The dead rise in the Blackest Night hardback series and it warms my heart

In this piece we’re going to be looking at the Green Lantern themed event Blackest Night which took place last summer but was recently released as a series of seven hardback graphic novels.  (Which puts the question; Does reprinting it in hard back MAKE a comic a graphic novel?  But I digress)

For those unfamiliar with the hero Green Lantern, go wiki him.  (I kid.)  Hal Jordan was an air force test pilot that was guided to a crashed alien spaceship by the power ring of Abin Sur, a member of the Green Lantern Corps.  The corps is basically an intergalactic police force lead by an ancient race of little blue men called Guardians that use power rings to fly, create force fields, shapes, and anything the wielder can will into existence.  Sur was dying and sought out a replacement in Hal Jordan who went on to use his power ring as the Green Lantern of sector 2814 (that’s us).

Hal went on to have a long career where he joined the Justice League, became the greatest Green Lantern ever, fell from grace and became a villain called Parallax and then redeeming himself by  sacrificing himself to reignite our dying sun.  Typical superhero life.  Years later he was revived in the mini series Green Lantern Rebirth whose story eventually comes to a head with the Blackest Night event.  During the events that follow Rebirth we are introduced to Corps that follow other colors of the “Emotional Spectrum”.  IT turns out each color is powered by a different emotion with green being powered by Will.  All the other corps react to each other in completely different ways with no two corps behaving or even using their rings the same way.

Here’s the run down on those different corps

A prophecy is revealed early in Green Lantern’s book that there will be a “War of Light” among the different corps and that will lead to something called the Blackest Night.  Well it was right, of course.  Black power rings seek out the dead, bringing them back to life as a sort of intelligent zombie.  These black lanterns go about tearing out people’s hearts for a reason I won’t go into here for fear of spoilers.  This gives DC comics an opportunity to showcase dead heroes and villains and the reactions of friends, loved ones and enemies of those dead in quite a number of books (hence the 7 volumes of this collection).  A lot of these stories were spot on.  Excellent pathos generated by this event for us to read our heroes go through.  Guilt, love, hatred, fear.  A lot of this crosses the faces of characters encountering these evil black lanterns.  Heroes like Aquaman, Martian Manhunter, Firestorm, and an alternate universe Superman; Villains like Dr Light, Captain Boomerang, Copperhead and the Black Hand all come back as these evil twisted zombie nightmares. 

Admittedly some of the stories of this crossover are kind of unnecessary and you can totally skip them with no impact on the main story at all.  Thankfully these tertiary stories are not collected in the seven volumes.  These are stories that ran in titles like Outsiders, Secret Six, REBELS, and Doom Patrol and are collected in trades for those titles.  Some of them were...meh, while others were just dull.  Stick to the tales told in the main 7 books.

While this was definitely a Green Lantern story, Flash was a huge part of it, as well. He was just recently resurrected after over TWENTY years of being away from the DC universe.  Seeing him deal with the fact that while he was gone, alot of his teammates and friends have since died but now those people are coming out of the grave, tormenting him with words while trying to devour his heart.  There’s a moment in the last chapter of Blackest Night when Flash realizes a truth that just breaks your heart.

Blackest Night and most of it’s accompanying stories are some of the finest comic book prose ever to grace paper.  I can’t recommend it enough, even if you you’re not a Green Lantern or Flash fan or even if you don’t know any of these characters.  A must buy.

The hardbacks were just recently released and Amazon has great prices on these books. They retail for about $25 but they have them for about $13 - $16.  I’ve included a handy reading guide on how to read all the stories among the books in order.  When the comics were being released, alot of the stories ran concurrently in Green Lantern, Green Lantern Corps, and Blackest Night itself as well as many smaller mini-series like Blackest Night: Wonder Woman and Blackest Night: Superman.  So, it’ll help any confusion on reading order.

Reading Guide LINK

 

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