Countdown issue 50 review

So Jimm Olsen breaks into this place where Jason Todd is beating up a bunch of people, and they look like ninjas. Actually they all have Ninja Turtles masks and they wear them over their ninja faces. So they’re wearing the traditional ninja things, but then they’re wearing a mask over their ninja thing. They’re wearing the black ninja mask that totally covers their face, and they are also wearing an orange mask over the black ninja mask, my assumption is that nobody can figure out who they are.

Jimmy also talks to Jason Todd, and then he asks about Dulia Dent, the Joker’s daughter’s death. In a creepy voice, Jason Todd say, “Duela was being a bad girl.” That sent shivers up my spine. That was a eeew thing. Eeew. Eeew. Eeew.

So then we cut to Mary Marvel talking to some blind fortune-teller bathing suit model

apparently. Not everybody has to be an attractive supermodel. I’m just saying. It’s not my place to judge. She’s free to wear what she feels like. She's grown up fiction person who is not real, the team behinds this was all male.

In the first scene Mary Marvel’s clearly wearing some sort of turtleneck, but when you look down she’s wearing some super shiny thing. It’s sort of dumb. You know, the weird thing so far is that the art is really goofy when you just look at it for a second.

So Mary Marvel’s stuff is just plain exposition. The only thing it’s doing is just moving the pieces together to get her to Gotham to get her to do something. Things like this irritate me in a lot of ways. You know, in writing, as in life, there are coincidences, but this is a scene that explains something we already know, that Mary has lost her powers, which, as I said, was done very effectively in the first issue.

All this is dumb. I hate this scene. I now see that she wasn’t wearing a bikini but an exceptionally low top, but she was drawn to look like she was wearing nothing but a bikini, so I still call it b. s. and whatever. The scene I called stupid doesn’t really tell much about it. It was just Mary at a fortune-teller. Why even include this scene?

I feel like this whole review thing is totally disjointed and I’m sorry for that. I’m new at this, but whatever. It’s not like I’m going to be dedicating a year of my life to this.

So Karate Kid and Batman are in a fight, and I don’t know what Karate Kid is doing because he is from the future and not modern times. So it is a 2-page fight scene with no explanation. So I will give you one. There is just a fight scene, and a direct quote from the book itself is, “I guess Superman miscalculated.” So Karate Kid steals Batman’s belt, and then Black Lightning shocks Karate Kid. And then he says, “Super Man miscalculated the kid’s skill level.” The kid looks a lot like 25 and not like 15, so it’s a lot like video games. It’s great because any time they can just turn comic books into video games. Boy, I certainly hope that this doesn’t just descend into nothing but random fight scenes.

Okay, a little bit of praise – they do this effect where in each hit the panel represents the hit. I kind of like that effect.

And then we cut to the rouges of the flash and there is a scene where for a brief second there is a woman with such a low-cut top and a rose tattoo that I thought her nipple was showing. That feels gross. This comic book is slowly starting to feel gross, and sleazy. Honestly, though, it is still not that bad.

So we see a little bit more of the party that The Trickster and The rouges are having. Yeah, it appears that the super people are all doing cocaine, and that’s a scene I needed to see in my life. Mr. Polar Bear put cocaine on the reflective table, and Mirror Master whose power is to jump into mirrors snorted the cocaine from the table. That is a funny thing.

So at this depressing, terrible, terrible superhero party that makes me weep and be sad for mankind for how scummy and gross it feels, the guy in white who I now realize is Heat Wave yells at The Trickster for being a traitor and hanging out with The Flash. Then he makes this reference: “You both flip flop more than a Massachusetts senator.” okay, Heat Wave, I’m just going to have to take your word about that.

The thing ends with Jimmy Olsen interviewing The Joker, and brings up his daughter’s death. But The Joker teases with him and say, “Nope, don’t have a daughter.” He is interviewing The Joker in the asylum and then at the end Killer Croc goes free and is going to attack him. This is how this issue ends.

You know, looking back on it, I wouldn’t say this issue was good – not really bad, super inconsequential though. I know this is like a year-long series so they have a little time to set this up, but the Karate Kid scene came out of nowhere, and I don’t know where that scene comes from. This isn’t introduction to a story line at all. It’s just kind of putting stuff into place. My biggest criticism right now – if you look at it fully, and I’m doing that; I’m trying to be fair. The only real piece of information that was revealed was the whole scene when Mary Marvel went to Gotham. That was the only real forward momentum in the plot. That, and maybe the Joker saying he doesn’t have a daughter, but I think most people knew that. Like nothing happened in this issue. Well, I’m sure by the next issue stuff is really going to start moving forward.