So That's Why He Was Crying in the Countdown Teaser

It's an oversized spectacular blowout action anniversary issue, as Kurt Busiek, gearing up for his insanely huge next project, brings his Superman run to a close!
So begins the solicitation for the April issue of SUPERMAN (issue 675).

Well, damn. Damn it. This is sad news for Superman readers of good taste everywhere. "Camelot Falls" was one of the best superhero stories I'd read in a long time. I was hoping that, now that the book has a quality regular artist again (Renato Guedes), it'd be returning to those levels of high entertainment, but apparently it's not to be. From reading Busiek's comments in interviews and on message boards, I get the impression he still had tons of stories idea, too. What a shame. I want to find out who/what Omni-fi and the Envoy are, dammit! Dare I hope it's a temporary leave, to give him time to finish whatever this upcoming Mystery Project is?

Speaking of which, what *is* the Mystery Project? The hot rumor is that it's DC's third weekly series, the one after COUNTDOWN. Supposedly, it will star Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman and be drawn by Mark Bagley. Also supposedly, each issue will contain 14-16 pages of that story, filling out the rest of the issue with a Fabian Niceiza-written backup.

I'm trying to figure out how likely that is. I swear that the Mystery Project was described as an ongoing series at one point, early on. That doesn't disprove anything, though. The project could have changed since then, and it could still morph into an ongoing after the weekly is over.

In fact, we know that it's changed in some way since it was first announced; Busiek's said as much. He said it's gotten bigger and more complex, and turning into a weekly, even a finite one, could qualify as that. It was also held back to begin a year after originally planned. If it was tranformed into DC's third weekly series, then we have a perfect explanation for such a delay. (It also tells us it wasn't originally going to be a weekly series because there's no way anyone would have thought it was a good idea to run it alongside COUNTDOWN.)

I keep thinking back to how Busiek said he didn't think DC would go for the book but pitched it anyway just in case. What kind of book could that be? That leads me to believe it's very unconventional in some way. Now, a series about Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman doesn't sound particularly unconventional (it being a weekly doesn't factor in; whether or not it is one now, it wasn't one at that point), but there could be something unusual about the specific plot, like one where the three spend almost all the time in their civilian IDs, only more commercial than that.

Would Busiek have the time to write 14-16 pages a week? That's 56 pages per month minimum, or just over 2 1/2 issues. With him off SUPERMAN, he only has the sporadically-released ASTRO CITY and the Mystery Project on his plate (that we know of, at least). If he is doing the third weekly, he'd have enough time.

We actually know for a fact that Mark Bagley is attached to the Mystery Project as penciler. Would he have enough time? Now, he certainly can't draw two and one half issues a month. I don't know what the highest number of issues of ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN he drew in one year was, but I know it was far under 30! Could he have gotten a huge headstart? In that linked interview from earlier this week, he says he's still finishing up Marvel work and has only finished a couple of pages of the Mystery Project, while Dan DiDio has said the third weekly begins in June. Would that be enough of a headstart? Impossible to say without knowledge of how long the third weekly is. It's possible, though.

Whoever's doing the third weekly, I feel sorry for them. Thanks to the negative reaction towards COUNTDOWN, there's already a lot of ill will towards its successor. No matter how good it is, people are going to be carping.