The Blackest Night – thoughts, impressions, complaints, stuff

So, the Blackest Night. It began with the Green Lantern universe (which I’ve rather mercilessly hacked apart earlier), but then expanded beyond that. There was a Superman arc, an arc with The Flash, Wonder Woman, Batman, Titans and JSA…I had to look that up, for fuck’s sake. Turns out it’s the Justice Society of America. That’s a terrible group name. It sounds like a collection of rubes who should be ‘patrolling’ the Mexican border, armed with matching plaid shirts and trucker caps, hunting rifles and a lot of beer.

This will be a spoiler heavy post. So…yeah.

So, the Blackest Night. In the beginning, there was darkness. From the darkness came the white light, and the white light was split in to many different colors (and lanterns) by the Guardians.

Think old, wizened Smurfs who have had absolute power for so long that they’ve been corrupted by it. One of their order is tired of the corruption and the constant feuding between the Corps, so he brings about The Blackest Night. Basically, the return of the darkness to ‘cleanse’ the universe.

Now, my criticisms of the whole Green Lantern universe with all the Corps factions and the like was pretty harsh, and I stand by it. I think it’s fairly boring to create a bunch of one note groups whose every action and word is controlled by a singular emotional response. Sure, some can be interesting…Fear for example. And some of it worked…I like the fact that a Blue ring (Hope) is powerless unless a Green ring (Will) is nearby, for example. But overall, it results in shittily predictable plot lines.

However, I DID like the Blackest Night arc overall. It isn’t without its problems, but it worked for me as a whole.

Basically, a creepy little fucker who is just a bit obsessed with death is driven to kill his family and himself by an unseen force, then rises from the dead as Black Hand. He goes forth and ‘harvests’ the skull of Bruce Wayne, and spends a lot of time licking it (the whole Bruce Wayne part I found utterly baffling, actually. More on that later.) like it’s some homo-erotic version of Macbeth with poor Yoric getting everyone all hot and shit.

Soon, black power rings begin to arrive, latching on to the fingers of the dead.

And not just ANY dead are returning, but those who would most haunt the various SC universe denizens. So you see previous ‘versions’ of superheroes popping up all over the fucking place. Heroes and villains alike are left battling those who they’ve previously fought, previously loved, previously fought alongside of. Most of it is interesting. Some of it ridiculously confusing and required Google research.

For example…undead Superman and Lois Lane come back to fight…Superman. Huh? Turns out there was a story arc with an alternate Earth, and the Superman and Lois from THAT realm died and that’s who is back to fight Clark Kent Superman, who now lives on New Krypton but happened to be visiting Connor Kent, who is Superboy but also partly the result of something to do with Lex Luthor’s DNA. Get all that? I sure as fuck didn’t. More on THAT stuff later, too.

So anyway, it worked overall. My lack of familiarity with the DC universe meant that I had no clue who most of the membership of the Titans and the JSA were, so those series didn’t work all that well for me, but that’s the fault of a lack of knowledge of the material, not necessarily the material itself. Some of it was downright badass. For Chrissakes, they made AQUAMAN badass. He rises up from the dead, kills his kid, then summons a legion of sharks to tear apart a bunch of Atlantians. All cause he’s pissed off. Another character has her dead husband and child return and has to crush the kid’s head with her bare hands. But they just keep regenerating as the rings keep them coming back again…and again. And they’re harvesting the hearts of the living. Get them pumped up with emotion, then literally tear the beating heart from someone’s chest.

Finally, the power that caused Black Hand to be born is revealed as Nekron. Nekron is the power who has long allowed dead heroes to return to life (and holy shit is there a LOT of that going on in the DC universe!), but now he wants to usher in a new age of darkness and death. He’s also a complete and total rip off.

