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taraco wrote:

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COUNTDOWN was pretty awful. Ballyhooed as changing the face of the DC Universe forever, etc., it instead concentrated on minor characters, spiralled around a Ray Palmer quest that added up to not very much and had no real payoff at all except (spoiler warning), the "death" of Darkseid who miraculously appears may not be dead at all in the new Final Crisis.

There's an interview with Grant Morrison over on Newsarama.com where he explains that he began writing FINAL CRISIS two years ago, and that while COUNTDOWN was intended by DC editorial to lead into FC, there wasn't enough editorial coordination to actually ensure that events in the books would sync up. As a result, neither COUNTDOWN nor the DEATH OF THE NEW GODS miniseries serves as any logical "prequel" to FC -- and better yet (or worse, depending upon your POV), according to Morrison, the events of FC were really set up a few years ago in his SEVEN SOLDIERS OF VICTORY group of books.

chris schillig wrote:

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That said, since DC promoted the two series as being part of a bigger whole, then that IS a problem. Maybe the marketing folks got ahead of themselves. DC has really made hash out of Kirby's Fourth World concepts over the years, only getting them right a few times -- the Byrne and Simonson eras -- and messing them up more often than not.

LOL -- yeah, I was looking at the some of the issues from DEATH OF THE NEW GODS last night to refresh my memory of the stuff that Morrison referred to, and I was thinking the very same thing. As the kind of mumbo-jumbo-cosmic study in pretzel logic that Jim Starlin excels in, it may work -- but it's entirely the wrong approach for the Fourth World concept. But then practically every single creator who has tried to follow Kirby on these characters has gotten them completely wrong! The rap against Kirby back in those days was that he was not a good writer, but I'm finding that his stuff holds up a lot more than most, and I'm thinking that his strengths were precisely where others found flaws. There was a real push in the 70's to do more "realistic" characterization and dialogue, but Kirby was never about that. Where others used a pen, he used a hammer and chisel. And because his characters were so simple, so bold, so much larger than life, they escaped the trap that many others of the time fell prey to -- which is that they all talked and thought like the people writing them, and were practically interchangeable in any given situation (the exceptions being the colloquialisms and speech patterns that were usually so overwritten that they were just embarrassing).

Orion, Lightray, Highfather, Darkseid -- you knew what these guys were about the first time you saw them, and there was no mixing them up. As if there was a chance that you would, every so often, just to drive the point home, Kirby would drop a speech on you like a ton of bricks. There's a bit in FOREVER PEOPLE where Darkseid is strolling around the amusement park Happyland, and a young boy reacts to him with fear. His grandfather apologizes and tries to explain that Darkseid is just part of a show, and Darkseid puts him in his place with a comment regarding the ability (or even need) of adults to ignore what's right in front of them, while children possess no such self-deception. I don't know too many others who were writing this kind of stuff at the time -- or even now. For all the rationalization that these books failed (or were killed, take your pick) because Kirby was just too far ahead of his time, I don't think they would have been better met at any other time. It's really a miracle Kirby was ever able to do it at all.