Batman #692

Creator: Tony Daniel

Tony Daniel is no stranger to Batman.  he drew two arcs of Grant Morrison’s run, including the excellent Batman RIP.  He wrote and drew the recent Battle For The Cowl miniseries, which won’t win any lifetime achievement awards, but did its job well enough.  Now he’s returned to the main Bat-title as both writer and artist, and kicks off his story in a flurry of slightly disjointed activity.  There are some rough spots, but this issue holds up well enough to keep us reading.  In the end, that’s really all a first chapter has to do.

Daniel the writer may have learned a bit from working with Morrison. The story hits the ground running, leaving us to figure out the specifics of the story.  We hit several of the beats that post-Bruce Wayne Batman stories are supposed to hit: Dick Grayson is no Bruce Wayne, Catwoman doesn’t doesn’t really trust him, Black Mask is a really dangerous dude, etc.  We get a couple pages each of the main players, hopping from one to the next in a herky-jerky motion. Black Mask appears, inexplicably dressed like some sort of alien wizard in purple bondage gear. He’s gathered a cadre of mad scientists, Z-list characters from bye-gone eras of bat-lore.  A branch of the Falcone crime family returns, apparently not yet tired of competing with psychopaths and vigilantes for Gotham supremacy. And finally, we witness the resurrection of another fairly obscure bad guy (one created in a Nazi concentration camp.  SRSLY.  Why is it always Nazis? Aren’t there any bad guys from the last 60 years we can pick on?)

Daniel the artist turns in good work, without coming close to the iconic work he did on Batman RIP last year.  His layouts are clear but not repetitive, showing that he knows his way around a page in order to tell a story.  We get nice establishing shots, and while I could have done without the Falcone family flashbacks, they’re laid out nicely.

In all, it’s too soon to pass judgement on this story arc.  There is too much setup in this first book, but there seems to be a lot to set up.  If the story ends up being broad and eventful, then we’ll forgive a lot.

Grade: B

Blackest Night #4

Creators: Geoff Johns and Ivan Reis

There’s only so much gushing I can do here.  Blackest Night continues to be the best read on the comics stands.  The halfway point arrives and we finally meet what appears to be at the bottom of the Black Lanterns.

In the meantime, Barry Allen continues to show his revered leadership ability, Ray Palmer continues to work through his personal issues, and an ever-growing chunk of characters gets put through the emotional wringer.  My biggest fear about this title early on was that we weren’t going to get any forward motion.  I was afraid it would just continue to expand in scope until there was nothing left to do, inviting a stilted and cheesy ending.  That doesn’t appear to be the case.  The threat seems to be bottoming out, and we’re finally seeing how bad it’s going to get. And more importantly we have heroes acting like… well, heroes, a nice change from the brooding and hopelessness of some major catastrophic storylines.

Reis’s artwork gets even more spectacular.  While he doesn’t get as much detail on the zombies as some of the ther BN-related artists, he does do a great job of conveying the action.  This story is fairly dense, and Reis keeps it all straight for us visually so we’re not left trying to figure out what we just read.

Two slightly unfortunate things come to light here.  One is that the word “corps” is both singular and plural, and it’s the sort of word you’re not used to using a lot, so a line like “they need Hal to rally together the other corps” sounds odd as you read it.  The second has to do with my own personal prejudices.  I throw up in my mouth a little every time the Atom rides a phone line from one place to another.  Hitching rides on electrons didn’t even make sense when all phones were analog.  In the digital age, it doesn’t seem like this is even worthy of three seconds of thought.  Maybe Ray can read a packet header and address himself to the same place once his phone call gets to a router.  That’s right.  I suspend my disblief about super-powered zombies, but not about fiberoptics and VOIP. That’s my own cross to bear, though.

Grade: A

Green Lantern #47

Creators: Geoff Johns and Doug Mahnke

The best of the companion books to Blackest Night continues.  While the heroes on Earth fight in the main title, Hal Jordan and Sinestro struggle to form an alliance that can take down the Black Lanterns. We see a return of the Five Inversions, the demonic characters conjured by Alan Moore ages ago as a throwaway backup story that Johns used as a basis for the sci-fi epic he’s building.  Abin Sur, Hal’s predecessor and Sinestro’s old friend, makes a comeback to great emotional effect.  We also get a glimpse of the two color corps we haven’t focused on much lately: Saint Walker and the Blue Lanterns, and the increasingly comedic Orange Lantern, Larfleeze.

