Okay, I'm ready to be done writing about Blackest Night, so this is going to be my last word on it, at least for the foreseeable future. I was going to try to cover the whole event, including "core" title Green Lantern Corps and all the tie-in miniseries, but like I said, I'm ready to be done, so I'm just going to stick here to the main story running through the main title and Green Lantern. My broadest, bluntest, thumbs-up-or-down take is that this blockbuster comic event has a bit too much in common with recent blockbuster movies--the gorgeous and spectacular visual realization of a promising high-concept story that is disappointingly (sometimes even bizarrely) marred by problems and mistakes that seem entirely avoidable. On balance, I did enjoy it, and I could recommend it, but only to someone who seems predisposed to like it, and even then only with reservations.Superhero Horror Story: Although Blackest Night is not ultimately itself a superhero horror story, writer Geoff Johns does kick it off in zombie-apocalypse fashion. Green Lantern 43-44 and Blackest Night 1-4 basically focus on the rise of the DCU dead on planet earth. I continue to think the Prologue and first issue do an outstanding job of setting the stage.
The murder of the Hawks by the Black Lantern Dibnys has been criticized as extreme violence and a further "desecration" of fan favorite characters who have already been much abused, but in the end I find it an effective and appropriately brutal action/horror set-piece. Even better is the whole Black Lantern Aquaman sequence in BN 2, which features the jaw-dropping zombie shark moment, and most importantly shifts Mera from backbencher to badass, establishing her as a credible, fresh, exciting co-star for this event.
(These panels might be an odd way to illustrate that--here she is stabbing BL Aquaman in the chest with her trident, if you prefer--but I love it that, after getting blasted through a lighthouse window, she has the presence of mind and athleticism to right herself and stick the landing.)On the other hand, the central extended fight that begins with Black Lantern Martian Manhunter in GL #44, and then expands to include first the Black Lantern Justice League and then all those metahumans entombed in the Hall of Justice vault in BN 2-4, is one of the most poorly paced and orchestrated fights I've ever seen in superhero comics. It's nothing more than panel after panel of fight-like eye-candy while the Black Lanterns spout their monotonous monologues. Each turning point is more of an artificial intrusion than the kind of true development that emerges naturally from events and circumstances. Especially egregious here is Geoff Johns's interruption of the fight to deliver, via the Indigo tribe, an astonishingly brazen infodump.
When the fight resumes, we're subjected to Black Lantern Firestorm's snuff-porny torment and murder of Gen. Over the course of four pages (in a 26 page comic), we get no less than six close-up panels of her tear-stained and terrified face begging for mercy and help, before he turns her into salt. Later, in the Justice League tie-in, Black Lantern Doctor Light, DC's resident Rapey McRapist, is found licking her head. According to the Wikipedia entry, she's "five years old, yet has the body of an older teenager." Hey kids--comics!!!
We get a splash page in BN 3 and a two-page spread in BN 4 of all the Black Lanterns arising from the Hall of Justice vault . . . but then after that, only another panel or two of pseudo-action before the heroes skedaddle on out. After the heavy-handed foreshadowing in BN 1, I expected this to be an encounter the heroes wouldn't be able to duck out of so easily. I expected it to be more of a problem for them--something that would make Blackest Night significantly darker for them. Where's Chekhov with his gun when you need him?
Speaking of broken promises and missed opportunities, let's talk about Black Hand. After being massively built up, in a whole Prologue issue dedicated cover-to-cover to that very purpose, as an interesting, scary, and powerful villain who would be central to the story until the Big Bad's arrival, he turns out to play no active role in the first half of the event. He directly engages no superheroes whatsoever, and does nothing that I can see beyond carrying that skull around, mostly through various graveyards. He doesn't even appear in BN 3 at all--oh, except smack dab in the middle of the motherfucking cover. Here's what I said about him in my midpoint assessment, and it still holds true.
