Beware the Great Disaster!

Here we go, a week full of revelations and answers to all your questions! Wait…what? This is only week 37? Damn. That means it’s another issue full of twists and turns, as our group of heroes trip through the DC Universe on the way to The End. This week a couple of stories get a much needed kick in the pants, while others get us nowhere fast. Does that mean Countdown #37 is a bad issue? Not at all.

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Death of a New God

Last week readers got a few clues into the mystery of Jimmy Olsen, Mary Batson stumbled upon a repowered Black Adam, Stinky made the other Monitors angry, and Karate Kid continued to hang out in a JLA cell. So what becomes of our key characters this week?

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Or - “Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting… IN THE FUTURE!!!”

The launches of Justice League and Justice Society have been interesting contrasts, with JLA taking the looong way around to a story that didn’t really do much for me, and JSA starting with a bang, and running breakneck through their opening arc. The real contrast seems to be in terms of story structure, with the League telling us a lot but showing very little and the Society somewhat doing the opposite. Both teams have had strange interactions with time-lost members of a third superteam, the Legion of Superheroes, and their stories are about to converge. Apropos of nothing, aren’t the teams’ respective leaders attractive?

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Or - “The Older I Get, The More I Miss The Old Legion…”

With the recent return of the original Karate Kid (no, not Mr. Miyagi’s protegee Danny), Stephen mentioned that I was probably “frantically writing a post about Karate Kid in all his incarnations in the Legion of Superheroes.”  Well, I have to admit that until he mentioned it, it honestly hadn’t occurred to me.  After all, this is a Legionnaire we’re talking about, I said to myself.  In this, the machine age, there’s certainly a Wikipedia somewhere that’ll cover Mr. Armorr and do him justice.  “Wrong-ola,” says the Internet, “and also, your shoes are cheap!”  (That darned Internet always knows my weaknesses.)  Nobody has anything of the sort, not even a suitable blurb.  Indeed, all the information I could find dealt with the reboot versions of Karate Kid, both versions of whom are interesting, but don’t have the sheer versimilitude of the original, Pre-Crisis version.  My “frantic writing” ended up taking most of the week, (though two days of that were spent combing my collection for the relevant issues), but in any case, I found what I felt was necessary.  As the man who once made an argument that a clay dinosaur was the psychological equal of Samuel L. Jackson, I feel absolutely qualified to show why Karate Kid should be among your favorite heroes.  Thus, I bring you our inaugural version of Major Spoilers’ Hero History…  This, then, is your Major Spoilers Hero History of Val Armorr of Earth… Karate Kid!

 

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