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Review: Blackest Night

      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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