In short, no matter how strongly this part of Blackest Night started, no matter how great the art looks, and no matter how cool a couple of good scenes are, I found it a tremendous disappointment. Its strengths are too far outweighed by weak action, weaker horror, atrocious pacing, and a scene that even I found gratuitously vile.The War of Light: Concurrently with all of that, in Green Lantern 45-48, the War of Light winds down as the chief Lanterns resolve their differences to make common cause against the Black Lantern threat. I noted an interview waaay back in the beginning, in which writer Geoff Johns seemed much, much, much more excited about the "emotional spectrum" stuff than the zombie apocalypse stuff. That impression turned out to be accurate, and it really shows in the comics.
This is actually the part that initially interested me the least, and yet this run of issues turns out to be, in my judgment, one of the most impressive arcs in the story. In stark contrast to the "action" in the first half of the main title, the action in the GL issues is even more spectacular (all that colored light helps a lot in this regard), but also more consequential and purposive. It brings the characters to life, and it brings them together, however uneasily. It also puts a lot of backstory across in a way that new readers like me can quickly and easily absorb.The Pivot: Blackest Night 5 and 6 are a one-two punch that totally changes the game. Whereas in previous issues, a disorganized handful of superheroes responds defensively to something like a zombie apocalypse, these two issues put enough more pieces in place to blow this up into a full-on superhero crossover event. Nekron, the Big Bad, joins the fray. Most of the big guns of the DCU join the fray (notably absent are Batman and Robin). Xanshi, a whole Black Lantern planet, joins the fray to loom over earth. And the threads that ran parallel in the main title and Green Lantern come together as the Lanterns arrive to join the fray. Above and beyond that, two huge developments rock the story--Nekron's shocking conversion of major superheroes into Black Lanterns by commanding them to "Die!", and Ganthet's deputization of six characters as light-spectrum Lanterns.
At the time--see here and here--I found BN 5 exciting almost to the point of overload. In fact, I was so ready to see those developments play out that I wasn't prepared for the further development in the next issue of the creation of a bunch of new Lanterns, and responded quite negatively to it. I can see more clearly now the symmetry, balance, pendulum swing, or whatever you want to call it, in this arrangement, and in that light it looks much better than it did after a month's wait to see what all those newly-minted Black Lantern superheroes would do and how the living would deal with them.
I do have one big complaint about this Pivot, and that is the way it brings all the action back to earth. This is another one of those cases where my hopes and expectations simply did not jibe with Geoff Johns's conception and what he wanted to do with the story. I understand how unfair it is to judge a story for not being the one I wanted to see told, rather than for whether it succeeds on its own terms. Unfortunately, much of my reaction to Blackest Night was and continues to be skewed by my prejudices and expectations in this manner. Even so, I think I ought to be honest about my disappointments. If zombie horror was one key enticement for me to plunge into this event, the promise of space opera was certainly another. I wanted to see Lanterns and other superheroes battling Black Lanterns among the stars, on distant planets, all throughout the DCU cosmos. The initial location of the Black Lantern battery on Ryut in Space Sector 666 promised a desperate Final Confrontation on a remote and desolate planet far from home for earth's heroes. I was pretty disgusted, then, when Scar teleported the battery to Coast City and Nekron emerged there rather than on Ryut or, even better, through some ghastly rip in outer space, as he does in every previous appearance.
