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Countdown: Out with a whimper

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Posts

  • DJ EebsDJ Eebs Moderator, Administrator admin
    edited April 2008
    didn't jimmy meet the joker at arkham in like the second or third issue?

    Yeah, he did, but it wasn't much of an encounter.

    there's a really easy countdown joke to make here

    DJ Eebs on
  • Rabid_LlamaRabid_Llama Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    noir_blood wrote: »
    Kaiser4149 wrote: »
    Is it possible that Luthor in the picture is a reference to Salvation Run too? I don't know. I haven't read any of it, but thought that Luthor was a big part of it. I was planning on picking up the trade if it was any good.

    The DC Nation that talked about it made it sound really awesome (original concept by George R.R. Martin = win). Everything I have heard since then has made it sound pretty mediocre. Might be worth the trade, but I have no regrets about missing it in singles.

    Edit*

    I just read DC Nation for this week. I loved how they kind of acknowledged that Countdown sucked without outright saying "Wow, what the hell were we thinking?".

    Wait, wait. Did Martin actually thought up the concept of Salvation Run for DC, or was DC inspired by something Martin did/wrote? Cause that's the first I heard of it.

    Quoting DC Nation, spoiler'd for size
    The Long Road to Salvation

    Salvation Run is the type of story I couldn't wait to do when I first arrived at DC Comics. Growing up in the '70s, I was a fan of both SECRET SOCIETY OF SUPERVILLAINS and THE JOKER. I loved those series and any series where villains get their chance to shine. I found nothing cooler than to watch two villains battle for total villain supremacy. Who wouldn't? That's why I enjoyed VILLAINS UNITED and SECRET SIX (thanks, Gail!), but even with those books, I still didn't get my total villain fix. Then I remembered an old series backburnered in the DC Development pile. The project, EXILES IN PARADISE, was created by the celebrated fantasy writer George R.R. Martin.

    Over ten years earlier (yep, that's not a typo), George pitched and sold an idea where all the villains of the DC Universe were shipped off to another planet where they could start their own society away from mankind. It was a massive Elseworlds story that featured all our villains and tracked their lives as they fought and built a new society on an empty planet over the course of several decades. The project was started and pages were drawn, but circumstances worked against it and the series was stopped and shelved.

    Flash forward to a couple of years ago. Following VILLAINS UNITED I was looking for another project to showcase villainy, and I remembered EXILES. After a series of calls and meetings with George, which took some time since he was on a book tour promoting his latest best-selling novel, he agreed to revisit EXILES, now under the title of SALVATION RUN. But once again, time worked against the project. George was in much demand (as great writers always are) and with this series now tied to the DC Universe continuity, it required more time from his schedule. George stepped aside and Bill Willingham stepped up. For Bill it was an easy sell, killer planet posing as a penal colony for unsuspecting villains. What's not to love? Even better, he could have his pick of any villain he wanted, and he picked over 40 of the nastiest villains the DCU had to offer.

    And there you have it, the strange road to Salvation, so if you have a craving for some villain-on-villain action with more than a fair share of evil alliances, betrayal and destruction, then this is the series for you. As for me, it boils down to one thing: Luthor vs. Joker. Like I said before, what's not to love?

    To be continued…DD

    God, I would have been all over that series if Martin had stuck with it.

    Rabid_Llama on
    /sig
    The+Rabid+Llama.png
  • DMACDMAC Come at me, bro! Moderator mod
    edited April 2008
    Doing it as an Elseworlds where anything could happen, especially something multi-generational, sounds way more interesting. We'd get to see the current villains as grumpy old men and their children either following in their footsteps or turning against their elders.

    DMAC on
  • Kaiser4149Kaiser4149 Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    Wasn't that pretty much the premise of Runaways?

    Kaiser4149 on
  • MunchMunch Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    DMAC wrote: »
    Doing it as an Elseworlds where anything could happen, especially something multi-generational, sounds way more interesting. We'd get to see the current villains as grumpy old men and their children either following in their footsteps or turning against their elders.

    Martin had some pretty interesting things to say on Salvation Run.
    The first issue of the new DC Comics miniseries SALVATION RUN has just hit the stands, and I've gotten a number of questions about my involvement with the project. Rather than try and respond individually by email, I thought it best to address the questions here, lay out the history, and put the matter to rest.

    Those who've picked up the comic will have read the "DC Nation" afterword, where DC Executive Editor Dan DiDio gives a brief history of the project, and credits the original idea to me. His account is accurate for the most part, but there's a huge and important omission. My involvement in this project, which goes back a decade, was always as one-half of a team. The other half was my friend and sometime collaborator John Jos. Miller, one of the mainstays of my Wild Cards series, and a talented writer and comic scriptor in his own right. John and I came up with the idea together, developed it together, pitched it together, sold it together, wrote it together (to the extent that we wrote it). It's true that I did have more meetings with Dan than John did, simply because I get to New York more often, but John was just as much a part of SALVATION RUN as I was, start to finish. I have no idea why Dan omitted any mention of John's name in his account of the project, but the record should be corrected. SALVATION RUN was never just me. It was always John and me.

