BLACKEST NIGHT: Concluding Overview, Pt. 3: What's the story?

I turn now to the main story of the Blackest Night event. By "main story," I don't just mean the main title, the Blackest Night eight-issue limited series. Charles Hatfield of Thought Balloonist recently reviewed the whole limited series by itself; his remarks are almost uniformly negative, and while I would agree with many of his criticisms, I had to take issue with this:

Blackest Night is yet another example of a story that isn’t really a story in itself, but a skeleton, a notional blueprint, a whiteboard’s worth of Post-It notes. It continually gestures outward and backwards rather than resolving into a tight, self-contained performance. The resulting impoverishment of the narrative is twofold: for one, the plot judders unpredictably from one issue to the next, transitioning vaguely, with unexplained sidelong bits that are never fleshed out. The result is a hectic patchwork of allusions that makes clear only one thing, the fact that DC is banking on me investing in a bunch of interpolated tie-in issues from other series.

I responded:

Did you only read BLACKEST NIGHT, or the GREEN LANTERNs too (which Johns also wrote and interwove very tightly with the main event title)? GL is so closely tied in, it almost doesn't make sense to call it a tie-in; really, the crossover story pings between the two titles, and if you read one without the other, the gaps you mention are bound to seem many and enormous. Other tie-ins have some bearing on the main story, but GL is the one (and really the only one) that completes those dangling threads you complain of here.

To which he replied:

I figured that BN and the current GL titles were tightly interlaced; obviously, the GL Corps is at the heart of the emotional spectrum concept. Out of stubbornness, I would not buy BN and certainly wouldn't buy the tie-ins, so inevitably I missed some of the connective tissue. Call my review an experiment in reading an event series without its attendant crossovers.

Well, fair enough. But then, when Ryan said further down in comments:

The saddest part is alone, BN is weak, and thus, the HC/TPB/GN will be weak because instead of printing them in order ala Sinestro Corps War, they aren't doing Blackest Night with all the middle parts (GL/GLC a little) between each issue. Ideally it should have been a 3 volume series or one pretty huge HC.

. . . Hatfield speculated:

Wouldn't you say that a huge HC collection would falsify the experience of BN by implying that it is one coherent, monumental work, rather than the opportunistic series of tie-in products that it really is?

We fans crave the monumentality, legitimacy, and durability that a big HC seems to confer, but, really, the whole point of something like BN is being strung along for months and going with the flow and seeing what kinds of surprises the experience has in store for us. As a collected work, a series like BN simply doesn't have the coherence that would justify a massive HC omnibus edition.

I would think that keeping BN issues in a long box would be a better memento of the experience than buying some oversized book collection. I just don't see the narrative and aesthetic coherence that would make a $50 "Blackest Night" HC worthwhile.

I'm no fan of hardcover collections, but I definitely wouldn't say that a Blackest Night collection of the sort Ryan proposes would "falsify the experience" for the reasons Hatfield suggests. I was actually hoping for a more diffuse, more branching and interweaving, less linear reading experience (I guess you could call what I wanted the kind of "series of tie-in products" Hatfield has in mind here, except motivated more by narrative considerations than mere rank opportunism), but the truth is, BN simply does have the coherence that would justify an omnibus edition. There is a whole and self-contained story that could be collected in the following order:

• GL 43
• BN 1
• GL 44
• BN 2
• GL 45
• BN 3
• GL 46
• BN 4
• GL 47
• GL 48
• BN 5
• GL 49
• BN 6
• GL 50
• GL 51
• BN 7
• GLC 46
• GL 52
• BN 8

What's more, although I'm glad I followed this in monthly floppies and had a lot of fun discussing it with a lot of cool comics bloggers I wouldn't otherwise have met, I'm surprised to say the story running through these issues really is better served by being read as a collection. I know I'm not the only one who complained about the pacing. Rokk, to name just one example, prefaced his review of BN 5 by saying, "This big event has been plagued with poor plot progression and an incredibly slow pace." But I find the pacing evens out and works much better when it isn't parceled out over months and months and months. I'm reminded, in this regard, of the contrast I noted between Sean T. Collins's reaction to Batman: Hush after reading it in monthlies, and my reaction after reading it in the trade collection. You'll find, at that link, I say, "some superhero events benefit from the monthly pamphlet format and actually suffer from being collected in a graphic novel (and I suspect Blackest Night will fall very firmly into that category)," but I was wrong, about Blackest Night anyway.

So, the issues listed above, in that sequence, are what I consider the "main story," and that's how I believe they should ideally be collected. That's not quite how I'm going to discuss them, however. Although dual plot threads running in parallel should probably alternate in a collection, they're best considered as separate whole sections for the purposes of discussion and analysis.

So here's how I intend to break it down:

• The Superhero Horror Story (GL 43, BN 1, GL 44, BN 2-4)
• The War of Light (GL 45-48)
• The Pivot (BN 5-6, GL 49)
• The Specter (GL 50-51)
• The Classic Crossover (BN 7, GLC 46, GL 52, BN 8)