I've been getting into this Really Important comic book saga about a bunch of dead people rising from the grave to wreak havoc lately. It's got a nice big cast (including a stunt resurrection of a dead fan favorite), it's written by one of my all time favorite comic book writers, and it's an action-packed read, with some really randy violence every few pages. On the down side, there's a lot of artists involved, and the quality of said art is a bit up and down. It's also a really long serial, so each part has to meet certain beats in every chapter, which makes it hard for it to maintain a coherent build.
What? No, it's not
Blackest Night. What's
Blackest Night?
Garth Ennis had only been writing comic books for a few years when he took on a John Wagner idea called "Judgment Day". The story--which remains Ennis' longest Judge Dredd tale to date--was an unusual one. It was the first time the
Judge Dredd Megazine had told a crossover story with sister & mother publication
2000 AD, something that has only happened a scant few times since then. Besides that, it was one of the first times anyone besides John Wagner or Alan Grant had told a Dredd epic that "mattered". Others might have tried, and their stories might have had their fans, but as far as most Dredd fans were (and in many ways, still are) concerned, Wagner/Grant Dredd stories are the ones worth paying attention to. Everything else is suspect. To say that Judgment Day changed that would be--well, it would be a straight up lie. It didn't. Judgment Day has its fans, but it's still a non-Wagner Dredd story, and that's all it takes for some to dismiss it as lesser work. Ennis isn't much of a help for Judgment Day defenders--he's been known to apologize for his Dredd work, claiming that he was "too much of a fan of the character" to really do the work justice.
But you want to know something? Judgment Day isn't that bad. And while I think that it's a bit unfair to malign what's appeared of that other Zombies Go To War comic story so far,
Blackest Night is going to have to step it up a notch if it wants to take the throne. Let's take a look at the competition so far, and see what
Blackest Night has to bring to the table if, you know, it wants to win a made-up prize I'll forget to give it. When it finishes.
In 2010.
Body Count:
In Judgment Day, the final death toll for the story arc is listed as being around three billion human beings. Most of those people are killed when the various Judges of the world agree that they have to bomb all the cities that have been overrun by the zombie hordes. Although they all acknowledge that dropping nuclear weapons on these cities will, Aw Shucks, kill any innocent people the zombies haven't gotten to yet, they have no real choice. So they decide to wipe them off the face of the planet, thereby eliminating a hefty amount of potential recruits for the bad guy's undead army. (Like most standard zombie stories, you can kill the undead by destroying the brain, and the assumption--which proves correct--is that a nuclear weapon works as a dynamic brain-destroying tool.)
Blackest Night could get a pass on this one--after all,
Blackest Night has only just begun, and the story won't conclude for months. But really, do you think DC Comics is going to publish a story line where they kill three billion human beings? I wouldn't put it past them to blow up a planet of Zargivians, the aliens that bake bread, but that doesn't really count. (And Judgment Day blows up a planet too, so it still wouldn't matter.) I think we can call this one for Judgment Day now, although I'm willing to put an asterisk next to it, the same way we do with home run records now that we know all baseball players shoot steroids into their eyesockets.
On Panel Gore:
Judgment Day has some delightfully gruesome imagery in it, but to be completely honest,
Blackest Night took this one in a walk. Sure, a lot of people die in Judgment Day, and there's an entire sequence devoted to the telekinetic removal of a samurai's heart, eyes & ribs, but Johns beat that in one issue by pitting Smurf versus Smurf, Mola Ram style. At the time of this writing, there've been two on-panel heart removals already. I can't imagine that's going to slow down.
Tactical Methods:
Now, in Judgment Day, it's really simple: raise the dead, have the dead kill the living, living are now dead, etc. Not that hard to pull off--there's more dead people in the world than there are living ones, so sheer numbers work in the enemy's favor. But in
Green Lantern--where the goal is basically the same, i.e. "kill everyone"--the evil dudes are only resurrecting people with familiar names and super-powers. Why? They have to kill everybody, according to the Scar character. One or two at a time--that's just slow-going, and it speaks to a lack of dedication on the part of Black Hand and Scar. If you want to kill everybody, and you can raise the dead and use them as militia, then guess what isn't hard?
Killing somebody besides Hawkman.
Stunt Resurrection:
Judgment Day featured the time-traveling appearance of Johnny Alpha, who had been killed off a few years earlier in a highly-regarded
Strontium Dog story!
