Blackest Night (comic review)

Ninety percent of those reading my blog can now tune out for a bit. I'm going to review a comic book event.

The DC Comics epic mini-series, Blackest Night, wrapped up recently and since it seems I've been living in this world for a year now I thought it deserved a moment of my time.

I have a feeling this may run a bit long so I'm going to break it up into two parts.

First, a little history is needed. I assume most people have at least heard of the Green Lantern? He's the major focal point of the series. After the Green Lantern movie comes out in a year or so I'm hoping the public will get to know how cool of a character he can be when written correctly.

Green Lantern, real name Hal Jordan, is a member of a intergalactic space policing force known as the Green Lantern Corps.

They wear rings that channel their willpower to create constructs that they use to fight evil doers. For example, hey, bad guy over there, let me think of this giant, ridiculously sized sledgehammer and whack you on the head with it.

Over the course of fifty years of stories, everyone just took at face value that they were the Green Lanterns just because that's just the color they happened to be. In the 1980s — perhaps early 1990s — Alan Moore, he of the shaggy beard, magic, and comic book writing brilliance, — wrote a one-off Green Lantern story exploring how the Green Lantern Corps were but one part of the spectrum of colors on the ROYGBIV spectrum.

The current DC comic book writer, Geoff Johns, took this idea and ran with it. Johns tied an emotion and created a corps for every color on the ROYGBIV spectrum.

To quickly run them down:

• Red - anger

• Orange - avarice

• Yellow - fear

• Green - will

• Blue - hope

• Indigo - compassion

• Violet - love

For a year building up to the Blackest Night event, Geoff Johns and his fellow Green Lantern writers and artists explored each corps through compelling stories and histories. Eventually, an all out color war broke out that further shattered the emotional spectrum and made them all susceptible to an every growing force of death and destruction, the newly revealed Black Lantern Corps.

Obviously, for those of you who keep up on comics, you know I've skimmed over years of compelling stories that stand out on their own without even tying them into the set-up for the Blackest Night event.

The storyline that stands above all the others during the pre-Blackest Night era is the Sinestro Corp war. The mini-series was essentially a battle between the Green Lantern Corps, led by Hal Jordan, and the Sinestro Corps, aka, the Yellow Lanterns, led by Hal's former friend and teacher, Sinestro. It's a brilliant bit of comic book writing and I think, while not essential, it gives a further understanding of the characters and intrigue involved in Blackest Night.

The majority of the color war was contained within the DC family of Green Lantern books. However, with Blackest Night upon the DC universe, the threat is just too big for the space characters alone.

In the second part of my little black review we dive into the Blackest Night event. Every major character in DC Comics will be effected and characters will die, then live, then die, then, maybe, live again.