the post-Great Disaster future of Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth!

Upon landing in this new time, Karate Kid realizes that this isn't his 30th century when he sees Dr. Canus and Mylock Bloodstalker, two evolved dogs who are a part of Kamandi's posse. Behaving like any good superhero does when he meets a new, previously unknown group of people from whom he could learn about cultures different from his own, Kamandi proceeds to kick them in the face:



Once that's taken care of, the rest of Kamandi's crew, sans Kamandi, spends about 10 pages catching Karate Kid, and the reader, up on what's been going on in Kamandi's own book. It turns out that Kamandi has been kidnapped by some surfing lobster men, who treat him as if he were a god. All this time, Major Disaster and the Lord of Time are watching over Karate Kid, and Major Disaster chooses this moment to create a tidal wave that brings the surfing lobsters to our heroes:




After a brief and unbelievably lopsided fight, where Karate Kid discovers that his punches and kicks have no effect on the lobster men's hard shells, Karate Kid is coldcocked by a lobster man and taken prisoner. As it turns out they also worship him as a god.

You may be wondering, then, what the religious ceremonies of the lobster men look like First, their gods are placed in egg-shaped containers. Then, those containers are inserted into a projection machine, and the gods' consciousnesses are loaded into an already-existing film, which is projected onto a drive-in movie screen.


And in what movie do Karate Kid and Kamandi get to participate? Oh, it's better than you could possibly expect!


Perhaps, with this being 1978 and all, you were expecting that year's Oscar winner, The Deer Hunter, or the touching Vietnam veteran drama Coming Home, or even Woody Allen's foray into Bergmanesque drama, Interiors. However, Rozakis and Harris make the best of all possible choices by making the heroic duo the stars of Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon!

Next: the story comes to a shocking anti-climax in Kamandi 58!

More on DC Countdown

This may be the last I comment on Countdown for a while, mainly because Brian Hibbs, owner of Comix Experience in San Francisco and author of the best column on comic retailing, "Tilting at Windmills," has written a column that reflects my feelings on the series, and he has the evidence to back up his claims.

One thing I didn't comment on in my earlier posts is Countdown's returnability in the first three months and how that might affect the sales outlook. Here's what Hibbs has to say on that:

"Now, this is semi-anecdotal – by the June sales chart, Countdown in its second month is still (just barely) a Top 25 book – but I know that I, at least, have been taking advantage of the returnability offer on the first 12 issues. Basically, the deal was 'order what you did of 52, and you can send back unsold copies at a later date'.
"That deal worked really well for 52 – I brought in more copies than my fiscally conservative instincts would have suggested, and that paid off, not just for those first three months, but for the entire year that followed. We returned under 15% of our orders, orders that were largely based off of Infinite Crisis’ huge sales. 52 was, for the entire year, very nearly the best-selling DC comic for us – only a few issues of Justice League of America beat it – a remarkably consistent and strong sales pattern for the year.
"Countdown? Well, we’re only at the 10th week, as of this writing, but no, not nearly as strong and profitable. At this point in time, I expect to be returning more than a third of my initial orders on the first three months to DC. Owie."

Those are some pretty startling numbers.

And over here, Phil has started a contest to predict Countdown's final numbers. Winner gets an Amazon gift card. Go enter!

DC Countdown continued

I wanted to point out that The Beat has posted DC's sales for June, and the numbers bear out some of my predictions about Countdown. And analyst Marc-Oliver Frisch's commentary also reflect my own comments.

For the sake of discussion, here are the numbers:

17/19/21/22 - COUNTDOWN
05/2007: Countdown #51 — 91,083
05/2007: Countdown #50 — 83,752 (-8.1%) [85,564]
05/2007: Countdown #49 — 81,484 (-2.7%) [83,188]
05/2007: Countdown #48 — 79,810 (-2.1%) [81,828]
06/2007: Countdown #47 — 77,504 (-2.9%)
06/2007: Countdown #46 — 76,362 (-1.5%)
06/2007: Countdown #45 — 74,918 (-1.9%)
06/2007: Countdown #44 — 73,971 (-1.3%)

(The numbers in brackets include late reorders on those issues.)