Okay, yeah, you don't know who Johnny Alpha is, and you'll probably think he has a funny helmet if you look him up on Wikipedia. (Hey, I actually do know who Johnny Alpha is and I'm still learning to tolerate the helmet.) Let's just say that Johnny Alpha is well-liked. At this point, I personally would pull for Judgment Day, because I like Alpha more than I do Ralph & Sue Dibny or the Martian Manhunter, but I'm willing to bet that the return of Vibe--if true--is the sort of thing that's going to strike a nerve somewhere in the part of me that still gauges quality based on how bad I smell when I get done with the reading process.
Simplicity of Explanation:
One of the most appealing things about Judgment Day is that it's an incredibly simple framework for what turns out to be a pretty lengthy epic: an evil magician named Sabbat has travelled back in time to 2114. Upon his arrival, he raises the dead--all of them--so that he can build a massive zombie army he'll use to take over the entire galaxy.
That's it! That's all he wants to do. He has a back story, an origin--it's standard "weird kid gets picked on, grows up to be nasty killer" stuff, but that's all he wants. Galactic takeover. I appreciate the simplicity in that: guy wants to rule the galaxy. Guy can raise (and control) the dead. Guy will raise and control the dead to take over the galaxy.
This is what I understand of
Blackest Night so far, boiled down and pasteurized: An evil supervillain named Black Hand and an evil Guardian named Scar have decided to kill all sentient beings so that chaos can be eliminated and the growth of the emotional spectrum can be halted. All of this is tied into a larger story involving the 31 Flavors of Lantern Corps. Also, it's the third part of a trilogy. And it's at the behest of another, as of yet unknown character, who has as of yet unknown goals, and large hands. And there's a war of light coming. Oh yeah, and copious vomiting.
Okay, that's not too difficult to get behind. I'm willing to hold off on making snide remarks about what I think of the "emotional spectrum" part of the story, because I can recognize that is part of what Geoff Johns has worked to develop over the last few years on the
Green Lantern title. I'm also willing to hold off on even claiming that a finished story from the early 90's has a "better" story than one that's barely begun, and serves as the third part of a massive trilogy. But this is the one category where
Blackest Night has the steepest uphill climb, especially because it's supposed to act as the lead-up to The War of Light, and it's planning to take another six to eight months of 30 or so comic books to reach, and conclude, that story. And at the end of all that, I'm betting that a simple two sentence explanation is going to fail to encompass the basic plot.
So I guess the question might be "Does it need to be?" Maybe it doesn't--part of what makes super-hero event comics work, from a financial/production standpoint, is creating something that can survive as a story-creating engine for an extended period of time, a time frame where the various creators can attempt to stay ahead of the production schedule. And right now,
Blackest Night has that engine down pat: it can resurrect anybody from DC's extensive library of "dead" characters, and its status as a "horror" version of super-hero comics leaves the door wide open for any manner of violent action--which, my own personal dislike for wishing-rings and cosmic epic stories aside--is what the
Green Lantern family of titles has proven itself capable of doing better than any other DC book. (When's the last time there was a good action sequence in a Justice League comic?)
The danger isn't that
Blackest Night will fail to provide some excellent action to a DC line-up of titles in sore need of it, the danger is that's all it will provide, and it will do so while attempting to walk the razor's edge of stunt resurrections. Now, that danger doesn't potentially mean the collapse of the comic book industry--that day will be postponed as long as the movies continue to rake it in--the worst outcomes are all the equivalent of luxury problems, like the potential curtailing of long super-hero epics that open with Preludes AND Prologues or the replacement of Geoff Johns as Green Lantern's High Priest by some writer who prefers
fake wedding stories over Martians picking up buildings. Neither of those things will send the comics industry into a tailspin, and if
Blackest Night does end up as another too-long event comic requiring a Master's in
Trivial Nonsense loved by a minority and forgotten by the rest, we're all still likely to climb aboard the horse as soon as the horse looks sobered up.
It would just be nice, you know, if we could finish the ride and explain the whole thing in a fashion that might interest somebody who missed it the first time around.
Tucker Stone's writing may be found in print in Comic Foundry and online at The Factual Opinion, where he frequently reviews new releases.
This Ship Is Totally Sinking is © Tucker Stone, 2008
