Why DC Bugs Me

When I started this blog (well, not this one, but the first one), I wanted to give the internets a Marvel-tinted blog to balance out the more DC-centric ones out there. Even when I decided to talk about anything, I thought I'd talk about the big two evenly, because, well, they both have excellent comics or maddening practices.

Yet, every week, I'm here talking about the latest reason DC is destroying my brain.

The latest thing that really is getting to me is this. It's not Countdown to Mystery or Countdown to Adventure that's bugging me. It's Countdown Presents: The Search for Ray Palmer. Why the hell is this a miniseries? Fifty-two freaking issues isn't enough to tell this story? Isn't the Monitors story and the whole bit with Jason, Donna and Kyle supposed to be a storyarc in Countdown?

This new trend, having multiple mini-series to coincide with a miniseries, is happening in both DC and Marvel. But you know what makes them different? You don't have to read any of the extra Marvel series to understand the main story.

Think about it. Were any of the Civil War mini-series necessary for the series? But Infinite Crisis was the culmination of four previous mini-series, plus a mini-series that led into one of the four. Would IC make any sense if you had no clue what an OMAC was, when someone was pretending to be Luthor, or why the hell was Rann & Thanagar was at war? And then, they had specials to "end" the mini-series, but they only led back to IC.

And 52? Well, World War III just plain sucked. Yet, the majority of the year long gap plots were stuffed into those four issues, thus making them essential to the point of 52.

This may be an over-reaction, but to have a mini-series devoted to what's been so far established as one of the main points of Countdown is superfluous, and just a way to squeeze money out of the comic fans who are completists at heart. And it seems to be DC's new standard.