BLACKEST NIGHT: Early Stumbles

After a solid week of wall-to-wall coverage here, I thought I'd give Blackest Night a rest for a while, though that meant leaving some loose ends. Since there's nothing new out this week on that front, it's a good chance for me to get fully up to speed.

I've already looked at BN #1 and Green Lantern #44 from the point of view of new-reader friendliness, but my goal in covering them here is to examine how they do or don't live up to writer Geoff Johns's stated goal of delivering a "horror story about superheroes."

SPOILERS FOLLOW

As I mentioned, GL #43, technically the Prologue, does quite a decent job of establishing Black Hand not only as a supervillain, but as a character who can function as a kind of gothic monster in a superhero universe.

As a figure of horror, he frames the events of BN #1, very similarly to how Scar's ominous presence frames the events of his origin story in GL #43. The issue opens (see the panel at the top of this post) with him lurking in a cemetery, like a vampire or necromancer. He's in a Gotham City (the very name allusive of the word gothic, if not outright derived from it) graveyard, in fact, at the grave of Batman, the mainstream superhero of the DC universe most easily associated with horror--from the very concept of his character and its association with vampires (an association made literal in comics from Red Rain to Nosferatu), it's hardly an accident that he's the superhero who appeared in Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson's macabre early issues of Swamp Thing.

The issue closes with Black Hand at the scene of the climactic superhero zombie attack that leaves two major characters dead on the floor, the first victims of Blackest Night. He wields Batman's skull as some kind of necromantic artifact:

For the most part, I think this issue hits the right horror beats. A lot of people have complained about the early pages as boring and unnecessary exposition, with added grumblings that blame new readers for it. I address the whole "fuck new readers" sentiment here, but I also think it's incorrect to view this sequence as an infodump. The point, as I see it, is to focus the view of old and new readers alike through a funereal lens, through the veil of a winding sheet. The point of this recital of the dead is to draw a pall of death over the DC universe, and establish a somber mood. And also to impress us with the scale of the impending threat. When Green Lantern shows the Flash who has died, he's also showing us what the heroes will have to face in a hideous, horrific guise--this isn't raw information, it's obviously meant to pack some emotional punch, and I think it does. There's no strict identity, of course, between this two-page spread and the one revealing the dead Green Lanterns resurrected as zombie Black Lanterns, but there is a resonant symmetry.

The Black Lantern rings suggest a biblical plague of locusts or swarm of Beelzebub's flies as they disperse throughout the cosmos to work their evil magic of raising the dead.

Scar's vicious attack on the Guardians is spectacular and shocking. First, it establishes just how far up the food chain this crisis horror story will play out. Then, biting a throat in such an animalistic manner and ripping out a beating heart carry connotations of vampires, werewolves, and appalling heathen rituals.

The one serious stumble in this issue, it seems to me, is the use of the Dibnys as the zombie attackers in the climactic murder scene. In itself, the scene is suitably horrific, but as I've mentioned, these characters are perceived by some readers as having a history of shabby treatment, and those readers seem to have responded to the Dibnys' zombification in the context of that treatment, as more of the same (here's another example). Basically, this response distracts from and undermines the horror. It looks to me like it should have been foreseeable, and avoided.

Where Blackest Night (the crossover, not the issue) goes off the rails is in GL #44. In the closing pages of BN #1, Martian Manhunter shows up as a Black Lantern zombie to tell Hal Jordan and Barry Allen they should both be dead:

This strikes me as a decently effective horror moment, first because he looks pretty scary, and second because he's right--they should be dead.

GL #44 picks up from that point, and botches it by commencing with an ordinary superhero brawl. However the Dibnys' history may have complicated the reception of their zombie attack, at least they establish in no uncertain terms what Black Lanterns do--they use their superpowers to kill, rip hearts out, and raise their victims as Black Lantern zombies. Martian Manhunter doesn't seem to be trying to do any of that here, and his attack utterly lacks the murderous ferocity the Dibnys displayed.

What's more, character reactions are extremely important in eliciting feelings of horror in an audience. Characters need to respond to horror with horror for the audience to feel it. Green Lantern and Flash simply don't respond to Martian Manhunter with anywhere near the fear or loathing a monster should provoke. I don't care how recognizable he is as a former teammate. He's also plainly recognizable as a zombie. Sure we know Green Lantern and Flash are the major heroes in this crossover, but if they display real fear, we can empathize with them and feel some measure of it, too.

This isn't a disastrous misstep. Blackest Night can still develop into an awesome horror story. But this does make me wonder how well Johns understands horror and how to evoke fear in an audience. We shall see . . . !