    In the beginning, it wasn't SALVATION RUN either. The origins of this go back a decade. At the time DC was publishing a line of books called ELSEWORLDS, their version of Marvel's "What If" stories, tales that took place outside the on-going DC continuity. The editor of the line was a fellow named Andy Helfer. The idea that John and I pitched him, way back then, can be summed up in one word: Australia. What if the world finally got sick of all these super-villains and decided to get rid of them once and for all by transporting them to a distant planet, with no way home? Our title was EXILES IN PARADISE. Andy loved it, and bought it, and John and I set to work on what was originally to be a ten-issue series.

    It was an Elseworlds series from day one, however. A "what if" story. When Britain sent convicts to Australia, they were transported "for the term of your natural life," and that was the premise of our story too. There was no escape. The planet was in another galaxy, millions of light years away, accessible only by Boom Tube. We wanted to tell a story that would span decades. Characters would die, would change, would marry, would have children. Wars would be fought, but eventually, from the chaos and brutality of the early days, a society would be born. Some of the villains would find only death on the new world, but for others it would be a second chance, and they would find redemption. The whole tale, once told, would span decades. None of the villains would ever return to Earth. (Nor did they have to. This was an ELSEWORLDS series).

    The project began well enough. Barry Kitson was assigned to do the art, John and I plotted the first issue and wrote the script, and Kitson did the pencils... and did a terrific job, too. After that, however, problems developed. "Creative differences," as they say in Hollywood. As we plotted out the second issue, it became clear that the story John and I wanted to tell was a good deal darker and grittier than what Andy Helfer was comfortable with. A dozen villains died in issue one alone, some of them "name" villains, and that was just to start. There was murder, there was sex, there were even porta-potties (which became a big issue, somehow). We found ourselves unable to resolve those differences, so finally a settlement was reached, and EXILES IN PARADISE was shelved.

    It remained on the shelf for long years, during which time Andy left DC, and the entire Elseworlds line was discontinued, but when Dan DiDio came to DC, he took it off the shelf, dusted it off, and decided to revive the project... but with a crucial difference. Dan wanted to do the idea as part of DC's main, ongoing continuity. It would no longer be an "imaginary story" or a "what if," it would become part of the history of the DC universe. He laid out the idea to me over a lunch in New York several years ago, I took it back to New Mexico and hashed it out with John. Thus SALVATION RUN was born.

    Changing the tale from a "what if" to something that "really happens" had huge ramifications, however. At first, John and I were both excited by the prospect. Even as a kid in Bayonne, reading my Superman funnies, I always thought that "imaginary stories" were vaguely unsatisfying, somehow. When a story begins with a disclaimed that says no, this didn't really happen, the stakes are lowered from page one. So the prospect of being able to work within the actual ongoing continuity sound cool.

    Once we got into the nitty-gritty, however, we soon ran into difficulties. The whole concept had originally been built around the idea of these villains being sent to another world for "for the terms of [their] natural lives," to live or die as they would. That worked great for Elseworlds. Not so much for the main continuity. We wanted major characters to die, to change and find redemption, to marry, to love, to hate, to have children... but DC was not about to write off virtually all of its major and minor supervillains, which is really what our version of the story would have required.

    John and I gave it our best shot, I'll say that much, but it soon became clear that we could not make it work that way that DC wanted. So we stepped down, came to an amicable agreement, and returned to our myriad other projects while DC brought in Bill Willingham to take over the plotting and writing of SALVATION RUN.

    Bill is a first rate writer, has done some terrific work on FABLES, and is much better versed in the current DC universe and all its complexities than either John or me. He was a good choice to take over the writing, and like any comic fan, I'm looking forward to seeing what he does with the idea. I know that Bill started fresh, however, without consulting any of the prior work that John and I had done, and from reading the first issue, it's plain to see that he's taking the book in a much different direction than what we'd planned.

    One of these days, John Miller and I may go back and do our own version of the story, with a cast of original characters of our own creation. That won't be for a while, however. Not until after A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE is done, and John has finished BLACK TRAIN COMING, the big vampire novel that he's writing,

    Even though I really dislike Martin's novels, I have to admit that his version sounds pretty interesting.

    Munch on
  • DJ EebsDJ Eebs Moderator, Administrator admin
    edited April 2008
    That whole statement makes him seem like a pretty good dude. Not a whole lot of ego there at all.

