You made the decision to skip “Countdown”. Maybe it was because you weren’t as sure of the writing teams. Perhaps you didn’t think that Jimmy Olsen, Pied Piper, Jason Todd, Donna Troy, Karate Kid, Catwoman’s ex-hooker ex-sidekick, Harley Quinn out of costume and a Triplicate Girl without superpowers were compelling enough to make for good reading. Or you just wanted to save $150+. You haven’t been reading Countdown at all up to now.

Gawd, do I envy you.

I don’t even know how to best summarize this rambling, shambling soap opera. It may be best to tell you some of the threads that have taken all year to play out. For all of the following storylines, imagine them taking place in little chunks, about four pages an issue apiece.

And I’m doing this all from memory. If I get anything wrong, I’m not even going to bother to correct it, because it’s evidence of just how hard it is to follow this meandering title.

Plotline #1: Jimmy Olsen begins developing goofy superpowers, all of which are based on his pre-crisis stories and transformations, and begins a quest to try to figure out what’s causing them. It ultimately leads him to Cadmus and then Apokolips, where it turns out his body is a vessel for the Anti-Life Equation. Oh, and he meets a new female version of Forager who is more insectoid and also walks around naked in front of him. This plot has the largest continuity gaffe, because Jimmy Olsen and/or Perry White refer openly to “Jason Todd”. How is it that they know the secret ID of the former Robin? Isn’t that a huge security breach?

Plotline #2: Mary Marvel, having lost her Shazam powers, begs for new powers from Black Adam. She then becomes a totally corrupt evil harridan, and if she hasn’t killed people by the letter of the law she’s certainly assisted in their deaths. Eclipso (Jean Suekiller Loring) leads her around by the nose for a while, and then Mary rejects her and falls in with the duo from Plotline #3. Her story sort of petered out.

Plotline #3: Holly, the tweenie hooker introduced as Selina Kyle’s sidekick in “Batman: Year One” is now grown up. I’ve not a clue what happened to her since that as I’ve never read Catwoman. She joins a cult of Amazons-in-training who are led by Athena herself (but it’s really Granny Goodness in disguise who is recruiting new Female Furies from Earth). Also in this cult is Harleen Quinzel, a/k/a Harley Quinn; I guess you need to be a regular Batman reader in order to know why she isn’t a criminal any longer and why she doesn’t wear a costume.

Plotline #4: Somebody is killing off the New Gods by ripping their hearts out. Lightray, Sleez, Knockout… every New Genesis and Apokolips resident gets killed off. Big Barda, one of the coolest female characters ever….who was based on the mom from “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” back in the days where she posed for Playboy, just in case you hadn’t caught that bit of trivia…dies without a fight. This spins off into “Death of the New Gods”, though I think “New Goderdammerung” would have been a much better title. It all culminates in the destruction of Jack Kirby’s Fourth World in order to bring about a “Fifth World” which, for some reason, Darkseid is looking forward to.

Plotline #5: The Flash’s Rogues Gallery gathers together doing drugs and hanging around with hookers so we get the point that they’re a bunch of reprobate criminals and not a cute colorful gang who teeter on the edge of going straight. They begin plotting some new villainy, while Pied Piper and The Trickster (the former a friend of Wally West, and the latter a dude who had been on the side of good for years) are reluctant to participate. Then they all kill The Flash. I can’t give you the details because I wasn’t able to read the story. The marketing wizards at DC had this essential plot element occur in the 13th issue of a book few people were reading without any kind of note at the end of Countdown screaming “YOU ABSOLUTELY CANNOT MISS ‘FLASH: THE FASTEST MAN ALIVE’ #13. YOU MUST READ IT BEFORE NEXT WEEK!” They thought it was enough to show a house ad with the Rogues standing over Flash’s dead body. Because, you know, comic book advertising never ever shows us anything that doesn’t actually take place in the book. So most of us picked up the next issue of Countdown to find Piper and Trickster on the run for their lives, hysterical that they’ve killed the Flash, and then we called our comic shop to find out they were out of that issue. Oh, and in case you were wondering, this was Bart Allen, former Impulse and Kid Flash, who died. Piper and Trickster go on the run, tied together with some sophisticated bomb handcuffs, and suddenly we’re in a remake of The Defiant Ones with a gay man and a homophobe shackled. Then Trickster gets shot in the head. Piper ends up on Apokolips and plays a tune that causes the planet to blow up.

