BLACKEST NIGHT: Event Horizons

I complained last week about how little had happened in Blackest Night despite about ten BN-related issues, to which Sean Collins replied:

[I]t was weird to me just to see Curt use the phrase "ten issues later" to describe where we're at with Blackest Night--by my reckoning, i.e. by the numbering of the main BN series, we're only two issues deep [at the time of that writing--issue #3 has come out since then]. It would never occur to me that anything important would happen in any of the tie-ins, except perhaps the Johns-authored Green Lantern and Tales of the Corps issues.

You know, back when I was heavy into superhero comics, the crossovers I read tended not to mess with tie-ins. They were really straightforward, running through a family of regular ongoing titles in a numbered sequence, usually indicated on the cover. What stands out in my mind as a textbook case is X-tinction Agenda, which cycled through X-Men, New Mutants, and X-Factor, three issues each, with each issue a chapter in a linear progression. X-cutioner's Song is another example. Maximum Carnage and Knightfall, though not so much "crossovers" as major story arcs for Spider-Man and Batman respectively, also follow this model of unfolding in a numbered sequence through multiple regular titles. Some issues might be better or hit bigger story beats, but there was never any question whether or how even the crappiest issue fit into the event.

Blackest Night, of course, is something else altogether. It is, first of all, Blackest Night, the eight-issue limited series. But the ongoing regular titles Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps are also designated "core" titles in this crossover event. Then we have a number of three-issue miniseries--BN: Batman, BN: Superman, and BN: Titans, probably with more yet to be announced. November (and maybe beyond?) will see a number of tie-in issues in other ongoing series. And so forth. This approach to crossovers raises questions all over the place, whether and how anything not part of the main title fits into the event.

Sean goes on to say:

There are a couple of routes recent event comics have taken to make their tie-ins matter: You can use them to fill in all the important story details that your main-series slugfest elides, as did Secret Invasion scribe Brian Bendis in his vastly superior New Avengers and Mighty Avengers issues; or you can make the tie-ins have little, if anything, to do with the main series, as Grant Morrison, Geoff Johns, and Greg Rucka did with their Final Crisis minis. The problems here are obvious, though: The former can leave fans feeling like we could have lost a few boring battle splash pages in favor of actual information, while the latter can leave fans scratching their heads and ruing their purchases.

Cal Cleary at read/RANT! independently makes much the same point in nearly-identical terms in his review of BN: Batman #1:

Spin-off minis to Major Crossover Events are interesting things. They are often posited as being important to the main story in some way, though the best crossovers know better than to make them vital or trivial and offend fans. On the one hand, you can have the debacle that was the Final Crisis spin-offs – decent minis that had absolutely nothing to do with the main title or, even worse, which actively contradicted the main title. On the other hand, you have Secret Invasion, which didn’t even make sense without the vastly more important spin-off titles.

With money at stake, any tie-in's deviation from a fine balance of being strictly supplemental--adding something, but not too much--can naturally make readers feel gouged or taken advantage of, one way or another. If it adds little or nothing, it's a bald cash-grab. If it adds too much, then the main title isn't really complete in itself, which provokes essentially the same kind of irritation we feel whenever anything pictured on a box is "sold separately." Even hardcore fans who bring a lot of excitement and enthusiasm to a crossover, and have every intention of buying everything related to it, tend to regard tie-ins with an almost adversarial wariness. This ambivalence comes through clearly in an exchange between G-Man and Babs in their video review of Blackest Night #2 at ComicVine:

G-Man: That brings another question. There's a bunch of crossovers--we also have Blackest Night: Batman, and we're going to have Blackest Night: Titans, and all this other stuff, and Green Lanterns, Green Lantern Corps. This is the eight-issue miniseries. Should most of the story be told here, or is it okay that it references, "Here's some Green Lantern stuff. You're going to have to read Green Lantern Corps to see more of that"? That's the question. The biggest complaint that people have with these events is that it ties into all these offshoot titles. Would it be good to have the story told in one series, or is it good to spread out and say, "Okay you have to buy this title, this title, this title?"

