Full disclosure: I've been a Marvel reader since I was a kid, drawn in by the '90s prominence of an X-Men coming off more than a decade of classic Claremont stories. But in the last several years, I've become more and more of a convert to the DC faith. I'll admit that Marvel's done a few things to alienate me, One More Day being the worst and most recent (unlike Joe Quesada, I grew up with a Spider-Man married to Mary Jane Watson). But DC has done even more to win me over: Kevin Smith's Green Arrow relaunch, Identity Crisis (plus Meltzer's "Archer's Quest" arc in Green Arrow), and perhaps most prominently, Geoff Johns' incredible run on Green Lantern.
Johns doesn't seem to have quite the cachet of a writer like Grant Morrison or Brian Michael Bendis, but over the last several years he's been one of the architects of the biggest and best stories in the DC universe. From Green Lantern: Rebirth (and Recharge, and Sinestro Corps War) through Infinite Crisis and 52 (writeup forthcoming), not to mention his own regular work on the GL monthly, Johns has been weaving a tapestry through the DCU that's primed to reach a climax in the upcoming Blackest Night.
In a lot of ways, Johns is almost the anti-Morrison: the latter made his name with a revisionist take on a forgotten character (Animal Man), the former by resurrecting Hal Jordan, one of the most beloved and prominent characters in the DC universe. Morrison's stories are intensely revisionist, with even the most archetypal heroes becoming malleable clay in his hands. Johns is more of a classicist, celebrating the essence of his characters by letting them take flight in grand, elemental epics. Morrison's most at home challenging what we know, as much a destroyer as he is a creator. But Johns is a natural world builder; witness the rainbow of Lantern Corps he's created.
What they have in common is a shared belief in rebirth, and it's rebirth that seems to be the core of Blackest Night. But it's a very different form of rebirth than what Hal Jordan received. Blackest Night #0 opens in a graveyard, with Hal Jordan standing over the grave of Bruce Wayne. (Of course, it's a small, unmarked headstone, next to his parents'.) He is joined by a freshly-resurrected Barry Allen, and the two spend the rest of the issue discussing death and rebirth. It doesn't sound like an especially exciting comic book, especially for a writer known for his epic, world-shaking superpowered blowouts, but it's a perfect distillation of where Johns has been and where he's going. No other comic writer has conducted such a sustained confrontation with the impermanence of superhero death: where many have tried to rage against this fact by making death seem more final, Johns instead embraces the inevitability of resurrection and tries to endow it with elegance and power.
But elegance may be in short supply for Blackest Night, as the issue's conclusion demonstrates. After Hal and Barry leave, Black Hand, now empowered as a Black Lantern, emerges to raise the dead. The lineup of confirmed and suggested Black Lanterns includes everyone from Aquaman to Earth-2's Superman to Ralph and Sue Dibny, who finally found peace in the afterlife at the close of 52. But the issue points another apparent inevitability, which is the resurrection of Batman, the character recently killed by none other than Grant Morrison.
Even as the Battle for the Cowl rages on, it seems like Bruce Wayne's death will last about as long as Clark Kent's. It's kind of sad in a way: Johns' work on Green Lantern has been infinitely better (pun not intended) and more exciting than Morrison's convoluted and ultimately tedious run on Batman. It's depressing to think of Johns having to clean up the mess left by Morrison's R.I.P. and Final Crisis. But this is Geoff Johns we're talking about, so there's no fear (pun, again, not intended) that Blackest Night will be anything but a galaxy-spanning epic worthy of DC's greatest heroes. It's impossible to say exactly what will happen, but Blackest Night #0 is an exciting, galvanizing prologue to what promises to be a story for the ages.
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