The All-New Atom #16 had a very fun fill-in story written by Roger Stern. Roger did a great job matching the "feel" and "narrative style" of regular writer Gail Simone.
Coundown #30 was just okay - it mostly focused on the world-hopping team's visit to Earth-15. The art on the main story was only so-so, and the villain origin pages in back on General Zod didn't do much to excite me.
The Tales of the Sinestro Corps - Cyborg-Superman one-shot special was okay as well - half of it was spent recapping C-S's history which I was already thoroughly acquainted with and the other half was really just a lead in to next week's Green Lantern issue. The art was nice though.
So, that leaves the book of the week to the Countdown Presents - The Search of Ray Palmer: the Crime Society. This one-shot special really is a tie-in to last week's Countdown #31 when the world-hopping team ended up on Earth-3. A little history lesson for those not savy on their parallel Earths history: Earth-3 is a world in which the known major heroes like the Justice League, etc. have villainous counterparts while the villains of Earth-1 might have heroic counterparts. So, on this world, the Batman-like character is Owlman and a criminal. The Superman-like character is Ultraman and a criminal. The Joker-like character is called the Jokester and he's a hero. The first Earth-3 was destroyed as part of the Crisis On Infinite Earths mini-series back in 1985. Earth-3 along with the whole parallel Earths concept was brought back, slightly different than before, at the end of the 52 mini-series last year. This issue actually focuses on that later character - the Jokester - how he came to be and how he is connected to the character of the Joker's Daughter who was killed in Countdown #51 (she was a world-hopper too). I very much enjoyed this looking at familiar characters through a reverse-mirror. The art was solid with a lot of homages to classic comic images from Batman books of decades gone by.
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