Babs: I want to feel like this is happening in the entire DC universe. I want to be like, this is where Aquaman is, this is where Batman is, and in relationship to that, this is what's really happening in this universe. I think that's awesome, I think it's really cool, and I don't have any conflict with it at all. The one thing, though--if you can't afford 3.99 an issue and the Teen Titans, and Batman Blackest Night, all of those series, you should be able to read just the eight-issue miniseries and still get by and have an understanding.

G-Man: That's what I was getting at. It's great to have all these, but I just don't want to see, "We've got this cool event going. Let's do all these spinoff titles and make people buy that." If it's an offshoot, like this Batman one--I don't know how crucial it's going to be overall--it's nice that it's an option. I don't want to be forced to read something else. But as far as the whole universe, the whole scene with Barbara and her dad, I like that they brought them in. So we are seeing the whole universe. That's great. But I don't want to be forced to buy eight different titles. I'm gonna buy them, but I don't want to be forced. I'd like to be able to read the story here [indicating an issue of the Blackest Night main series].

No doubt DC and Marvel have worked hard to earn such mistrust from their fans. My only prior experience with tie-ins richly bears out Sean's skepticism, and that was Secret Wars II. Of course, the main title sucked hard enough, jumping the shark right into orbit by the second issue, when Spider-Man had to potty-train the godlike Beyonder, but the tie-ins were so shockingly irrelevant and execrable in their own right, I dumped the whole thing at that point in utter disgust. It's funny--I haven't given it a thought in decades, and yet I'm surprised how angry it's making me to recall it now.

You thought I was kidding?

That's a shame, really, because the monthly pamphlet comics format opens tremendous storytelling possibilities for crossovers. In Sean's same post, he links to a review of Inglorious Basterds in which David Bordwell describes a less linear approach to storytelling, based on storylines that converge, diverge, overlap, and run parallel:

First, [Inglorious Basterds exhibits] strengths of structure. Tarantino’s conception of storytelling owes at least as much to popular literature, particularly policiers, as it does to current conventions of screenwriting.

Take his penchant for repeating scenes from different viewpoints. In Elmore Leonard’s novel Get Shorty, Chapter 2 ends with Harry, seeing Chili at his desk, exclaiming, “Jesus Christ!” Chapter 3 consists of the first stretch of their conversation. Chapter 4 starts with Karen approaching Harry’s office and hearing him say, “Jesus Christ!” This overlapping-scene strategy, sketched in Reservoir Dogs, gets elaborated in Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown.

Likewise, thrillers and crime novels commonly play on showing how distant lines of action unexpectedly intersect. In Peter Abrahams’ Hard Rain the agent who becomes the hero tells the story of two coal miners, Bazak and Vaclav, who meet after tunneling from two ends of the field. Needless to say, Hard Rain’s own plot enacts the same pattern. Charles Willeford’s chance-driven, parallel-action novel Sideswipe could be a model for the structure of Pulp Fiction. So it should be no surprise that Inglourious Basterds, labeling its long sequences “chapters,” should rely on the stepwise convergence of Shosanna’s plotline and the Basterds’ guerrilla operations, with the UK Operation Kino serving as the first sign of a merger.

So the film is built on large-scale alternation of the principal forces: Shosanna (Chapter 1), the Basterds (2), Shosanna again (3), the Basterds again (4), and finally the two strands knotting at the screening of National Pride (5). Landa also knits the two strands together, of course, starting when he investigates the tavern shootout at the end of (4). In Chapter 5 the alternation gets carried by classic crosscutting. We shift to and fro among Shosanna’s plot, the capture of Raine and Utivich, the conflagration in the auditorium, and the deal struck between Landa and the US command. Yet right to the end both Shosanna and the Basterds have no awareness of each other’s plan: only we are grasp the double dose of Jewish vengeance. More than in most films, but typical for Tarantino, we’re aware of the plot’s abstract architecture.

