By Geoff Johns, James Robinson, Tony Bedard, Greg Rucka, Scott Kolins, Eddy Barrows, Nicola Scott, Eduardo Pansica & various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-4012-2803-3
Hold onto your heads, hearts and scorecards: the mind-buggering confusion is almost over…
Reprinting supplemental 3-part miniseries Blackest Night: The Flash, Blackest Night: J.S.A. and Blackest Night: Wonder Woman from 2010, this concluding collection of sidebar stories chronicles how the horrific doom and gloom of the Blackest Night began to wane and depicts key moments when the darkness began to lift…
The inexorable progress of the reanimated angels of death – slaughtering the living and feeding on the raw emotions of the defiant and defeated alike – seemed to stall here as hard-pressed humanity began to turn the tables and start a furious hope-fuelled fight back against Death God Nekron‘s all-conquering Black Lantern Corps…
Blackest Night: Flash by Geoff Johns & Scott Kolins opens with a terse and gritty examination of villainy unleashed as Barry Allen – who gave his life to preserve the multiverse in Crisis on Infinite Earths – flashes across the world, returned in all his scarlet glory to save universal sentience itself.
Amidst all the revolting resurrections, one in particular is troubling: 25th century maniac Eobard Thawne – who haunted and hunted Allen throughout his career, murdering the hero’s wife and mother in an obscene life-long obsession to become his enemy, is also back – not as a resurrected Black Lantern zombie revenant but as a living, breathing Reverse Flash Professor Zoom. Time travel is so confusing…
Forearmed with crucial knowledge, Barry races around the globe seeking allies, including his protégé Wally West and (briefly deceased, but better now and breathing) grandson Bart. Meanwhile a BL Rogues Gallery including The Top, Golden Glider, the first Mirror Master and Captain Boomerang, Rainbow Raider, Trickster James Jesse, and – impossibly – the reanimated corpse of Professor Zoom (time travel, see?) all stalk the speedy sentinels and their own still-breathing former comrades…
Barry knows now that Black Lantern zombies are in actuality Nekron’s perfidious power rings, downloaded with the memories of the angry dead and physically manifesting as psychologically devastating simulacra, programmed to feed on emotion and tear the hearts from the living – literally and figuratively.
However when the animated corpse of Zoom begins chasing him, garbed as the fearsome mythological Black Flash (as seen in Flash: The Human Race), the Scarlet Speedster divines a way to combat the voracious wraiths even as he hurtles towards Africa in search of his old friend Solovar of Gorilla City.
Sadly the all-wise super-ape is also dead and a ravening agent of the BL Corps…
Back in Central City living Rogues Captain Cold, Heat Wave, Weather Wizard, second Mirror Master Evan McCulloch, parvenu Trickster Axel Walker and the son of Captain Boomerang decide to pre-emptively strike at their fallen former friends.
Tracking the phantasmal freaks to maximum security metahuman penitentiary Iron Heights, the cadre of criminals are unaware that their undead comrades already know they’re coming…
Barry, unable to help Solovar, has since fled and, whilst planning his next move, has been approached by Blue Lantern St. Walker. The wielder of the Light of Hope has targeted Flash as the embodiment of that fragile, unconquerable sentiment (even after the dark side again claims young Bart) and makes the indomitable Allen a blue ring-bearer: beacon and messenger to humanity with the oath “All Will Be Wellâ€â€¦
As the mortal Rogues win their own battle against the dark, Barry and St. Walker, armed with the azure power of Blue Lanterns, defeat a host of Black foes and, with the aid of Wally, manage to expel the Nekron infection from Bart, bringing him back to full life and finally incapacitating Black Flash Zoom.
