Countdown Review - Monarch & The Monitors

We're reaching the end of the Countdown reviews with this second-to-last review of the Monarch & The Monitors storyline. This has been a sort of background story that has been building up over the last half year and is just now coming out in full force with Monarch's active recruiting and the Monitor's catching up with the Challengers. If you've missed the previous reviews, hit up the introduction post, which explains what these are all about and has a nice table of contents guiding you to all the different reviews. That said, on with the review!

Monarch & The Monitors

Countdown was kicked off with a rogue Monitor taking matters into his own hands and killing Duela Dent during her encounter with Jason Todd. If not for the intervention of our Earth’s Monitor, who later is named Bob, the evil Monitor would have gone on to kill Jason as well, which would kind of make him kind of a good guy in my opinion, but I digress.

The reasons behind this attack on Duela and Jason were that they were anomalies that should not exist that passed over to our world from other Earths. They, along with Kyle Rayner and Donna Troy, represent people from our Earth that have crossed through the Bleed and breached the barriers between Earths. The more that cross over, the weaker the barriers between each Earth and the Bleed get. The rogue Monitor believes this weakening will lead to the Great Disaster and must be stopped at all costs, hence the killings.

After the encounter with the rogue Monitor, our Monitor, Bob, goes on to consult the Source Wall as to the cause of the problems plaguing the new Multiverse to which the Wall responds, “Great Disaster”. When Bob asks for a solution the Wall responds with “Ray Palmer”, which sets Bob on his collision course with the Challengers, Donna, Jason and Kyle.

Eventually, all 52 Monitors from each individual Earth meet to discuss what to do with the anomalies. Eventually a decision is made, to the shock of Bob, to purge them all. This is where the Forerunner, Viza Aziv, is introduced. The Forerunners are a race engineered by the Monitors to act as their tools and she is dispatched to find and kill Donna Troy and Jason Todd.

Forerunner catches up to the duo in the midst of Amazons Attack where she nearly succeeds in killing both heroes before Bob shows up. Bob quickly calls of the Forerunner, who cannot disobey the Monitor and is physically unable to even fight back against him. With the Forerunner subdued, Bob ferries away the two heroes. Their story picks up in Challengers From Beyond: The Search For Ray Palmer.

After her defeat, Forerunner’s honour is sullied and she must enter a self-imposed exile. Enter Monarch, who had been observing the battle. Seeing how important Forerunner is, Monarch tracks her down and convinces her to join him and lead his army, which he is preparing to use against the Monitors. Initially, Forerunner turns him down, but upon hearing that the Monitors had completely wiped out her race while she was gone, she quickly changes her mind and joins Monarch’s cause.

Meanwhile, the Monitors continue to, um, monitor the anomalies and witness Kyle Rayner’s role in the Sinestro Corps War where he is infected by the Parallax entity. His continued existence causes further bolsters the Monitors’ decision to wipe out all the anomalies. Upon learning that Bob has joined up with the rogue anomalies, the Monitors decide to eliminate him as well. Uato, The Watcher, these guys are not.

During this time, Monarch and Forerunner’s adventures picked up in the Countdown to Adventure, where Forerunner’s origin was told to us and we see their recruitment of heroes, and villains, from other Earths in an attempt to build an army to take on the Monitors.

Monarch and Forerunner’s path begins to intersect with the Challengers soon after the Challengers leave Earth-3. After they depart Earth-3, Monarch shows up almost immediately after and recruits the Crime Society into his ever growing army.

Monarch and the Monitors’ paths eventually cross on Earth-8 when they all meet up with the Challengers during their battle with Lord Havok and the Extremists. The evil Monitor arrived in an attempt to kill the Challengers, but only succeeded in killing the tag along Jokester before being forced to retreat with the arrival of Monarch.

Monarch, in turn, tried to recruit the Extremists into his army. When they refused and attacked him, Monarch called in reinforcements, in the form of the Crime Society, to handle the Challengers and Extremists.

During the battle, Monarch offers the Challengers a spot in his army, to which they refuse. However, in the last issue of Countdown during the ensuing brawl, Jason Todd kills one of the Extremists, betrays the Challengers by shooting Donna with Bob’s gun and takes Monarch up on his offer to join his cause, leaving us with the cliffhanger of his betrayal as we head into Countdown to Final Crisis.

Kirk Says: This is not so much a storyline as it is the spine of the series that seems to be connecting most of the events together. Monarch and Forerunner are one of the best parts of the book, but didn’t show up until about half way through the series and only just recently started being a driving force in the story.

The Monitors, with the exception of Bob and the evil one, have little to no personalities and have been depicted as identical in just about every way. Future previews show much more unique models for each Monitor, but as of right now, they all have appeared the same and had little to no personalities. In fact, their motivations all appear to be forced. One minute they are against making a rash decision to kill the anomalies and then, after one 2 panel speech from the evil Monitor, they all quickly switch stances and agree to kill them all. It just came off as forced.

However, the more recent appearances on the behalf of both Monarch and the Monitors have been great. It’s good to finally see the storylines intersecting and some action happening. I’m curious to see how the Monitors react to Monarch’s growing army and if they will in turn recruit their own or how they will go about combating him.

Verdict – Excellent. Countdown began with the introduction of the evil Monitor killing Duela Dent, but after that, they sort of faded to the background for a month or two. Once Monarch and Forerunner came into play, this storyline really started gaining momentum and, leading into the Countdown to Final Crisis, this story is firing on all cylinders. Lots of potential here, but my only concern is whether the large number of tie-ins related to their progress will hurt their overall story. They already have Countdown to Adventure and Countdown Arena is coming up as well as appearances in Search for Ray Palmer one-shots.

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