About Scott Cederlund
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Congrats to DC for getting me to pay 50 cents for a teaser. Again.
Chalk up another failure for Countdown. Instead of being a year long story, it was only a 51 week long story, just missing the mark. DC Universe: 0 was originally intended to be Countdown #0 but according to Dan Didio, when they couldn’t properly work out the trade collections, they repositioned Countdown #0 as DC Universe: 0. At least, that’s what the company line is.
My own personal theory is that DC Universe was repositioned to be a palate cleanser; a way to wash out the bad taste of Countdown and better set up Grant Morrison’s upcoming Final Crisis. Taken a bit further, this may be a re-positioning of the whole DC universe since, other than 52, there has been little to celebrate since the end of Infinite Crisis. One Year Later and Countdown failed to connect with readers. Late books like Action Comics and Wonder Woman derailed those high profile relaunches, making the news more about missed deadlines than anything that may have been happening within the pages of those books.
If there was once supposed to be a Countdown #0, all traces of that has been wiped out of this book. Nothing from that story is alluded to as this book instead picks up plot points of DC’s main characters; Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, the Spectre and even the villains. DC Universe is foward looking, giving the readers a taste of what’s coming this summer. Superman teams up with the Legion of Super-Heroes. Batman and the Joker have a discussion of the future that’s reminiscent of a scene from The Killing Joke. Wonder Woman is prepped for a meeting with the cast of 300. Green Lantern is set up for Blackest Night. Maybe correctly DC realizes that their future is wrapped up in these characters and not Mary Marvel or whoever else showed up in Countdown.
The strongest sequence in the book features a discussion between Batman and the Joker. Tony Daniel does his best Brian Bolland impersonation here and whichever of the colorist contributed to this segment does a nice job bathing the Batman in a blood red-like light. As the Batman attempts to pull information out of the Joker, the Joker lays out a series of playing cards, almost as if he’s laying out Tarot cards to divine the future. There’s no laughing; no murderous hijinks. There’s just two men, a deck of cards and the future in front of them.
DC Universe #0 is comfort food, a way for the long-time fans of these characters to feel good about them and the concepts around them. The silly gimmicks of the past couple of years are jettisoned and the focus is seemingly put more on plot around the cornerstone characters. DC Universe is barely a story. It’s small glimpses of plots. It’s the trailers before a movie, hoping to offer enough to entice its audience but offering little on overall narrative, characterization or development. The Superman, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern sequences barely hold together, trying to generate excitement about upcoming stories but delivering confusing artwork and storytelling.
DC Universe #0
Written by: Grant Morrison and Geoff Johns
Penciled by: George Perez, Doug Mahnke, Tony S. Daniel, Ivan Reis, Aaron Lopresti, Philip Tan, Ed Benes, Carlos Pacheco, JG Jones
Inked by: Scott Koblish, Christian Alamy, Tony S. Daniel, Oclair Albert, Matt Ryan, Jeff De Los Santos, Ed Benes, Jesus Merino, JG Jones
Colored by: Alex Sinclair, Tom Smith, David Baron
Lettered by: Nick J. Napolitano
I can’t remember if it was Countdown to Infinite Crisis or what, but the $1 comic that featured the death of Ted Kord was actually a good long comic for that $1, and it actually had a beginning, middle and end as opposed to a series of extended ads for the Final Crisis and all its tie-ins.
I loved the comment about the cast of 300. I was thinking the exact same thing.
But all in all, you gotta love that payoff at the end. That was killer.