COUNTDOWN PRESENTS: THE SEARCH FOR RAY PALMER - WILDSTORM #1Written by Ron Marz
Art by Paco Unzueta
Well, DC finally managed to get Countdown to tie-in to their other universes with this issue. I suppose DC intended this issue to help promote the Wildstorm universe while, at the same time, build upon the Challengers storyline that had been dragging along in the main Countdown series. What they manage to do here is an imitation of a cheap 90's crossover.
Pretty much every major Wildstorm character shows up at one point or another, typically in one or two panel scenes with the exception of the Authority, who job to the Challengers. As a long time Authority fan, seeing them barely able to hold their own against Kyle, Donna and Todd was painful to watch. Todd literally holds his own with The Engineer while Kyle goes toe to toe with the Superman archtype, Apollo, while Donna takes on two or three members on her own.
If the Authority actually fought these three, they would have killed them all in three seconds flat. Plot armour saves the trio while making the Authority look like chumps. My guess is that it was simply put in there to have some sort of fight in this universe and possibly try and promote the new Authority book. All it did was leave a sour taste in my mouth.
Another complaint is Bob, the Monitor. This character serves no purpose apparently aside from moving them from universe to universe. He sits there the entire fight with the Authority and does nothing. While the other three looked for Palmer, he ended up staying where the originally landed, again doing nothing to help. None of his powers seem to work. He needed Kyle's help in narrowing Palmer's location down and it ended up only being accurate to within the entire continent. In the Ion series, the Monitor was going to kill both Donna and Kyle, who was even more powerful as Ion at the time, at the same time. How this Monitor is so completely worthless and powerless boggles the mind. I would like to know how they managed to find or monitor these anomolies in the first place based on how inept Bob is in this issue and Countdown.
Do yourself a favour and ignore this issue, as it is merely a Wildstorm primer for people that do not read any of those books and a slap in the face for anyone that does. Nothing happens in this issue in regards to the actual search for Palmer either, unless you count the fact he is not on the Wildstorm Earth as progress.
Verdict - Avoid It
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