See, I’m not a comic geek. I AM something of a Warhammer 40,000 geek. And within that universe we have…the Necrons. A ‘race’ of demonic skeleton robots, whose leaders (Necron Lords) can resurrect the fallen, and who exist to usher in a new age of darkness and death. So…yeah. Sorry DC, but changing one fucking letter in the guy’s name and giving him a cloak doesn’t so much work to remove the lack of originality. I mean, look at the two of them!

So yeah…not so much with the stellar work there. So, he decides it’s time to reclaim the resurrected heroes as Black Lanterns. Somehow, this happens when he temporarily raises Bruce Wayne from the dead…I don’t get how in the fuck this works, and there didn’t seem to be much of an explanation of it. Anyway, he then lets Bruce die again, but Superman, Wonder Woman and several others are Black Lanterns.

Meanwhile, it has been deduced that the combined light of all of the lanterns will send Nekron back to…wherever…and end the Blackest Night. So the various factions have to work together. This could have been horribly After School Special like, but it was actually done well. They introduce yet another Corps (for better or worse) that has been ‘hidden’ in another dimension, the Indigo Corps of compassion. They can apparently teleport through the universe, so they get to be the errand boys and gather everyone together to fight Nekron on Earth.

Why Earth? It seems the Guardians hid the original light under the planet’s surface. When Black Hand kills a Guardian, it allows Nekron to raise the light and begin attacking it. The Corps need more manpower as their memberships head towards Earth, so the Guardians use the wonderful plot hole of ‘Oh yeah, your rings can seek out new members automatically’ to bring some new blood to the various Corps on a temporary basis. Some of the recruits are pretty cool. You get The Flash as a Blue (Hope) Lantern, Scarecrow as a Yellow (Fear) Lantern, Lex Luthor as an Orange (Avarice) Lantern, and a bunch of others. This ends up pulling several ‘back’ from being Black Lanterns, while others avoid it through other means entirely.

Eventually, the entirety of every Corps is here. Sinestro (an ex Green Lantern who defected to the Yellow Corps and is bent on destroying the Green Lantern Corps) tries to embody the light and destroy Nekron, but that fails miserably. Every Lantern fires their rings at Nekron…not so much. He once again decides to reclaim the fallen heroes as Black Lanterns, this time without raising Bruce Wayne again for no fucking reason. However, the heroes point out that while Nekron opened the door for them to return to Earth, they chose Life…and the White Lantern Corps (comprised of all the back from the dead types) is born. They bring Black Hand back to life, removing Nekron’s tether to Earth, and defeat him. Then a whole bunch of characters return to life for real who were dead before this all started for reasons that are really not explained whatsoever. And not Bruce Wayne…meaning the body buried in his grave isn’t Bruce and he’s alive…somewhere.

Now, this brings me to the ridiculously convoluted melodramas in the back stories of these characters…it’s insane. Did DC hire Days of Our Lives script writers to helm some of these projects? I sort of understand you need some dangers against heroes to be emotional or mental…especially when it comes to an indestructible force like Superman…but it seems like DC REALLY leaned hard on the whole ‘soap opera bullshit’ angle over the years. It’s just too much. There’s too much ‘this guy was with her but she died and he tried to avenge her but ended up hurting others and when she came back she left him and he lashed out and became this guy who then sought revenge against this other person because they’re to blame’ blah de fucking blah. It’s incredibly lame looking up character back stories and seeing the sheer quantity of this garbage that comes up. Maybe that’s why I tend to prefer more ‘mortal’ heroes. It’s much easier to put them in real physical peril, so not as much of this dreck has to be resorted to for drama (though obviously the Batman stuff is heading that way anyway).

And perhaps part of the problem is the sheer amount of time that some of these characters have existed. Is it really surprising that in order to keep things fresh the writers have had to veer in to the realm of the insanely melodramatic to mine something new for the characters? Perhaps it’s time some of them were shelved.

So, my final conclusion…The Blackest Night was really good, the Green Lantern universe is a fucking mess and the DC writing staff needs to be horse whipped.