Zombies!

This week’s blog is part one of two, DC Comic’s Blackest Night. This is a crossover title, which means that it is the main ongoing story within the universe, and most of the company titles interact and expand on it in some way. In this case it is a Green Lantern story that involves a series of black rings raising the heroes who have died over the years (and there have been a lot) and using them to destroy all life.
For the sake of consistency, I will only focus on the main eight issues and the eight issues of Green Lantern that make up the core of the series.
What is interesting about Blackest Night is despite it having been building up for several years like most major crossovers, this one can be clearly rooted in the origins of Green Lantern (seeing as their oath begins “In blackest night. In brightest day.”) since we see characters like Abin Sur, who gave Hal Jordan the ring in issue one.
The purpose of Blackest Night clearly is a resurrection story, which allows many major characters who have died to come back, such as Martian Manhunter and Flash. What is nice though is that DC didn’t overdo it and only kept ten heroes (several of which were recent deaths) alive once everything was all said and done. This helped readers from being overwhelmed by the number of old characters being reintroduced.
But this also introduces Blackest Night’s major flaw: it is rooted deeply in comic book continuity. For casual readers, the hundreds of old characters coming back are overwhelming and often have a meaningless impact since the reader doesn’t know who the character is. While some characters like Bruce Wayne coming back are easily recognizable, many people don’t realize there are more than one Superman, or who Terra is for example. This severely crippled the series ability to respond with new readers.
On the other hand, the strongest point of Blackest Night obviously falls in the court of Green Lantern fans. This is where all the different corps (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet) unite for the first time put aside their differences for a full color spectrum beat down (for those who don’t know, each color is based on an emotion based in the visible light spectrum, green being the emotion will that powers the ring).
Since for the longest time, green and yellow were the only two colors in the series, the other five are new and therefore relevant to readers new and old. Being a fairly new reader to DC comics myself, it was easy for me to catch up and understand the characters motivations and plots that culminated in Blackest Night.
Overall, Blackest Night was an extremely successful crossover and provided enough answers with enough new questions to keep me wanting more. Despite not understanding most of the character’s reaction within the tie in stories, the main story was straightforward enough that I had no trouble following it.