    DJ Eebs on
  • DelduwathDelduwath Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    It's pretty terribly how much time I've spent on the Internet: I can't look at a positive thing said about someone without subconsciously seeing sarcasm. To clarify, Geebs, are you being serious or sarcastic?

    Delduwath on
  • BalefuegoBalefuego Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    I love George R.R. Martin and goddamn that would have been an amazing series.

    Balefuego on
    [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
  • DJ EebsDJ Eebs Moderator, Administrator admin
    edited April 2008
    Delduwath wrote: »
    It's pretty terribly how much time I've spent on the Internet: I can't look at a positive thing said about someone without subconsciously seeing sarcasm. To clarify, Geebs, are you being serious or sarcastic?

    I'm being serious

    DJ Eebs on
  • FencingsaxFencingsax It is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understanding GNU Terry PratchettRegistered User regular
    edited April 2008
    Going back to that picture, why were Jade and Question on it? Weren't they already dead?

    Fencingsax on
  • LockedOnTargetLockedOnTarget Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    I think the dead bodies of those two and Beetle and Max were supposed to just be a "what has come before" kind of thing.

    LockedOnTarget on
  • KVWKVW Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    I think the dead bodies of those two and Beetle and Max were supposed to just be a "what has come before" kind of thing.

    It was also pointing out that anything on the ground was dead or about to die. Flash was half on the ground, so had one foot in the grave and the only ones on the ground were Barda and Terrific, who obviously died.

    I think someone said something about the broken arrow being Connor. It was actually for Ollie, who "died" at the wedding. I'm pretty sure they clarified what that one meant, but it oculd be tied to Connor as well.

    KVW on
  • DMACDMAC Come at me, bro! Moderator mod
    edited April 2008
    Man, I hope Connor survives whatever's going on in GA/BC. It's kind of like with Kyle and Hal. I came to like Connor a lot while Ollie was gone and it just seems like lazy/sensationalist writing to get rid of him.

    DMAC on
  • FuruFuru Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    Wait.

    Darkseid died in Countdown?

    What the fuck?

    What the bloody point in all the build up to the big showdown between The Source and the anti-life powered Darkseid in Death of the New Gods then, if he's just going to be killed in Countdown anyway?

    argh

    He's not really dead.

    Furu on
  • deadonthestreetdeadonthestreet Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    DMAC wrote: »
    lazy/sensationalist writing
    Well....

    deadonthestreet on
  • Garlic BreadGarlic Bread i'm a bitch i'm a bitch i'm a bitch i'm a Registered User, Disagreeable regular
    edited April 2008
    NRAMA: Nothing has changed for Jason? He's still the same at the end of this story as he was at the beginning?

    MC: Jason’s story arc does seem to be a circle... That happens sometimes. He almost changed... But didn’t.
    NRAMA: Mary - back in issue #47, Black Adam specifically said that he had given Mary all of his power. So what/whose powers does he have now?

    MC: And you believe everything a skunk like Black Adam says...? Foolish man!
    NRAMA: And Mary saying she didn't want or ask for what she got. Again, in #47, she asked Black Adam for his help and wanted her life (powered) back...and then took Dakseid's ball of evil. Is Mary that nuts that she just can't remember a few days previous and earlier in the year? Or are Mary and Black Adam meeting, in more ways than one, near De Nile (ba-dum-biump!)

    MC: Mary’s not crazy... She is, however, confused. A lot of folks I know act like they didn’t ask for specifically what they get— especially when what they asked for has gone so far astray of what they intended in the first place.

    why can't you just admit it was terrible writing, DC

    Garlic Bread on
  • MunchMunch Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    You know, with the finale of Countdown, DC has now soured me on their books so badly that I'm not even going to buy Final Crisis. Going into it I already know Mary Marvel will be evil, and a certain character I have an affinity for will die. And I just don't want to read it. It's Morrison and Jones so it'll likely be very good, but I simply could not be less interested. Maybe I'll pick up the trade once it's out, and I can see how certain plot points shake out in the long run.

    Munch on
  • Garlic BreadGarlic Bread i'm a bitch i'm a bitch i'm a bitch i'm a Registered User, Disagreeable regular
    edited April 2008
    Okay!

    Garlic Bread on
  • MunchMunch Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    Man just sayin'.

    Munch on
  • Garlic BreadGarlic Bread i'm a bitch i'm a bitch i'm a bitch i'm a Registered User, Disagreeable regular
    edited April 2008
    Okay!

    Garlic Bread on
  • Robos A Go GoRobos A Go Go Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    The word evil gets thrown around too much. She's just a bit of a bitch.

    Robos A Go Go on
  • MunchMunch Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    Man if Darkseid's hanging out on your couch, you're evil. That's like ten Superhitlers and a Megastalin playing poker in your den.

