BLACKEST NIGHT: Concluding Overview, Pt. 6: Black Lantern Speech

One of the most unfortunate creative choices in the conception of the Black Lanterns was giving them fully articulate speech patterns--presented, no less, in normally-shaped, though slightly discolored, speech balloons. Yes, I get it, that they aren't strictly "zombies," and that one of their chief functions is to elicit maximal emotional reactions before killing, but I don't think this choice really furthers that end. What's more, it drastically undermines their immediate effect, and has plenty of other damaging consequences for the quality of Blackest Night, as well.

In the first place, it simply humanizes them too much. I'm firmly of the opinion that anyone coming back from the grave should be marked as uncanny and horribly Other:

When I was young, Ambrose Bierce's story "Chickamauga" seared into my mind the eerie scene of a deaf child's encounter with many soldiers after a battle--maimed, bleeding, clearly in great agony. The most memorable detail for me was that their faces were so pale, the boy first thought they were clowns. Their weird movements, caused by pain, injury, and weariness, struck him as funny at first. . . .

Ever since, there's a certain quality of suffering, of having suffered, of having gone through something horrible, of being reduced or having been reduced to one of these haunting, pale-faced figures, that holds a tremendous morbid fascination for me when I encounter it in horror.

I've mentioned before that the visceral punch of "Chickamauga" has influenced my conception of vampires; their paleness and everything else about them that indicates their unliving state should be a reminder that they've died and blasphemously risen from the grave, and that these have been horrible, eternally traumatizing experiences for them. A vampire, to my mind, should essentially be like one of those Chickamauga soldiers who stands back up and goes on functioning, but who remains a pale, twisted wreck of a man despite all the occult power, strength, and invulnerability conferred by his unholy resurrection. No vampire should ever quite shake off the "victim experience" of having died.

Yes, the Black Lanterns do look different. The kind of movement suggested for them is inconsistently rendered--occasionally as zombie-ish (i.e. slouched, halting, etc.), just for effect, but more often (especially in fight scenes) as normal and unencumbered by their condition. Their wholly fluent speech, though, is what really takes the edge off any sense that they've died and returned from the grave. I really think a more halting speech pattern, as of someone suffering too horribly to speak normally, visually reinforced by a different, spookier style of speech balloons, would have gone a long way toward giving them that edge. Maybe some readers would find that hokey or cliche, but I would have preferred it.

Just as bad if not worse, their speech drags the pace to a crawl in multiple ways. With more self-editorial discipline, writer Geoff Johns might have made it work better, but he just lets them run off at the mouth to the point that it seems like all yakking, all the time. Visually, this loads the pages down with speech balloons (I owe this point to Sean T. Collins)--big, full chunks of text that the eye can't simply glide over. Unrealistic quantities of speech in superhero fights is a long, venerable convention of the genre, but this is ridiculous. The scale of the splash/spread layout below goes some way toward offsetting the space taken up by the balloons, and viewing it as a small image on a screen further diminishes the effect, but holding the actual comic in my hands, this really strikes my eye as a whole damn lot of smack-talk the Black Lanterns are dishing:

In some cases, extra panels and even pages are necessary just to make room for these Black Lantern rants. The rants are at the worst when the Black Lanterns are trying to kill people--that is to say, in action scenes that should be moving much more briskly, with the consequence that fights sometimes seem bloated and dulled, with beats added and stretched out that serve no purpose except accommodating the verbiage. In the page below, after two action panels in which Black Lantern Firestorm has his say, he actually then needs a whole "talking head" panel--in the middle of what should be a fast, heated fight scene, mind you--for three more speech balloons' worth of taunting:

Worst of all, the Black Lanterns almost always say essentially the same things and strike exactly the same limited range of emotional tones--they endlessly spout rote, on-the-nose Hannibal Lectures--making all of this logorrhea inexcusably repetitive.

If they weren't conceived as being able to speak so freely and easily, the problems I mention here might not have arisen, or at least not so obtrusively.