Freed from death’s influence Bart, as Kid Flash, informs his elders that a final confrontation is brewing in Coast City even as Captain Cold and Co. end their dealings with the Black Lanterns by dealing poetic justice to a traitor in their midst…
The carnage and crusading continues in Blackest Night: J.S.A with the opening sally ‘Lost Souls’, by James Robinson, Eddie Barrows, Marcos Marz, Julio Ferreira, Luciana Del Negro & Ruy José, wherein the multigenerational Justice Society of America is targeted by unquiet Black Lantern-ed liches of fallen members Sandman, Dr. Mid-Nite and Mr. Terrific, tasked with not only destroying the living members of the fabled team but also leading an army of revenants against the most brilliant man on Earth as he tirelessly toils on a device to banish Nekron’s influence…
As veteran Flash Jay Garrick and modern legacy heroes Cyclone, Tomcat, Magog, Liberty Belle II and the new Hourman strive against the hordes of the fallen, stunned by the recent loss of their tragic comrade Damage, at S.T.A.R. labs the current Dr. Midnight and Mister Terrific race to build their machine to stop the dead. Green Lantern Alan Scott, Wildcat and Power Girl are posting an uneasy guard over them…
Everywhere young and old champions desperately hold back the onslaught of the final darkness, but as the device nears completion a convergence of Black Lanterns outside and within the citadel threatens the living’s last hope…
‘Troubled Souls’ (Robinson, Tony Bedard, Barrows, Marz, Eduardo Pansica, Julio & Eber Ferreira & Del Negro) sees Liberty Belle race her deadly departed dad Johnny Quick in a most unconventional and unexpected duel of wills even as BL-ed Lois Lane of Earth-2 menaces the scientist heroes in S.T.A.R. labs as she seeks to reactivate her twice-dead husband (the BL Superman of Earth-2 was destroyed by Superboy and “our†Man of Steel in Blackest Night: Superman in Black Lantern Corps volume 1).
In the street Damage menaces his “cousin†Atom Smasher and former love Judomaster before fighting off his Black Lantern programming long enough to destroy all the horrors besieging the lab, but his death-defying gesture is proved pointless as, within the shaken structure, Lois’ ring reanimates the mangled remains of the unstoppable Kal-L of Krypton…
‘White Lightning’ (Bedard, Robinson, Barrows, Marz, Pansica, Del Negro, Wayne Faucher, Eber Ferreira & Sandro Ribeiro) then sees Power Girl battling her zombie father figure to a standstill, aided by a phalanx of JSA all-stars, until the saviour machine can be activated to sever Nekron’s connection to all his agents in the city. As the Black Lanterns return to dust the stage is set for the final fight against the Lord of Death…
Blackest Night: Wonder Woman (by Greg Rucka, Nicola Scott, Prentis Rollins, Jonathan Glapion, Walden Wong, Drew Geraci & Eber Ferreira) is perhaps the most confusing tale for casual readers to follow, as much of the critical action occurs contemporaneously in other books such as core tome Blackest Night).
Nevertheless, as we’ve come this far…
It begins in WashingtonDC as the Amazing Amazon tracks the reconstituted mind-manipulator Maxwell Lord, whom she executed during the Infinite Crisis to prevent him making Superman his slave.
Undead Lord is running amok, causing people to kill themselves, and even beheading him doesn’t stop his malevolent depredations. When he causes all the nation’s honoured dead (including DC war hero Unknown Soldier) to rise from their graves and attack, Wonder Woman is forced to destroy them all with her magic lasso. Furious, she swears vengeance on the beast who has twice compelled her to commit shameful acts of barbarism…
The second chapter opens with her actually dead and operating as a Black Lantern beside her equally compromised “sister†Donna Troy (see why you need to read the other volumes?) fighting Aquaman‘s widow Mera and a contingent of Teen Titans, all the while struggling to throw off the malign influence of the Black Ring that controls her…
After ripping out the heart of her protégé, Wonder Girl Cassie Sandsmark, dead Diana turns on Troy and her own mother Queen Hippolyta. Suddenly substitute Batman Dick Grayson distracts her long enough for the goddess Aphrodite to intervene and open a path for a Violet power ring to capture the agonised Amazon princess…
Brought back to life and now a love-fuelled Star Sapphire/Wonder Woman, she rendezvous with Star Sapphire Carol Ferris to end the menace of Max Lord, only to be ambushed by Mera, now a raging Red Lantern. Battling each other and an army of Black Lanterns, the furiously warring women are only stopped by Green Lantern Hal Jordan who has gathered a taskforce of ring-bearers from every hue of the emotional spectrum, determined to lead them all into final battle against Nekron…
Which will or indeed has already happened in the aforementioned core collection Blackest Night…
With covers and variants by Kolins, Gene Ha, Greg Horn, Francis Manapul, Ryan Sook & Barrows, this book also includes a selection of info pages digging the dirt on sixteen Black Lantern heroes and villains from this collection courtesy of designers Joe Prado & Scott Kolins.
Epic, ambitious, enthralling and grandiose, whilst the subtler shades and in-continuity treats of this epic adventure will be utterly impenetrable to all but the most devoted DC disciple, there’s so much that is great about Blackest Night that I’d strongly urge every fan of cosmic comics and frantic Fights ‘n’ Tights fiction to give it a try (but you really, really need to read all seven collections). Think of it as a keep-fit class for your comicbook sinews…
© 2010 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.