    Munch on
  • MunchMunch Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    At the very least the couch is evil.

    Munch on
  • bobgorilabobgorila Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    She'll probably have to burn the couch.

    bobgorila on
    I like my women how I like my coffee.

    Anally.
  • MunchMunch Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    Not even because of the evil aura now surrounding it. I mean, the dude's heavy for one. So he probably broke the springs. And he wears a skirt. Would you want something that a guy had parked his big granite ass on for who knows how long?

    Munch on
  • Bloods EndBloods End Blade of Tyshalle Punch dimensionRegistered User regular
    edited April 2008
    Munch wrote: »
    Man just sayin'.

    You're always just saying, but unfortunately we can't find an off switch.

    Bloods End on
  • KVWKVW Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    Munch wrote: »
    You know, with the finale of Countdown, DC has now soured me on their books so badly that I'm not even going to buy Final Crisis. Going into it I already know Mary Marvel will be evil, and a certain character I have an affinity for will die. And I just don't want to read it. It's Morrison and Jones so it'll likely be very good, but I simply could not be less interested. Maybe I'll pick up the trade once it's out, and I can see how certain plot points shake out in the long run.

    I feel pretty much teh same. I'll see Countdown / FC to the end, but I'm soured on the whole thing now. I'm 99% sure I'm not going to pick up Trinity on principle alone. I can already see 2 weeks in the 20 some odd tie-ins added to it's story that DC will roll out and Bagley's art, as good as it is, isn't enough to sell me on another weekly. The interviews with Carlin and company every week and their general dickish responses to legitimate concerns is also leaving a bitter after taste in my mouth and feels like a big up yours to the fans.

    KVW on
  • FuruFuru Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    There aren't any tie-ins to Trinity. It's a self-contained story.

    Furu on
  • durandal4532durandal4532 Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    I just like that evil Mary has a pleated skirt.

    "Shit! What am I doing wearing this girly such-and-so? I'm empowered by dark gods and by gum I should show it. ... What about pleats?"

    durandal4532 on
    Take a moment to donate what you can to Critical Resistance and Black Lives Matter.
  • The Muffin ManThe Muffin Man Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    I just like that evil Mary has a pleated skirt.

    "Shit! What am I doing wearing this girly such-and-so? I'm empowered by dark gods and by gum I should show it. ... What about pleats?"

    Nothing says 'evil'* like a pleated skirt.
    *naughty

    The Muffin Man on
  • psycojesterpsycojester Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    Well heres hoping that Mary Marvels Satanic evil couch becomes her side-kick.

    psycojester on
    [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
  • The Lovely BastardThe Lovely Bastard Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    Keith wrote: »

    why can't you just admit it was terrible writing, DC

    because it sold so well

    The Lovely Bastard on
    7656367.jpg
  • Robos A Go GoRobos A Go Go Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    Keith wrote: »

    why can't you just admit it was terrible writing, DC

    because it sold so well

    It did? What the hell?

    Robos A Go Go on
  • MunchMunch Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    It did? What the hell?

    It sold poorly in comparison to 52, and for the lead-up to their big summer event, and it failed to spin off any successful tie-ins. But taken by itself, it sold very well, starting out at around 100k copies sold, and dropping down to around 65k. For reference, DC's cancellation point for a series is around 18k. Iron Fist sells around 30k. Booster Gold 35k, and the Flash slightly less than that. Blue Beetle and the Atom sell around 14k.

    So it basically outperformed a lot of better books despite a shitty art team, meandering and ultimately pointless story, a lot of really bad gay jokes, the worst pupper show in history, and Renee Montoya wearing panty hose over her head.

    Which depresses me more than anyone will ever know.

    Munch on
  • Garlic BreadGarlic Bread i'm a bitch i'm a bitch i'm a bitch i'm a Registered User, Disagreeable regular
    edited April 2008
    Munch wrote: »
    Which depresses me more than anyone will ever know.

    No, I think we got it around the 10,000th "I hate today's DC" post

    Garlic Bread on
  • MunchMunch Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    Well nobody got me a 10,000 sad post anniversary gift, so I thought maybe I'd understated it a bit.

    Munch on
  • PantheraOncaPantheraOnca Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    just sayin'.

    :-p

    PantheraOnca on
  • Bloods EndBloods End Blade of Tyshalle Punch dimensionRegistered User regular
    edited April 2008
    I got you something. But when I sent it to you, you threw away the package without even looking at it because you hated the paper it was in.

    Bloods End on
  • MunchMunch Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    Bloods End wrote: »
    I got you something. But when I sent it to you, you threw away the package without even looking at it because you hated the paper it was in.

    didiopackagepu9.jpg

    Munch on
  • The Lovely BastardThe Lovely Bastard Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    oh munch

    The Lovely Bastard on
    7656367.jpg
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