Though the sales are dropping on Countdown from week to week, the drops don't seem signficant, unless you make a month-to-month comparison. Disregarding the sales boost that the first issue received, the comparison of issue 50 to issue 44 shows a drop of 11,593 after reorders. That's a 13.5% drop. Now, issues 47-44 may receive some late reorders next month, but this still looks like a big drop. And I think the month-to-month comparisons here are relevant because most readers probably preorder the series in monthly chunks, and many are reluctant to leave their local comic shops holding the bag on comics that they personally ordered. And then there are readers like me, who buy their monthly comics through a mail order service. There, the orders are made 2-3 months in advance, and often the mail order companies don't allow for order cancellations or returns. Therefore, those customers usually end up buying 2-3 months of a title that they want to quit. So, I expect to see a more significant drop from 44 to 43.

Marc-Oliver Frisch also makes some interesting observations about the two announced Countdown crossovers for June: Catwoman 68 and Blue Beetle 16. Neither of these books saw much of a sales boost from their crossover status. Now, I've read both of those issues, and their connection to Countdown seems relatively tangential: both deal with characters (Holly and Eclipso, respectively) who are or will be a part of Countdown, but the stories don't seem particularly important to that series.

I'll be looking at next month's numbers with great interest. Will there be a signficant third-month drop? Will the announcement of so many spinoffs have a negative effect? And what will be see for numbers on those series?

And Phil has already chimed in on these numbers, with a link to a Countdown supporter who is tired of the hating.

DC Countdown

I was preparing a long entry for this weekend on DC Comics's weekly Countdown series, but since Heidi at The Beat reported "that [Andrew Hickey] the guy who was going to blog about it every week has quit" reading the series, I thought it would be worthwhile to chime in now. Phil Looney also makes some good points on his blog, explaining why he dropped the series after the fifth week, and I've had interesting online discussions on the subject with Jim Shelley and Chris Sims that have formed the basis for this entry.

I'm sorry to see Andrew Hickey drop Countdown, though I don't blame him for doing so. I was, however, enjoying his blog on the series, especially as he became increasingly disenchanted with the series, and his criticism was precise, articulate, and often funny. I hope he continues to use his blog to comment on and analyze this particular phenomenon, even if he isn't buying the series anymore.

Personally, I stopped buying Countdown after six issues (though I have kept reading it), and I want to use this entry to detail my feelings about the series in particular and about the direction DC is heading in general. In particular, I'm concerned about what the Countdown brand says about DC's attitude toward its readers and what it may mean for the future of the company.

To be honest, I wasn't real enthusiastic about Countdown from the beginning. The reason for my disenchantment came about at the end of the previous weekly series, 52. I ended up enjoying 52 more than I didn't, and its strengths have been detailed in many places, including Phil's blog: the series had a clear plot, it was self-contained, Keith Giffin provided a unified visual style, etc. However, the "World War III" story pointed to a serious flaw in that series that put me off to DC's plan for another weekly comic. When 52 was originally introduced, DC made claims that it would not only tell the story of the year without Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, but that it would also fill in the gaps from the "One Year Later" jump in the regular DC books. When it became apparent by week 50 that the latter goal would not be achieved in any immediate way, the World War III spin-off books were used to ham-fistedly force some last minute explanations for some of the changes that occurred (and Dan DiDio did own up to the fact that plans changed for the series during its composition). This soured me on the whole project--though I bought the 4 spin-offs in order to complete the story that I had already invested 50 issues into, I wasn't going to make the same mistake and commitment to another weekly series. So, while reading 52 did have its rewards, I had the nagging feeling that a "bait and switch" had taken place.

