Trivia / Countdown to Final Crisis

• Executive Meddling:
  • The entire premise of the series. Dan Didio absolutely hated 52 because DC's editors had little to no say in how the series unfolded. Countdown was conceived as "52 done right" by Didio as a weekly series where DC's editors had ultimate control over every single issue. Fans didn't agree with his sentiments and the results was a hodgepodge mess of a story that had little to no coherency. This resulted in a real life All for Nothing as Final Crisis didn't even allude to this series let alone follow any of its storylines.
  • The appearance of the New Gods - Grant Morrison wanted DC to minimize, if not outright refrain from, using them, so when they did reappear during Final Crisis, their impact would be much bigger. Either DC ignored their request or didn't get it, and regardless of which was the case, they opted to do the inverse and have them appear everywhere - this series, Death of the New Gods, and Amazons Attack!.
• Follow the Leader: The whole maxi-series was, at least structure-wise, copying the 52 series: a weekly series with focus on lesser-known/less popular characters, trips to many places of the larger DC Universe, and each plot thread eventually converging in the lead-in to the next big event. A post by writer Mark Waid on his website mentioned that then DC editor Dan Didio referred to Countdown as "52 done right", implying it was intentional for the series to imitate its predecessor.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: Why does Superboy-Prime show up as Superman Prime (no, not that one)? DC had lost the Superboy trademark to the Siegel family around the time of Infinite Crisis; while they were able to use the regular Superboy for that event to kill the character off until they got the rights back, since Prime was still around after the aforementioned Infinite Crisis, their options were either not use him at all, or rename him and give him a Plot-Relevant Age-Up. They ultimately wound up choosing the latter, although as soon as they got the Superboy trademark back, they undid said age up and changed his name back.

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