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Countdown to Mystery #1
Posted 08 Oct 2007
Writer: Steve Gerber, Matthew Sturges
Artist: Justiniano, Stephen Jorge Segovia
Letters: Pat Brosseau
Ink: Walden Wong
Colors: Chris Chuckry, Dan Brown
Publisher: DC Comics
5.00 out of 5 Stars
Reviewed by Adam McGovern
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Readers have been waiting many months for Steve Gerber’s
Doctor Fate series, but that’s nothing in the spacetime scheme
of things to a writer who’s been waiting 30 years for a chance
to reinvent one of comics history’s most intriguing characters.
And now that it’s here, it’s the kind of book you never
want to end.
“Already at the top of his game is Gerber; no one can mix gritty
cynicism and miraculous spectacle like him.”
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The mindbending occult vistas and supercool special-effects of
artist Justiniano ideally match a script which delivers on both the
physical and supernatural planes, with tautly paced action and
compellingly unfolding character revelation. Rescuing the hero from a
thicket of continuity denser than a mystical tome in a lost language,
the new miniseries in Countdown to Mystery gets us deftly
caught up with Doctor Fate’s history and immediately involved in
the man who represents his shaky future: A new Kent Nelson, distant
relative and namesake of the original Doctor, though this time a real
one — an acclaimed but self-destructive psychiatrist who has hit
the bottom of existence and will claw back to the heights in an
unexpected spiritual ascension as Doctor Fate.
Already at the top of his game is Gerber; no one can mix gritty
cynicism and miraculous spectacle like him, and his imagination and
insights are fine-tuned and cranked high. The showmanship and
subtleties of Justiniano match him at every frequency, with dynamic
body language and shades of expression, textures to suit every
atmosphere from squalid alley to mythic continuum, and tricky shifts
of style and explosions of page composition to take us every direction
in the story’s timeline and the characters’ space.
It’s a great blend of the statuesque definition
originally-announced artist Paul Gulacy would have brought to the
project, with a trippy fluidity that few artists could achieve with
such utter success.
The new Kent’s identity as a disgraced psychiatrist is
well-chosen, and allows for deft exposition that moves the story along
briskly while amplifying, rather than obscuring, its visceral and
visual wonder — a stand-in shaman of the modern world, his
clinical observation both tests the book’s fantastic phenomena
against the material facts he thinks he’s sure of and guides us
through new worlds he can’t deny. The dual nature of this Doctor
Fate is between rationality and belief, but it’s not as simple
as either of those words implies, and it seems his odyssey will be one
of recognizing the blurry horizon between the two. This is a book
which stands on the precipice between the processed certainties of
official religion and the rich, self-discovered mysteries of more
ancient faiths. For a decade which suffers from a shortage of
spiritual inquiry and an abundance of fanatical resolve, this is truly
a series that’s arrived just in time.
Countdown to Mystery also features a backup series dealing
with down-and-out dirtbags and deities, starring Eclipso. The title
character herself hardly appears in the first chapter, but we get
convincing characterization on figures as far-flung as Plastic Man and
the Spectre as this crossover-to-mystery starts to play out.
Effectively murky, atmospheric art from Stephen Jorge Segovia and
wicked gothic humor from writer Matthew Sturges so far promise a good
chillout from Doctor Fate’s highs.
—CCdC—
Cover image used without explicit permission in accordance with the "Fair Use" provision of US copyright law.
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