If you can read the title Countdown to Infinite Crisis without laughing, you're a better person than I am.  There's something faintly alarming about the fact that DC can honestly produce a book called Countdown to Infinite Crisis with a straight face.  It's the sort of title so gloriously ridiculous that if you can't see why it's funny, there's something slightly suspect about your frame of reference.

Infinite Crisis is of course DC's major crossover event for the summer.  We know it's a major event because it's so very big.  This issue is 80 pages long.  That's big.  That's a big event.  It has three writers.  That's how damn big it is.  No one writer can write a writing this big.  It takes three.  They take turns to hit the keys.  Geoff Johns does consonants in the first half of the alphabet.  Judd Winick does the rest.  And Greg Rucka?  Vowels.  Only in this way can a story so big be written safely.

You know how big Infinite Crisis is?  It's so damn big that it crosses over into four whole miniseries before it even gets started.  Now that's big.  And that's an event.  A big event.  Just wait till it actually gets started.  The crossovers will be not just big, but huge.  Possibly even large.  There could be crossovers with JLA.  Superman.  Octobriana.  Strictly Dance Fever On Three.  Now that's large.  And exciting.  And big.

In this issue, the Blue Beetle gets killed.  Perhaps future issues will feature equally earth-shattering events.  Maybe Detective Chimp will sprain his ankle.  This will be big, because it will be in a crossover.

Technically, taken completely on its own terms, this is not horrible.  It's... okay.  Nothing more.  It overplays the idea that nobody takes Blue Beetle seriously.  It tries to have it both ways - we're meant to take it that the Beetle is a genius scientist and career superhero, beset by genuine problems.  But at the same time, we're meant to accept that none of the heroes take him seriously, except Wonder Woman, who is a girl and therefore nice. 

It could of course be that a better explanation is coming in future chapters, but in this issue, the effect is to make DC's top heroes look like heartless bastards.  The Blue Beetle's only sin is to be a C-list hero who's appeared in some comedy stories.  He doesn't whine about his problems.  He doesn't do anything annoying.  He has plenty of evidence to back up what he's saying.  And for his sins, Batman won't take his calls, and the Martian Manhunter actually kicks him out of the JLA base the moment he's out of his hospital bed.  The story falls woefully short of justifying any of this, even on its own terms.

It also pisses on the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League run, by retconning Maxwell Lord into an evil manipulator who deliberately set out to keep the Justice League ineffectual.  Of course, a large part of the original stories was Lord's redemption arc, which isn't consistent with this interpretation at all.  This is pick-and-mix continuity, where a whole swathe of stories are invoked, an ill-fitting explanation is shoved on top of them, and we're expected to politely ignore the fact that it doesn't bloody fit the very stories which we've just been expressly directed to.  It's one thing to quietly ignore earlier stories; it's quite another to deliberately refer to them for the sole purpose of contradicting them.

The most depressing thing about Countdown is that, like Identity Crisis before it, it seems to see the fact that earlier stories were fun and upbeat as something which has to be explained away.  Loudly insisting that you're above childish things isn't a sign of maturity.  It's a sign of adolescence.  And trying to explain happy stories in a grim universe only succeeds in tearing out their hearts, not "making them work."  It doesn't have to be done that way.

None of which matters, because Infinite Crisis is not a storytelling event, it's a marketing event.  The events of this issue matter simply because DC has insisted very loudly that they matter.  Because it's an event.  And it's big.  And it's important.  And a towering sense of self-importance looms over every page.

Rating: C

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