Blackest Night was published by DC Comics from 2009 to
2010 and was written by Geoff Johns with pencils by Ivan Reis. This is the
final major story of the trilogy that began in 2004 with Green Lantern: Rebirth. Blackest Night. It involves
the supervillains Nekron, Black Hand, and rogue Guardian of the Universe, Scar,
forming the Black Lantern Corps which zombifies the deceased with black power
rings. The Black Lantern Corps. membership is made up of several dead
superheroes like Aquaman, the Martian Manhunter, Elongated Man, Sue Dibny, and
Firestorm. The Black Lanterns intend to extinguish all life and emotion in the
universe. Green Lantern Hal Jordan, the recently resurrected Barry Allen, A.K.A
the Flash, Aquaman’s widow Mera, and the Atom must hold off the Black Lanterns
until the Green Lantern Corps and the Justice League can arrive to save the
day.
However, when the Green Lantern Corps and
the Justice League are unable to defeat the Black Lanterns, Hal Jordan realizes
that all of the other Lantern Corps. need to team up in order to defeat them.
This presents a bit of a problem because all of the various Lantern Corps. are
all at war with each other. As a result, various compromises must be made before
they can team up.
I have a couple of critiques of Blackest Night. First is that the action
in the book is nonstop from beginning to end. Don’t get me wrong, the action
sequences are some of the best I’ve seen in a comic book, but I feel like the
readers need an occasional breather. Second
is that I felt it doesn’t focus enough on Green Lantern Corps. members like
Kyle Rayner, John Stewart, Guy Gardner, Kilowog, and the various other Green
Lanterns we’ve come to know and fall in love with since the beginning of the Rebirth era. We’ve grown to have such a
relationship with these characters over this story arc and I believe they
deserved a much bigger role. Instead, much of the story’s focus is on Hal
Jordan’s relationship with the recently resurrected Barry Allen, who plays a
major role in Blackest Night. It felt
like Geoff Johns was too focused on setting up Barry Allen’s return as the
Flash rather than wrapping up the Green Lantern story arc he had started four
years earlier.
Geoff Johns knocks this story out of the
park from a writing perspective. He takes all of the themes and plots that he
has written about since Rebirth, like
the emotional spectrum, and wraps it up in a nice bow for a satisfying
conclusion for everyone that has been following this story. Also, by creating
new characters and different colored Lantern Corps., Johns has set up an
infinite number of story possibilities for future Green Lantern writers and
artists to explore. This may be Johns’ greatest contribution to the Green
Lantern mythos.
Ivan Reis is absolutely stellar at drawing dozens of characters in one
page. I counted at least two dozen characters in one page at one point while
reading Blackest Night. You can tell
that Reis loves drawing huge splash pages like this. If it weren’t for his
penciling, Reis’s artwork would make Geoff John’s writing seem a lot less epic
in scale.
Geoff John’s run on the Green Lantern in
the mid to late 2000s is one of the most epic in the history of comic books. He
turned the Green Lantern mythos from an obscure part of the DC Comic’s back
catalog and made it one of the most prominent pieces of the DC Universe. David
Gibbons, Peter J. Tomasi, Ivan Reis, and Ethan Van Sciver also deserve credit
for this feat as well. With the exception of Gibbons (who drew seminal graphic
novel, The Watchmen), these Green
Lantern stories that they wrote and drew during this time period is their
crowning achievement as writers and artists. The Rebirth trilogy redefined
and reintroduced the Green Lantern for my generation and these stories will be
remembered for years to come as an all-time classic in the comic book medium.
The Rebirth trilogy and its companion
stories are essential reading for all comic book fans.
Overall Rating: *****
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