The Mutant Massacre crossover that ran primarily through the X-books isn't an especially great one by any measure, but it took advantage of the format of multiple monthly pamphlet comics to tell exactly the kind of story Bordwell describes:

Like Shosanna and the Basterds, the X-Men and X-Factor operate independently, in parallel, criss-crossing each other's paths through the Morlock tunnels without ever actually meeting up. A blast fired at the Marauders by Cyclops in X-Factor #10 misses, and almost clips Wolverine and Storm far downtunnel in X-Men #211, which is their first clue that X-Factor is involved. As they move to join their old friends and allies, a tunnel collapse cuts them off. Power Pack venture into the tunnels in their issue, disregard Wolverine's stern warning that they need to get out immediately (he's hunting Sabretooth in X-Men 212), and later run into X-Factor. When Thor gives the dead Morlocks a "viking's funeral" by scouring the tunnels with a ridiculous supernova of lightning in issue #374, the blast wave actually reaches the entrance to the tunnels beneath the X-Mansion in the last panels of X-Men 212.

Now, this is essentially the kind of storytelling Babs is hoping for from Blackest Night when she says, "I want to be like, this is where Aquaman is, this is where Batman is, and in relationship to that, this is what's really happening in this universe." My impression is that this is just the kind of storytelling Blackest Night has been delivering so far. That's why it seemed natural to me to say "ten issues later." Sure, the tie-ins don't fall neatly into linear sequence with the main story--Blackest Night: Titans #1 isn't Chapter n of a story in which BN #1 is Chapter 1--but there does seem to be, as Bordwell would say, an "architecture" to this crossover, and the tie-ins are part of it.

There is a linear progression that runs GL 43, BN 1, GL 44, BN 2, BN 3. It's all very well and good for Sean to say, "by my reckoning, i.e. by the numbering of the main BN series, we're only two issues deep," but anyone who's read only those two issues will have had to make the jarring leap from this:

. . . to this:

. . . and will have missed the whole fight in-between, which comprises pretty much the entirety of Green Lantern #44. That goes way beyond compression and "important story details that your main-series slugfest elides." In this case, GL 44 really does go between BNs 1 and 2, making the event at least three issues deep at the time of my post and Sean's.

GL 45, though, seems to bear a more parallel relation to BN 2. While the latter is almost entirely earth-bound, the former catches us up on the War of Light raging through the cosmos, and a certain simultaneity is established when Black Lantern Pariah is depicted in both issues uttering the words, "Worlds have died. Worlds will rise."

Green Lantern Corps seems to be running on a parallel course to the main trunk of the story, with a focus on Blackest Night descending on the Green Lantern homeworld of Oa. GLC #39 seems to occur simultaneously with BN #1, culminating with the rise of the Black Lanterns that forms such a spectacular spread in the latter. I'm not sure where GLC 40 fits into the timeline--it appears to have leapfrogged ahead of everything else. We last saw Scar and the Guardians in GL #45:

But in GLC #40, they've disappeared or something:

I was hoping BN #3 would clear up what happened, but no such luck.

As for the tie-in miniseries, BN: Batman #1 and BN: Titans #1 diverge from the main story at the point of BN #2, in the characters of Deadman and Black Lantern Hawk respectively. Presumably, both Batman and Superman will eventually join the action in the main title, at which point their tie-in stories will converge with it and won't have been simply irrelevant. And Keith Giffen told Newsarama, regarding his Doom Patrol issues that will tie-in to the crossover:

It's two issues, #4 and #5. Then I believe that the Doom Patrol are actually going to become a substantial part of Blackest Night. In other words, they'll have appearances in the Blackest Night series, after my two issues.

In sum, whatever other faults Blackest Night may have (and I have noted a few), I think it's making outstanding use of multiple core titles and a range of tie-in miniseries and issues. It's taking advantage of the monthly pamphlet comic's possibilities for telling a big story with multiple plotlines that interact in a variety of interesting ways. I stand by my claim that not enough has happened yet, but assuming it will hit its stride (hopefully sooner rather than later), I'm confident that going all-in on the tie-ins will prove rewarding.