BLACKEST NIGHT: Batman & Superman

Tomorrow we get the double-whammy of Blackest Night 4 and Green Lantern 47, plus the final installment of BN: Titans, which entirely wraps up this first round of tie-in minis. I'm hoping that will give me a lot to talk about (unlike last month's crop), so to clear my plate a little, I thought this would be a good time to sum up my reactions to BN: Batman and BN: Superman, the two tie-in minis that have already concluded.

The main point I want to address is a relatively widespread sentiment expressed by Brian Hibbs at Savage Critics:

BLACKEST NIGHT BATMAN 1-3, and SUPERMAN #1-3: To me, the biggest sin of a crossover tie-in is to be "red skies". That is, where basically nothing really happens, except to take money from your pocket. And I kind of feel that BN crossovers are doing pretty much that -- zombies show up, get fended off, the end.

I guess superhero fans are so conditioned to expect a kick in the teeth from crossover tie-ins that they feel a kick whether any is delivered or not. I wasn't previously familiar with the term "red skies" tie-in, but if this TV Tropes entry fairly summarizes what Hibbs has in mind, I really must disagree with him and all those who've voiced essentially the same complaint.

My first observation would be that a zombie apocalypse isn't the kind of tightly-centralized event that allows for very strict demarcations between the "tentpole" story, tie-ins that are essential to it, and tie-ins that are "red skies" peripheral or irrelevant to it.

Let's suppose that one sweeps-week, CBS ran a zombie apocalypse through the whole CSI franchise. Each show--the original in Vegas, the spinoffs in New York and Miami--depicts its team dealing separately and in its own way with the local consequences of the global event. There's not really a tentpole story here for which one show could be essential and another peripheral. The event is big enough that three shows can depict three entirely unrelated responses to it. What happens in Vegas isn't a "red skies" tie-in to what happens in Miami or New York, or vice-versa in any direction. Now, if you want to talk "red skies," that would be a contained zombie outbreak in Vegas that the New York and Miami teams are shown watching on tv or discussing as they work on their own ordinary murder cases.

As it happens, Blackest Night does have a tentpole story with a central hero (Hal Jordan) and a Big Bad (Nekron). Nevertheless, it's also a DC Universe-wide zombie apocalypse story, and it therefore affects not only Hal and his supporting cast, but pretty much everyone. Returning to the CSI example, Gil and Sara no longer regularly appear on the original show or any other, but they remain important enough to the CSI-verse that if a global zombie apocalypse really did rage through it, fans would naturally be concerned to know how they're dealing with it, and CBS wouldn't be at all remiss if it aired a standalone special to tell their story, quite apart from what happens on their original Vegas show.

By the same token, Batman and Superman are important enough heavy-hitters that it's worthwhile showing them dealing with Blackest Night in their own corners of the DCU with their own supporting casts, whether or not those stories tie-in with Hal Jordan's. There's a big difference between musing about a red sky in the distance, and fighting for your life against a Black Lantern zombie of someone you care about who's trying to rip your heart out. And we don't just have random Black Lanterns briefly interrupting ongoing stories in regular titles, but dedicated miniseries that tell complete story arcs.

On those grounds alone, I don't think BN: Batman and Superman can reasonably be dismissed as "red skies" tie-ins, but my experience has been that these tie-ins contribute a good deal more to the event.

Ivan Reis and Doug Mahnke have established a distinctive look and a high standard of art to Blackest Night in the main title and Green Lantern. By maintaining that look and quality, Eddy Barrows in Superman and especially Adrian Syaf in Batman really make the tie-ins feel like part of the bigger story, and thereby make the story feel that much bigger. The visual juxtaposition between gloomy horror and flashy superheroic action is one I've been enjoying immensely. Big-budget, high-concept blockbuster extravaganza movies only wish they could deliver this kind of slick, eye-popping overstimulation.

What's more, these earth-bound tie-ins nicely balanced and grounded the event when Green Lantern went all War-of-Light and joined Green Lantern Corps on a more space-operatic stage. Tucker Stone:

Blackest Night Batman is that other kind of "horror-but-not-really" movie, the action-with-gore kind. Old men yell "empty!" and get new shotguns thrown to them from their cripple daughters, people hide out in rooms and listen to unnamed side characters die in pain, somebody gets a drill shoved into their chest, reinforcements show up out of nowhere in giant machines, guns blazing...it's all very fast, a story that takes place in minutes. [. . .] It shows Batman, Damian & Tim Drake shooting monster types with flamethrowers on the cover. It's a gory action movie with Batman in it. One's appreciation for it is based around whether or not they think Devils Rejects would have been better if William Forsythe's character had been played by Christian Bale.

I think he's saying that like it's a bad thing, though I can't imagine why. A gory action movie with superheroes is exactly what I was hoping for, and it's exactly what was called for to counterbalance all that Compassion when the Indigo Tribe popped in from nowhere and whisked Hal to the stars.

Then, these tie-ins delve a bit more deeply into certain thematic concerns. The emotional spectrum visible to Black Lanterns figures prominently in Superman, while Batman appropriately enough explores the Black Lanterns' psychological manipulations.

Finally, in a previous post, I expressed my hope that the Blackest Night tie-ins would take advantage of the serial pamphlet format's possibilities for a "less linear approach to storytelling, based on storylines that converge, diverge, overlap, and run parallel." I really feel that BN: Superman and especially Batman accomplish this. Superman, so far, only runs parallel to the main action, as I discuss above in my point about zombie apocalypses, but ends on the suggestion that Superman's story will converge with it in due time--a suggestion the cover for the forthcoming BN #5 appears to bear out:

Batman presents a more interesting case, with a number of threads weaving it to the main and core titles--primarily Bruce Wayne's grave (BN 1, GL 44, BN:B 1), the Bat-Signal/Jim Gordon/Oracle (GL 44, BN 2, BN:B 1-3), and Deadman (BN 2, BN:B 1-3). What's fun here is that when the main story forks away from certain intriguing threads, they don't just get dropped, but interested readers can follow them into another title. I'm finding that to be true of the event generally. Hal Jordan's story may be central, but there's a lot more going on, and none of it has to be sacrificed or left out. Collectively, the various relevant titles are like a bank of screens, where a character who steps out of one steps into another. That's what I was hoping for, and so far that's what I feel I'm getting. We'll see how that holds up when the November wave of tie-ins hits.

Update: Not a minute after I posted this, Geoff Johns won the Scream Award for Best Comic Book Writer on Spike. Heh!