After DC’s last several attempts as massive event series, the biggest strength of Blackest Night has to be the workhorse artist Ivan Reis. Unlike the last two large DC event series, Infinite Crisis and Final Crisis, both of which had multiple artists on them and still suffered delays, Blackest Night has had the benefit of consistent craftsmanship on it. In an age where it seems like artists are trying to make every other page a larger-than-life, epic shot of heroes grittingly fighting the bad guys (and Blackest Night #8 manages to have two of those that it doesn’t need it,) Reis’s storytelling hearkens back to Neal Adams, Alan Davis and George Perez; like those artists, he can take massive amounts of characters, draw each and every one of them on a page and never lose sight of the story that needs to be told. In Blackest Night #8, he’s got countless aliens, a multitude of different superhero teams and hordes of undead but there’s a clarity of storytelling here that’s absent in a lot of books. Reis may not be the flashiest artist around but he’s a really clear storyteller and that is what is needed for almost any Geoff Johns’ story.
Somewhere along the way, I lost track of what the main thrust of Blackest Night was, if it was even ever really there. It had to be more than just Nekron, a minor villain that’s been elevated in classic hyper-reality Johns style, versus Green Lantern and Flash, didn’t it? That’s certainly how a large majority of these series and this last issue felt, almost like any other old superhero/super villain showdown. How was this any different from the 20 other times the Justice League has faced over-powering situations? Those legions of the undead featured heroes like Hawkman, Martian Manhunter and Aquaman but we’ve seen the hero vs. hero thing done a thousand times in just the last 10 years. It’s always more interesting to see the hero vs. hero conflict because it’s more dangerous and scintillating than hero versus villain.
DC until recently was always the comic universe where heroes got along and were chums. Batman needs a stand in for a day so Superman dons the cape and cowl and fights the Penguin. That’s the history and legacy of DC Comics. That’s why the early days of Marvel were fresh and new because while Doctor Doom was kind of cool, the really memorable battles were The Hulk versus The Thing or everyone versus Spider-Man. That was the uncertainty and unpredictability that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby injected into our superhero comics and formed the basis for the Marvel Universe that still exists today, sans any major reboots like Crisis on Infinite Earths, Zero Hour and Infinite Crisis. In the 1980s, when DC finally started getting Marvel writers like Marv Wolfman, John Byrne and Frank Miller, you could see DC trying to “Marvelize” their stories, bringing more internal conflict into even stalwarts like Superman and Batman. Blackest Night #8 may feature one of the most Marvel-like panels DC has ever published as Martian Manhunter pounds Green Lantern’s head into the ground. Right there is the Hulk versus the Thing, with two heroes coming to a battle from different view points and just unmercifully pounding the crap out of each other. This isn’t John Byrne or Frank Miller’s Batman pulverizing Superman to show the different ideologies of the characters. This is two heroes just pounding each other because they are on different sides of the battle.
That’s the main take away from Blackest Night #8; the giant battle. For all of the lip service given to the struggle of life and death, Blackest Night is unconditionally a story of good guys versus bad guys, a struggle we’ve seen over and over again in comics. It even lacks a heroic villain like The Sinestro Corp War has with Sinestro. At least there, Johns took his time in the story and after it to create a multi-dimensional character in Sinestro, almost building him up to a point where you could see and understand his point of view and motivations. I have no idea why we’ve come to expect this on any kind of regular basis out of Geoff Johns, the most unapologetic writer of superheroes out there right now. That’s the difference between Blackest Night and its most recent predecessor Final Crisis. Grant Morrison is all about the ideas but he lacks some of the more popular mainstream moments. Morrison couldn’t write “If anyone’s part of the White Lantern Corps, it’s us!” and pull it off quite the way that Johns and Reis do. If Final Crisis fails in any point, it’s that it doesn’t accept moments like this the way that Blackest Night does. It is moments like that that tie Blackest Night and Geoff Johns to good but hopelessly traditional superheroics, unable to use the book to explore any deeper ramifications of its own outrageous plot twists.
Blackest Night #8
Written by: Geoff Johns
Penciled by: Ivan Reis
Inked by: Oclair Albert & Joe Prado
Colored by: Alex Sinclair
Lettered by: Nick J. Napolitano
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Tags: Blackest Night, Geoff Johns, Green Lantern, Ivan Reis