After proving that it could deliver a weekly comic on time for an entire year with 52, DC Comics is at it again with Countdown, working their way backwards from #51 until May 2008 when, readers are given to understand, something big, big, big is going to go down. Whatever it is, it’s going to involve one of the DC Universe’s most powerful supervillains—and you know it’ll be humongous, because he’s breaking out his superhero chess set! (Or, as Wizard jokes, “a massive game of Apokoliptic HeroClix.”) Oh, Darkseid, will you ever learn?
Countdown #51 went on sale earlier this week, but fans online were able to see a sneak preview of the first half at the MySpace comic books page, where the remaining pages—and a chunk of next week’s #50—are scheduled to go up today. DC executive editor Dan DiDio explained the strategy, along with a whole bunch of character backstory, in the first installment of a weekly promotional chat with Newsarama. “With this first issue, we were looking to put a lot of the information, a lot of the concepts and storytelling up front, so that people who are just coming aboard, even if they’re unfamiliar with the universe, will feel at least comfortable with the issue, and then learn as the story goes along,” he said. “So we’re trying to make it a little more accessible than other things we’ve done in the past… For us, it’s not about being ‘universe-wide’ stories, because we’re trying to keep the scope down to the characters.” And the living chess sets. Because it’s a forty-year-old principle of comics that nothing says “cosmic scale” like living chess sets.