3 out of 5

I would love to rate this higher but several things have to be taken into account:

-Matt Sturges contributions to the Eclipso half of the mag are almost 90% atrocious

-Stephen Jorge Segovia’s art on Eclipso is all Image’d sketchy, all-abs, all-boobs

-And Gerber notably struggles to find his way into the Dr. Fate story for a couple of issues, only finally starting to pull the links together… when he up and died before the final issue.

So if I could trash Eclipso, this would get bumped up a star.  Alas.  Let’s get Sturgey’s bit out of the way.  So: Matt’s from Rhode Island.  I mention this, because a main character in his half of ‘Countdown’ (each issue of the 8 ish mini is split – one part Eclipso story, one part Fate story, the two tales unrelated) is English, and is written with the least convincing accent ever.  Or it might just be Sturges hammy, heavy, wayward writing.  Example: “There’s a word for being thrown out a window: defenestration.  I’ve been defenestrated.  Sounds nicer than it is.”  One part trying to sound smart (which gets worse when he introduces a physicist later), one part trying to be clever, one part sentence that doesn’t quite make sense.  Combine that with a story that only demonstrates any sense of import in its first issue (Darkseid!) and its last issue (A Big Battle!), filling up six middle issues with incredibly pointless subplots about Eclipso’s human host’s wife and a team of Eclipso-ettes turning from good to evil to good and that damned English man, who stops by with an equally pointless deus ex malfunctioning-machina after being questionably included as an afterthought along the way… and then draw it up with Segovia’s Double-H boobs flying out of each panel-that-yearns-to-be-a-splash-page.  Thankfully Chris Hardin comes in for the final chapters, giving that end battle an actual sense of scope.  The story is something something heart of darkness is being reassembled and now Eclipso is all powerful and will Spectre break the unspoken laws of ’embodiments of things can’t kill one another’ in one of those strange mash-ups of comic book morals that falls apart when you think about it too much, especially in the post Infinite Crisis world in which this story took place.

It was a chore reading the Eclipso part of the book.  Plastic Man has a couple chuckly lines, but the poor execution seems to suggest that Wilmingham has a larger hand in guiding Sturges comedic timing in his Fables work.

On to Dr. Fate.  Justiniano – awesome.  Steve lucked out to be paired with an artist who has a drastic form that can give solidity to quieter moments, levity to humorous moments, and druck up the evil Negral and demon-folk with gross aplomb.  We follow up on the helmet’s new choice for a wearer in Kent Nelson, a once-successful-psychiatrist turned drunken bum who discovers an understanding of self-worth and value in a pitiable life while stumbling into an understanding of fate (and Dr. Fate) as well as finding his own Inza.  It’s a mess of layering and randomness that, at about three issues in, becomes Steve at his best – firing on all cylinders, letting the story write itself with so many elements that feel both perfect and perfectly insane… but it does take him so wending to get there, the first two issues concerned with establishing (for himself, for the reader) just how much of Fate to expose us to and how much of the character history to wrap into the tale.  It begged for an ongoing, as it was apparent that the story was quickly growing way beyond its britches… alas, confined to a hospital bed during writing, issue seven ends up being scripted by Adam Beechen, plotted by Gerber, and issue eight gives us four different endings to the story, part tribute to Gerber (who had just passed), and in part probably working from his notes.  Beechen gives us a dwarf reference (Defenders) which is pretty great, but the lack of proper conclusion is, of course, a coffin-nail… even though you could argue that this harkens back to the 70s when Steve was yanked around titles without the chance to finish what he’d started.

So the story is a bit of a mess, but the art helps us sift through an initial madness to get to some really compelling studies of a man studying himself.

I do also wonder, considering that both halves of ‘Countdown’ shift gears after a couple issues, if there wasn’t some editorial ‘do this instead’ happening since ‘Countdown’ was going on at the time.  Who the hell knows.

Despite there being some great Gerber moments here, I wouldn’t absolutely recommend hunting this down since it’s essentially incomplete.  Buy a sammich instead.  Then I can hold it over you that you never read this.  (Dork.)