So, tomorrow the first of issue of DC Comics' Blackest Night series comes out. They have been building up to this story for something like three years now, ever since the current Green Lantern series began. Now, BN promises to be a big summer comic book crossover, and that almost always promises dull story telling, tired plot devices, and pointless carnage which gets reversed two months later. The most recent two big cross overs, Marvel's Secret Invasion and DC's Final Crisis, were both pretty big disappointments. Secret Invasion was at best deeply confused, and at worst boring. That's as great a sin as a comic book can commit. Final Crisis was deeply, deeply weird, and while I really liked something things about it, even am forced to admit that the story made no damn sense after the first two issues. Also, spoilers, it killed Batman in the stupidest way possible. What was that, I ask you, what was that?
So why am I excitedly looking forward to running over to the PX tomorrow and picking up my copy of the first issue of Blackest Night? Well, I'll give you five reasons:
1) The Sinestro Corps War was very well done. SCW was the big Green Lantern based crossover before this one, and it was great. It managed to incorporate swaths of DC mythology and back story while at the same time telling a story that made sense, developed characters in interesting and compelling ways, had tension, and was a whole lot of fun.
The cast of villains was just amazing: Superboy Prime(the psychotic child from another dimension who wanted every to think he was a hero), the Anti-Monitor(the evil god from Crisis On Infinite Earths), Parallax(the cosmic monster who killed all the Green Lanterns that one time), and Sinestro himself. It took come commitment to awesomeness to use all these villains an give each of them their due. The Superboy Prime bits alone are worth the price of reading.
2) The whole "Seven Different Lantern Corps" thing hasn't been a total cop-out.
At the end of SCW the main character are shown a prophecy of the Darkest Night. In that prophecy they and we learn that instead of there being just two lantern corps, the Green Lanterns, powered by will, and the Sinestro Corps, powered by fear, there will soon be seven, each powered by a different part of the emotion spectrum.
As neat an idea as that might be, I was totally grimacing when I heard it. See, the Green Lanterns and the Sinestros really weren't that different. They both used power rings to make constructs and hammered on each other with them. The story worked more by making you care about the characters than by doing neat things with the ring powers. The rings were basically a known quantity.
Well, that's all fine and good when you only have two groups, the good guys and the bad guys, but I worried that with seven such groups the repetition would get old fast. I mean, really, how different were the Red Lanterns, powered by anger, going to be from the guys powered by fear?
Shockingly enough, Geoff Johns and Dave Gibbons have done an amazing job making each corps different from the other six. The powers not only work differently, but each speaks to the ideas of different moral conundrums. It's great.
3) Marvel Zombies rocked real hard. As a lot of folks have pointed out, the idea of having the DC Universe menaced by an army of super-powered zombies seems a damn lot like Marvel Zombies.
Now, I understand that for many folks it might seem a little lame to take an idea whole cloth from another source, but you know what? I'll allow it. In fact, if they can managed to do something clever with the idea, I'll celebrate it. One good thing about zombie stories is that there's no standard narrative there. Instead the zombie elements of the story are fairly well defined, allowing everything else in the story to spin off in any direction you might like it to.
Marvel Zombies was a whole lot of fun, so I see no reason by Blackest Night shouldn't be even more fun.
4) The horror elements in the recent build up to Darkest Night have been very well done.
A few mini-spoilers here, but the Green Lantern who can hear the dead? The Orange Lantern who adds to his corps by killing and eating the identities of the new members? The Red Lanterns using their blood as a weapon> The growing amorality and willingness to spill blood of the Guardians of the Universe? There have been some creepy, shocking moments over the last year of Green Lantern comics. The writers know how to transgress, but how to do is so in a way that doesn't get all narm-y. I'm excited to see how they'll handle the raising of the dead thing.
5) And finally, I think it'll be neat to see DC address the matter of why so many of its main characters have come back from the dead in-continuity. It happens all the freaking time, but still, you'd think it would be a bigger deal. The fact that is barely raises an eyebrow except to have some light joke made about it, well, I feel that that has been eating away at the universe's underpinnings for a while.
I really think that this series might go a long way towards fixing some of the damage done by the overuse of the main character resurrection.
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So, I'm looking forward to getting the first issue tomorrow. It very well might be good. Beat the odds and all that.
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