A Look Back on what Blackest Night Means

At first I was going to do a review on Blackest Night all together, but I figured a look back on it is more valuable, instead of saying it was great for so many reasons I feel it is best for me to show you what you’re missing out on if you don’t pick it up.

Blackest Night was the quintessential story to bring Green Lantern fully into the spotlight, yes there was Green Lantern: Rebirth and Sinestro Wars, but no other book had what Blackest Night had, which is hope. There is something to be said that the same man who wrote Blackest Night, Geoff Johns, also wrote the other big hit Lantern books, and is continuing on with writing them, Brightest Day the follow-up to Blackest Night, but Blackest Night did something that no other DC book has really done, it made the gods of the DC universe face their own mortality.

As DC has gone along it has taken a lot of the man out and kept the super leaving us with godlike heroes that answer to no one, at least not very often. They have never faced the same fear of death that any human has, when humans die they die, but when superheroes die they always find a way to crawl back from the grave. Green Lantern (Hal Jordan and in a few stories Kyle Rayner), Green Arrow, Superman, Superboy, the Flash (Barry Allen and in a few stories Wally West), and so many more have all returned from the great beyond. It started to seem like a revolving door policy involving heroes. So much so that I was getting sort of irritated that so many heroes were coming back, yeah I loved Hal Jordan and him back was awesome, but how many Flashes did we truly need? And when Batman died I figured give it a year, rumors had already started swirling around that he was merely time displaced not dead, and so I was losing hope that anyone would ever really bite the big one and create a shock wave that shattered the world.

That’s where Blackest Night comes in, it didn’t just shatter the DC Universe it clogged up the revolving door never, at least not for a while anyways, allowing it to spin its resurrection stories again. Blackest Night was the war of light, where all the Lanterns had to join forces, where we were introduced to all the Corps, and where we learned the secret that the Guardians kept from everyone for so long.

The appearance of the White light, the unrelenting attack of the Black Lanterns, and more than anything else the use of Nekron as the main villain, a villain in comics who has only been used a handful of times before and was at one point shown bringing back dead Lanterns to attack Kyle Rayner years prior to Blackest Night. Nekron revealing he was the reason why the heroes returned to life, and the few pages where Black Lantern Batman was brought in, these are what makes Geoff Johns an amazing writer, not a shock value writer, but a writer who thinks things out and ties stories from years ago into an amazing eight part epic.

Blackest Night showed us what it meant to love, what redemption truly was, and most importantly that hope lives on.
It was dark, not subtle at all, but that’s what this story was meant to be, a hard look at what happens when the heroes don’t know what to do and when their emotions dictate everything.

Death, Rage, Avarice, Fear, Will, Love, Hope, Compassion, Life

Related articles by Zemanta

• DC’s Blackest Night Gives Way to Brightest Day (wired.com)
• Geoff Johns Describes His ‘Green Lantern’ Set Visit (splashpage.mtv.com)
• Geoff Johns Describes Abin Sur/Hal Jordan Meeting In ‘Green Lantern’ (splashpage.mtv.com)
• Let Blackest Night Truly be the End (manolith.com)
• Blackest Night #8 (popsyndicate.com)