I would also combine that feeling with a kind of "weekly comic ennui"--I was growing bored with the idea of another year-long commitment to a series, and I was looking forward to the opportunity to free up $10.00 of my monthly comic budget at the end of 52. Therefore, Countdown's higher price tag made it less appealing, as well. Then, as the multiple spin-offs were announced over the past two months, the price tag for the series has grown to the point that it would almost cost my entire monthly comic budget to follow this one story. Based on the main series and the 9 spin-offs that have been announced, including the two 52 spin-offs (52 The Aftermath and Crime Bible), a reader following all the Countdown related comics would be buying 106 comics at a cost of $334, and more spin-offs are on the way. This number also doesn't include the regular series issues that are tied in to Countdown, or the other major events going on in the DC Universe, such as Amazons Attacks, The Sinestro Corps War, The Outsiders, and the Black Canary/Green Arrow Wedding. Once you add those in, as a means of keeping up with the increasingly complicated and intertwined DC Universe, the cost becomes astronomical. I'd be willing to follow any one of these stories at a time, but definitely not all at once.

This economic issue may prove to be the most significant cause of Countdown's failure, if the series does indeed fail (and it's already performing below 52's numbers), but the economics of Countdown seem consistent with the business model DC has been following since Infinite Crisis. Though the company pays lip-service to the idea of drawing in new readers, little evidence of that appeal can be found in the continuity-heavy (what some call "continuity porn") events the company has put out over the last three years. Instead, the primary goal at DC seems to be maximizing the amount of money that they can draw from their existing reader base--a base familiar with decades worth of stories and the minutiae of shared-universe continuity. It sounds better to say that a company is trying to bring in new customers than it is to say they are trying to milk their existing customers as much as possible, so their public statements would, out of necessity, need to emphasize the former. And I believe with Countdown we will see the limits of that strategy. To this end, it will be important to pay attention to the sales figures for Countdown and the spin-offs. In the first month, Countdown already lost 30% of 52's readership, and while 52 maintained amazingly consistent numbers around 100,000 for the entire year, I would expect Countdown's numbers to continue dropping. But the real revelation will be in the performance of the spin-offs, because here we'll see the power of the Countdown brand in action. I would guess that The Search for Ray Palmer one-shots and The Death of the New Gods will perform close to the regular Countdown series. But what about Lord Havok and the Extremists, for example--a series with no past history in the DC universe? Other than fans of Frank Tieri's writing, I can only imagine this series will appeal to the hardcore DC loyalists and Countdown completists. I think we can extract from the sales numbers of that series just how many of those readers there are.

There are, of course, weaknesses to Countdown as a story, and many of the company's public statements on the series do not match with reality (Andrew Hickey has already detailed these well). I would also add a personal disappointment with all the errors that have creeped into the series, such as the reference to "The Tomorrow People" instead of "The Forever People" in the New Gods recap from issue 45. Such sloppiness indicates a lazy approach to editing a series that needs to be accurate in its relation to continuity. And I don't doubt that the series would be doing better, and the blogosphere would be less agitated, if Countdown had truly kicked ass out of the gate. But I think, for all those weaknesses, that readers would have had more patience with the series either if 52 had not happened, or if DC had taken a year or so break from weekly comics to allow readers to get enthusiastic for the concept again. As one commentor noted on The Beat, many of the story complaints we are hearing now were also levied at the beginning of 52. But then, there was a greater willingness to be patient.

While Andrew Hickey lasted 10 weeks, most other commentors on the subject that I've read say that they bailed around week 5 or 6. If making comparisons to a weekly fictional TV series is valid, as has been done by both DC and outside commentators, then 5 or 6 weeks is a couple of weeks longer than most viewers will retain their patience before moving on, let alone 10 weeks. With the anti-Countdown backlash, I believe we are seeing what amounts to an erosion of loyal readers who, in good faith, wanted the series to be good, but when faced with diminishing returns and the promise of an even bigger financial commitment down the road, they jumped off early. At best, the remaining readers who ride the series out to the end should provide a snapshot for DC of their hardcore, loyal readership.