I have to say, the more I see how earth-centric the DCU is, the less I like it. I think I first encountered this aspect in Final Crisis, with that ridiculous image of the "Orrery of Worlds":
I got an explanation of sorts from Sinestro Corps War, where the Guardians exposit that, although earth is not the center of the universe, it is the center of the Multiverse. Johns, of course, adds a whole new wrinkle to this nonsense, and I'll have more to say about that when I get to the relevant section of the story. For the moment, suffice it to say, bringing it all back to earth was almost as much a disappointment to me as the diminished importance of the horror aspect (and poor handling of what horror there was).The Specter: Green Lantern 50 and 51 form an interesting parentheses in the story. The new Lanterns have been deputized (in BN 6), but Nekron hasn't been directly engaged yet (as he will be in BN 7), and in that interval, Black Lantern Specter (first seen in BN 2, then again in tie-in issue Phantom Stranger 42) charges in to attack Hal Jordan. These issues are dedicated to that particular fight, which turns out to be a solid, complete story-arc unto itself. In truth, I consider it the strongest, most enjoyable part of the whole event. It's Lanterns flying around slinging spectacular ring powers against a kaiju-sized Specter in a zombie-overrun big-city battlefield. That could be a chaotic mess, as the main action in the first part was. This time, it isn't. This is one superhero comics fight where eye-popping surface doesn't stand in for good plotting, but visually dramatizes it. And in the meantime, the other Black Lanterns and the deputized Lanterns get more worthwhile, thrilling treatment than at any other point. In a story and event plagued by many serious flaws, this near-flawless episode is simply a show-stealing tour de force.
What's perhaps most amazing about it is that Geoff Johns here is mostly just disposing of some of Hal Jordan's backstory business. Resolving Hal's issues with both Parallax and the Specter prepares him to accept the White Light at Blackest Night's climax--a climax that unfortunately pales in comparison.Mega-Event Horizon: Blackest Night 7 puts the last of the pieces on the board. With events on Oa resolved in Green Lantern Corps 45, all the united color corps show up over earth to help save all life in the universe. The Anti-Monitor begins to get dangerously restless in that Black Lantern battery. And Nekron and Black Hand sacrifice no less than a Guardian to magically summon . . . "The Entity"?!? {sigh} I guess, given Ion, Parallax, the Predator, etc., there's a logic to this being that gets Johns off the hook for just totally pulling it out of his ass, but even so, it's weird for such a powerful and important thing to be just now putting in its first appearance in the DCU. I hate its design, I hate the stupid creation myth it reveals to Sinestro, and I don't particularly care for the way it defeats Nekron in the end--though, in fairness, taking out the Big Bad in a satisfying payoff is always a high hurdle to clear. As for the select few characters resurrected at the end of it all, I have no idea what to think--I suspect it probably takes a near-Talmudic knowledge of DC continuity and an unhealthy level of insight into Johns's psyche to puzzle that one out.
I also got really sick really fast of Orange Lantern Luthor's buffoonery. Isn't he supposed to be one of the greatest, strongest, most disciplined minds in all of superhero comicdom? And yet this ring reduces him to such a witless, clownish dolt with less self-control than even fucking Larfleeze?!? I not only didn't buy it, but I found it an incredibly grating waste of page-space.It's more than a little odd to me, too, that Superman (for example) makes no difference to the fight whatsoever, regardless whether he's a living superhero or a Black Lantern. Really, Johns didn't follow up very well with the characters he turned to Black Lanterns in that deceptively (in retrospect) awesome "Die!" moment back in BN 5.
Okay, enough of the negative. Here's what I liked about the concluding issues. My favorite, actually, turned out to be Green Lantern Corps 46. That one really does have great outer-space light-spectrum Lantern vs. Black Lantern action. And the way they kill the Anti-Monitor is now among my favorite moments in superhero comics--especially since it doesn't quite work out as planned, and he remains stuck, hanging halfway out of the Black Lantern battery. Yeah, this issue really is a treat. Then, in Green Lantern 52, I also much enjoyed everything about the battle against Xanshi--again, just a lot of gorgeous light-ring effects leaping off the page. As for BN 8, well, it's an ending; I've already said what I don't like about it, but I'd hasten to add, that doesn't by any means ruin the parts of the event I really do like.And that, overall, is what I thought of Blackest Night! Thanks to everyone who's followed along here, added their thoughts in comments, and engaged me in discussion on their own blogs!
