Amph [GLC] Blackest Night (spoilers, but please read first post before posting spoilers)

Aquaman was cooler in BN #2 than he has been in YEARS.

 

Actually, there were a few interesting elements revealed in the second issue of Blackest Night which are 1: the Black Ring's power which was able to detect fear like some type of thermal vision. Secondly, the issue demonstrated if a grave is at peace then the Black Ring cannot cause it to rise, ala Don Hall of earth at peace. Additionally, it answers the question as to where Aquaman wanted to be buried. I think it's progressing well.

 

I just read Blackest Night Superman. I couldn't believe it -- Earth 2 Superman AND Zor-El! Awesome!

 

The ability of the Black Rings to see the emotional spectrum was shown in the first issue. Firstly, Hal shows as green and Barry shows as blue, captioned with "Will" and "Hope." Secondly, Carter shows as red and is captioned for Rage, and Shiera is shown with a violet aura and captioned for Love.

 

I'm quite enjoying this so far. The first issue for Batman was quite good.

I assume the Waynes are at peace as they weren't made lanterns. Apparently the Graysons weren't though. I can the Drakes I guess though Jack Drake pretty much knew he was going to die and seemed to make peace with it.

Superman confused me. For a moment, I thought the Black Lantern Lois was the current Lois and not Kal-L's Lois. Also Pa Kent didn't rise so I assume he might be at peace as well?

The only thing I haven't liked was in Blackest Night 2 with Garth. Hopefully that changes. Garth is a character that can be extremely interesting depending on the writer, but most of the time, he is sidelined.

 

Want more power rings?

 

Yep. Jack Drake made peace with his son which is the point of what we saw in "War Games" and in "Identity Crisis".

Well, the rings haven't been distributed to Smallville yet. Kal-L and Lois Lane-Kent were buried elsewhere. As is Psycho Pirate II. Jonathan could be coming back soon.

 

I was a little disappointed with Blackest Night: Batman, as it seemed more like a typical Zombie book.

However, the third issue of Blackest Night was awesome as the Indigo tribe arrive on the scene and shed more light on the subject. Speaking of shedding more light on the subject, I thought it was cool when Flash removed a black ring from the walking dead. But BN #3 really hit the emotional note with the salty act of terror by Ronnie Raymond. Talk about a heart stopper.

 

I think the Batman and Superman entries are intended to be more typically zombie-like. Same with Titans. They are entries into the series showing you how Blackest Night is effecting the non-Lanterns. And that's just zombies with black rings.

It's the Lantern books that give you the cosmic angle.

 

The Blackest Night miniseries is the first time in a long time that I'm not waiting for the trades. I love the series!

 

Blackest Night: Superman 3 was great. Go Ma Kent!

 

I was happy with both the superman and batman tie ins. I was really glad to see superman involved. I was concenred that he wouldn't get due coverage since he is on new krypton.

 

KYLE NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

 

^Word.

 

Yeah.

Hopefully he's not quite dead. If he's dead, that's really annoying. Kyle is the red-shirted ensign of the Green Lantern Corps. If something bad is going to happen - girlfriend in the fridge, mother in stove, mother killed by an evil virus, girlfriend goes home early and shacks up with a dude in his apartment, girlfriend dying in the middle of a cosmic war, getting possessed by an evil manifestation of the emotion of fear (in all fairness, that happened to Hal too, and for longer), having his powers reduced multiple times, etc - it happens to Kyle. I don't think that any of the writers like him. The long slow work of killing off the character has been going for a while now.

It's a shame, because he's the Green Lantern I like most. My hope, such that it is, is that we'll see Kyle merging with the various emotional avatar things - Ion, Parallax, etc, to become Ion 1.0 again. Add Indigo, Violet, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange and Red together and you get White! Go go White Lantern!

 

I don't have have my sinestro corp war books around right now, but i didn't have any issues following it, and i'm not aware of any a typical layouts in blackest night. Keep in mind that there were atleast three artist working on sinestro war corp. Blackest night (The Core Series) is only being drawn by Ivan Reiss.

 

I can't be the only one who is suspicious of the state of Kyle's body given he was at ground zero for such a massive explosion.

 

So, Blackest Night is over. Thoughts?

Looking forward to Brightest Day.

 

I guess I am.

I dunno, after three or four years of awesome for there to be an ending that just didn't match up to the scale of the events that came before... eh. I'm feeling sort of let down.

 

Me too. It seemed to become more set up for Brightest Day than an actual ending, which is somewhat disappointing.

 

Frankly, the collection of Sinestro Corps is a bit of mess Quest.

When it started, DC structured it so you could read either Green Lantern OR Green Lantern Corps seperately and get the full story, bar the special. Then that seemed to change midway through with various one-shot character specials. The result is the story tends to be repetitive because its fused two halves trying to tell 2 seperate halves of a story into one. They also collected the character specials seperately, despite them having specific chronological points in the story.

Primary artists were:
GLC: Gleason
GL: Reis
Plus back-ups and others.

It's a shame because Sinestro Corps was one of DC's big successes - but they seem to have drawn the wrong conclusions as to what made it so as they've gone on to apply the model elsewhere e.g. Superman, expect the same to be done on the Flash books. Blackest Night has had its epic moments but the battle with Xanshi is inferior to the Ranx-Mogo battle in Sinestro Corps.

Comments on BN#8 to follow when I've got my copy.

 

The Ranx-Mogo battle was amazing.

It's funny how much Zonama Sekot and Mogo seem alike to me now...

 

I tend to agree, but there's no sort of for me, this was a big disappointment. From another board I'm active on, my review:

Blackest Night 8: In a way this issue proves all the rules about conclusions and their importance overall as well as just how far art can salvage a tale. Reis' art is spectacular, but it's wedded to a hollow story that's go on too long, that hasn't eaten enough and is now painfully racked out, Reis is brilliant, so too is Mahnke, but neither of them is so good that they can save this. At the same time the weakness of this supposedly conclusive issue destructively impacts backwards all along the line of the GL mega-arc, the shockwave is really only stopped at Sinestro Corps.

But maybe that's one of the big problems with the issue: It's not a conclusion! It's set-up for Brightest Day, it's placing the 12 characters on a chessboard to be moved, sure Nekron is defeated - and yeah, he does come across as a wousse after all - but the resurrections and the reactions, it's all geared to the stories to come. Yeah, but comics do this all the time don't they? To a degree yes, there's always that encouragement to keep reading, to see what happens next to the character, but Blackest Night was marketed as the conclusion to a 5-year arc - for it to not deliver strongly on that isn't good at all.

I remain unimpressed by the concept of Sinestro as White Lantern and even quite revolted by it, Sinestro as a character is an unrepentant fascist - nothing Johns has done has changed that, if anything he indulges in it. If I compare what Johns appears to be doing with Sinestro to the arc he did with Black Adam, the latter comes across as the superior, Adam had the charismatic edge to his personality that could win the reader over in a way Sinestro simply can't. Then there are the resurrections, most of which I don't recognise or care little about - but bringing back Max Lord? That's an odd move given the story his death featured in.

Finally, Blackest Night was quite often pointlessly violent for the hell of it - the initial solution from White Lantern Sinestro? Rip out and hold Nekron's heart. Was this really needed? I suspect I'll feel the same way about Siege's god-ripping scene too. I'm not exactly a squeamish reader, it's more that the sort of tone feels totally out of place on what is supposedly an all-ages superhero title.

 

So....if life originated on Earth...where did all these pre-Earth civilizations come from?