To recap: I see intriguing similarities between the superhero comic events Great Darkness Saga and Blackest Night, but more than a quarter of a century (!) separates them, and a lot has changed in that time, making them interesting subjects for comparison and contrast. To that end, I've been examining differences rooted in durable, industry-wide changes to mainstream superhero comics that have taken hold in the intervening years. In Pt. 2, I looked at some changes in art, and in Pt. 3, I began to look at changes in writing.Picking up where I left off there, I'd just note that most changes in the writing seem to derive from the changes in distribution I mentioned (from general availability pretty much everywhere to exclusive availability in Direct Market specialty shops), and especially the changes that made both feasible and necessary in audience demographic, toward an older audience of long-term, hardcore fandom.
Of course, we all know what "older" means--increasingly graphic violence, sexualization, darker tones, grimmer themes like death and rape and torture, and in short, everything that falls under the heading of "superhero decadence." Whether this represents genuine decadence in the sense of decline, or progress in the sense of stories that are more powerfully engaging and affecting to an audience that's genuinely more mature, is of course a matter of debate; my own view is that it represents a neutral change in itself that can and does go both ways, but that probably skews decadent just because doing something well is harder than doing something poorly.
In any case, this difference certainly looms large between GDS and BN. As I've mentioned, 1986 is generally regarded as the banner year for this sort of thing, with both Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns rocking the comics world, but in fact GDS artist Keith Giffen was already splattering blood and guts and brains all over the pages of Omega Men back in 1983. 1982 was a different story, though. No matter what Alan Moore may have been up to across the pond, Legion of Super-Heroes, at least, was still playing by the old rules. Nobody dies violently in-panel in the whole of the Great Darkness Saga. Whether Darkseid's minions count as living, autonomous beings who could count as getting killed is a murky, ambiguous question, but when one of them gets put down the hard way, we're encouraged both visually and verbally to understand it as a "heap of dumb inanimate matter" that could only be "destroyed":
Considering the scope and stakes of the conflict, there's remarkably little reference to casualties of any sort, and none depicted in any gory fashion.In starkest contrast, Blackest Night #1 paints the page red with the graphically-depicted double-murder of Hawkman and Hawkgirl. The second issue shows a character's heart being ripped out, right in-panel:
I've addressed the question before of whether these horror elements count as "superhero decadence," but whether they do or not, suffice it to say we saw nothing remotely like this in the Great Darkness Saga, and we see it in Blackest Night because over the years since then such depictions have grown increasingly acceptable in mainstream superhero comics.(more to come . . .)
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