It’s hard to top Reis’s artwork in Blackest Night, but I really do think Doug Mahnke does it here. Everything is so crisp and clean, with almost no linework.  The action comes through in powerful, large frames.  Like the last couple issues, Green Lantern #47 is a home run.

Grade: A+

The primary story is in the Blackest Night miniseries, and it’s definitely not to be missed.  Geoff Johns and artist Ivan Reis are building a truly terrifying story here.  We seem to see an endless array of characters coming back from the dead.  Some were reviled, some were loved, some were super-powered, and some were just civilians.  But now not only are they all back, but they’re super-powered and extremely envious of the living.

This isn’t a zombie story in the classic “braaaaaaaaaaiiiiiinnnnnssss” sort of sense. Instead, it manages to incorporate the insane possibilities of what can occur in the DC Universe, the god-like power some of its characters possess, and an interesting and subtle take on what it is to be a zombie.  In the end, it winds up being more high-powered and much more disturbing than your standard zombie tale.  The undead in Blackest Night are far from mindless.  We don’t know yet exactly what they are, but they seem to be envious of the living while also wanting to end them.

In fact, there’s a lot we don’t know.  We don’t know the whole story of the black power battery, or the mysterious force that’s controlling Scar and Black Hand.  Apparently, we also don’t know where the bottom of the story is.  Just when you think there couldn’t be any more dangerous undead characters, a new wave of black power rings swoops in and makes more trouble.

Reis’ artwork doesn’t have the delicate detail of Mahnke’s in Green Lantern, but it’s exciting and gritty.  It fits the creepiness of this book perfectly.

While it’s possible to get the whole story by reading just Blackest Night, the original Green Lantern title also has a lot to offer.  Johns relaunched Green Lantern about four years ago, and has been using it to expand the scope of the story and characters to epic proportions.  He’s been tying bits and pieces of old stories together, taking decades of convoluted story and actually making some sense of it.  He’s told us a story about complex characters with believable feelings, who have their own motivations and personality.  Even though there are dozens of them, we get a real sense of why each does what he does.

In GL, Hal Jordan and The Flash (that’s Barry Allen, recently resurrected and also written by Johns in a separate title) come face-to-face with the no-longer-so-dead Martian Manhunter, who has a serious score to settle.  Jon Stewart comes face-to-face with some ugly parts of his past.  And the storylines that have been playing out for years come to a head, while the black power rings continue to make everything more complicated.

The book is drawn in fantastic detail by Doug Mahnke, and it’s nearly bursting with rip-roaring, smashmouth action.  Even if I can’t convince you to read Blackest Night, this one is still worth looking at.

In addition to the two Geoff Johns books, there are a number of other titles.  These are filler stories that aren’t really required reading, but there are certainly reasons to look at them.

Peter Tomasi and Patrick Gleason have been telling a good but not great B-story for quite some time in Green Lantern Corps, focusing on Earth GLs Kyle Rayner and Guy Gardner and a handful of others not regularly appearing in Johns’ flagship title. Now that the events of Blackest Night are hitting the fan, we might expect more details on what’s happening on Oa, and some explanation of why the Guardians are acting as they are.  Whatever we learn from this book, though, it promises to be underwhelming compared to the two above.

There are also three miniseries running along with the first half of Blackest Night, lasting three issues each: BN Batman, BN Superman, and BN Titans.  When they’re done, there will be a new set of minis focusing on other characters.  None of them seem to be critical parts of the story, but are intended to tell side stories that wouldn’t fit in the main titles.

They aren’t really worth commenting on, except to say that it’s more of the same.  Yes, dead people are coming back from the dead.  Yes, they’re pissed off when they get back.  And yes, the black power rings give them the ability to really mess with the living. You can pretty much pick your favorite line of books and get a glimpse into the zombie-fighting exploits of those characters.  You don’t need to get too carried away in continuity and details, but there’s obviously been some thought put into the events and reactions you’ll see here.

Like I said at the top, Blackest Night is a solid story.  It’s even more solid because it can be read (at least so far) as a self-contained book.  If you have the time and resources, I highly recommend going back as far as you can in the ongoing Green Lantern book to make more sense of what’s happening. The Blackest Night tie-in issues are just as highly recommended as the rest of the series.

GLC is really just for the hardcore GL lover, and the minseries are for completists only.  They’re fine by themselves, but don’t add a lot.  They don’t need to add a lot. Blackest Night is a harrowing experience all itself, and what’s to come promises to be pretty spectacular.