Plotline #6: The Legion of Super-heroes comes back in time to help Wally West return to the DCU just as Bart is being killed, and they leave behind Karate Kid and Una (Triplicate Girl without the powers) in the present. The two wander around trying to cure a fatal illness that Karate Kid has, and they fail utterly. The virus Karate Kid has, Morticoccus, ultimately breaks free of his body and destroys one of the parallel Earths, turning it into Kamandi’s universe.

Plotline #7: Monarch is Captain Atom. He’s evil now due to something that happened in a Wildstorm book I didn’t read and then he was trapped in the Monarch armor in that Bludhaven book that I did read and yet completely forgot about. Now he’s conquering the alternate Earths using an army he builds using the bad guys from alternate realities.

Plotline #8: A team of Monitors, one for each of the 52 alternate universes, is fussing about cross-contamination amongst the alternate Earths. They quibble about what to do. We’re supposed to tell them apart due to differences in beards and slight costume changes. One of them leads a team of heroes (“The Challengers of” something or other) to search for Ray Palmer, while another of them hatches a scheme to do away with the other Monitors and absorb their power. No, wait, I think that’s the one who is with the Challengers, because he turns out to be evil. Then another one is playing chess with Darkseid. There was another one who had an assistant who was some kind of evil hunter-woman from a race that the Monitors always employed. Maybe those are the same guy. I can’t remember. Then, in the biggest ripoff ever sold by DC, there’s an issue entirely devoted to exposition by the Monitors about everything that happened so far, with no new action taking place whatsoever, and they had the gall to charge full price for that issue.

Plotline #9: A Monitor, who is nick-named “Bob”, escorts the “Challengers of the Beyond” (I admit it, I looked it up) into subatomic space and then across dimensions looking for Ray Palmer. These “Challengers” are Donna Troy and Jason Todd, joined later by Kyle Rayner. How this starts, we don’t know, because once again it’s a story occurring outside of the series and we aren’t directed to go buy the missing tale. One minute, Jason Todd is Nightwing, and the next he’s just wearing a domino mask with his leather coat. Their pairing doesn’t make much sense, except that readers know both of them are characters with incomprehensible histories. These stories are like the tale of Lemmiwinks, inasmuch as these so-called adventurers don’t do a darn thing but get led around from fight to fight. It could be Dumb Bunny, Resurrection Man and Major Bummer on this team for all the difference it would make. They go somewhere new, meet their new opponents, fight and then move on. This story gets tedious. They finally find Ray Palmer on an Earth where the Justice League is retired and living happily, and then that Earth gets destroyed. Ray’s body contains an antigen which gives him immunity to the Morticoccus virus. Jason Todd discovers the Batman of another Earth who took more extreme measures (similar to Jason’s own philosophy), and Jason adopts the guise of Red Robin.

Plotline #10: Superman-Prime, in perhaps the best issue of the entire book, goes on a rampage and destroys an entire alternate Earth just because it isn’t his ideal Earth like he used to read about in old DC Comics. He tortures Mr. Mxyzptlk, gets attacked by an alternate Zatanna, and then faces off against the Monitors. I’ve actually forgotten his present status.

Plotline #11: Brother Eye (who I just found out is a character that existed before “Infinite Crisis” — Hey, I never read the original OMAC!) breaks free from the facility where it’s contained. Brother Eye goes to Apokolips and merges with the planet, though it is defeated by Pied Piper.

Plotline #12: Buddy Blank, the pre-crisis OMAC, gathers up his grandson and takes refuge in Command D shelter as his planet is ravaged by the Morticoccus virus, which causes humans and animals to show traits of the other, and a nuclear war. Then we find out, natch, that it isn’t the “real” earth, and his grandson is now the “last boy alive”, Kamandi.

Plotline #13: All the disparate plotlines interwined and led to all these characters ending up on Apokolips, and from there they went to Earth to try to fix Karate Kid’s virus. Turns out they were on an alternate Earth, and when last we saw them they had fled Kamandi’s Earth to try to find their own.

This brings you up to speed. Or you can turn to Wikipedia.

That brings you up to date, sorta.