Countdown Presents: The Search for Ray Palmer: Red Rain

The search for Ray Palmer heads to Earth 43. For those of you out there keeping score, Earth 43 is the Earth where Batman is a vampire. In this issue, I was hoping to get more information about the team's desire to find Ray Palmer besides "Ray Palmer is the key". What we get is supposedly smart heroes acting very, very stupid. Where I come from vampires are bad and vampire killers are good. Why would the team then go after and stop the vampire killer from killing vampire Bat-Man? Their actions doomed this world's Dick Grayson and didn't move them closer to finding Ray Palmer. I'm sure the writer is writing from a DC editorial outline that goes something like "team arrives on Earth 43, confronts vampire Bat-Man, doesn't find Ray Palmer, and moves on". That about sums this book up. With the team of artist the outcome is surprisingly consistent. I'll have to give accolades to colorist Art Lyons for maintaining a consistent look and feel to the proceedings. However, the muted red tones did tend to drag towards the end of issue.

I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone other than a hardcore Countdown completist - if any of those really exist.