Comic Review: Blackest Night #1
Blackest Night #1
Death and superheroes are a tricky thing; there’s an old joke about superhero heaven that it has a revolving door at the front, instead of pearly gates. While this has always been a part of superhero culture, it seems to have really taken root at DC in recent years, with long-time corpses such as Jason Todd, Barry Allen, and Kara Zor-El all returning for various reasons.
Blackest Night seems to be set up to explore that, while at the same time serving as the next (final?) chapter in the epic “War of Light” storyline that’s been running through the Green Lantern books in recent years. While the other Lantern Corps (aside from Green) have been content to identify themselves with differing emotions, the Black Lanterns are instead the living dead, brought back to consume the flesh of the living Despite that naming structure, though, what this story really is is DC Zombies.
As if regular zombies weren’t enough of a threat, though, what we see with the Black Lanterns is superpowered zombies, as was also seen in the recent Marvel Zombies series of miniseries. Here, though, the zombies aren’t played for laughs, nor are they hidden away in an alternate reality. These facts, combined with the multiple character deaths in the first issue, help provide the level of peril necessary for any good zombie story; ironically, this is the same level of real peril that most ‘event’ comics lack, so it’s a good mix to have the two together.
Writer Geoff Johns does a really good job in this issue of exploring how constant rebirths of characters would affect the way people would look at death, especially in the scenes featuring Barry Allen, the Silver-Age Flash. Allen seems to suffer from a fair amount of survivor’s guilt centered around his returning to life while other less marketable characters stay dead, and the rising of the Black Lanterns allows that inner struggle to be matched nicely against the larger outer story.
Hopefully, the remainder of Blackest Night will live up to the rather unique premise of superpowered zombies being empowered by extraterrestrial forces. There’s a chance that, by the end, it will become another attempt by a DC writer to use a crossover event as a reset button to undo previous character deaths, but for now at least it should be an intriguing tale.
