Blackest Night: A Look Back, Ten Years Later
*Spoiler Warning. This article contains spoilers for Blackest Night and other DC Comics involved with the creation of the event. If you haven’t read Blackest Night, feel free to read it and come back!
“Across the universe, the dead will rise. Green Lantern, The Blackest Night. Summer 2009.” So read the house ads in many DC comic books in the summer of 2008 foretelling this upcoming storyline (the title was eventually changed from The Blackest Night to just Blackest Night by publication). The image shown - a hand rising from the grave, black ring on its finger, fist raised towards a lightning raged sky - signaled the tone. This wasn’t the first-time comic fans were given a tease in the Green Lantern comics for something called “The Blackest Night”. In issue twenty-five (third volume) of Green Lantern, the very last pages of the issue showed the images of a destroyed Cyborg Superman Skull (Hank Henshaw) floating in space, and the voice of someone evil telling the Anti-monitor that his body would create the new Black Lantern. Green Lantern fans did not know what was in store for them in the summer of 2009 when Blackest Night (written by Geoff Johns and drawn by Ivan Reis) hit the shelves.
The history and continuity of Green Lantern is a long and storied one from the original character in the Golden Age to the Justice Society of America, to the introduction of Hal Jordan and the new Lantern mythos in the Silver Age, to the apparent end of the corps in the nineties, when Hal Jordan went crazy and killed the entire corps. Throughout the rest of the nineties the only Green Lantern was given his ring by the only surviving guardian of the universe (Kyle Rayner). It wasn’t until the resurrection of Hal Jordan in 2005 in the pages of Green Lantern Rebirth, when Kyle realized to bring back the Corps, he had to first bring back Hal Jordan. After years of shake ups and new directions, DC Comics decided to hand the reigns of the Green Lantern franchise over to newcomer Geoff Johns. John’s goals were to bring back Hal Jordan, bring back the corps, the characters the fans loved, and also add new lore.
To fix the direction and status quo of the Green Lantern corner of the DC Universe, Geoff Johns (with art by Ethan Van Sciver) created the six-issue miniseries, Green Lantern Rebirth. In the miniseries, Johns rearranged and added context to stories of the past to launch the new Green Lantern ongoing comic. He brought back Hal Jordan and the corps, brought back the main villain in Sinestro, and hinted at “Blackest Night”. From issue one of the new ongoing series and spin offs, fans could tell that Johns and his collaborators (Dave Gibbons, Peter Tomasi, Ivan Reis, Patrick Gleason, among others) were building towards something big. After two years into John’s run, the signs in the comic pointed towards a big event in the summer of 2009 and introductions of other corps to the mythos.
In 2007, the first of these new corps were featured in the crossover storyline, “The Sinestro Corp War”. The storyline was well received by fans and critics. The storyline added the yellow corps of fear, as well as the revelations of more colors and different corps of emotion. In just a couple of years Johns had reinvented the Green Lantern books into must-read books. The Sinestro Corp War storyline also brought in many general fans of DC with its use of back history and tying the story into the bigger DC characters and universe. The critical event in the Green Lantern books leading up to Blackest Night was the discovery of the emotional spectrum and that green was just ONE corps among many. Introduced before Blackest Night were the Red Rage Lanterns, Larfleeze, Agent orange of Avarice, and the Blue Lanterns of Hope. The origin story of Hal Jordan was also redone (now with artwork by Ivan Reis, and put in more clues to what was ahead). The buzz by this time in the comic industry was hot, and the first issue of Blackest Night had incentives (different colored plastic rings, t-shirts, bags, etc.) for shops to order more copies. Preludes in Green Lantern featuring the dark and gritty origin story of Black Hand and the death of corps members in the Green Lantern Corps ongoing had built hype to a in a fever pitch. Over the next couple of months, more and more readers jumped on Green Lantern and the story, and hunted the back issues. By the end of the event, comic fans had known they were a part of something special. Ten years post publication, let us take a look back on this storyline, and how it still has affected the comic world to this day.
Taking a cue from the oath of the Green Lanterns and a well-loved Green Lantern short story by comic legend Alan Moore, Johns laid the foundation for what would become Blackest Night. In Blackest Night, readers eventually found out at each end of the emotional color spectrum were also the stark opposites of color, Black and White (Black equaling death and White meaning life). The storyline crossed many ongoing titles (Green Lantern, Green Lantern Corps, Batman, Final Crisis, etc.) and even brought back some titles from “the dead” for one more issue (Catwoman, The Question, Blue Beetle, etc.) and was the lead story thread of DC at the time. Dead heroes and villains from throughout the history of the DC Universe came to inflict murder, mayhem and psychological horror upon the living. Fan favorites were resurrected as villains and soldiers in a war against life. In the end, to defeat the Black Lanterns, all of the corps from across the galaxy (and heroes) had to band together. An anonymous voice first appearing in the preview pages was later to be revealed to belong to the villain, Nekron. The ending of Blackest Night kicked off another storyline titled Brightest Day, in which some of the heroes and villains that had been dead before Blackest Night (and even before Johns took over Green Lantern) were resurrected by the white light of the White Lantern, giving back fans some of their favorite heroes and villains like Martian Manhunter, Aquaman, Maxwell Lord and the original Firestorm. Until the ending of Volume Three of Green Lantern and the launch of the “New 52” in DC continuity, Blackest Night reached across all in continuity DC Comics.
When DC launched the New 52 in 2011, the initiative was met with mixed reviews from some fans, but was a commercial success. Tons of new fans flooded into comic shops to read these “square one” DC comics. All other continuity had been wiped away, except for basically two characters; both the histories of Batman and Green Lantern stayed mostly intact. Johns wrote the first couple years of the new volume before handing it off to new creative teams and directions. As of this writing, the Green Lantern title currently is being written by Grant Morrison and drawn by Liam Sharpe, harkening back to more of a 60’s cop feel. Nevertheless, the hints and nods to John’s work on Green Lantern are there. The creation of the new corps brought many new books to the market over the years with Red Lanterns, and even giving Hal Jordan’s archnemeses Sinestro his own comic. Rings of different colors have been used in storylines, for merchandise, and in other comics, homage jokes about the event. The success of the run and storyline were noticed by the film industry, and a Green Lantern motion picture was greenlit. In the comic book world, Blackest Night also skyrocketed Ivan Reis to A-list DC talent; he is currently drawing the ongoing Superman comic by comic heavyweight Brian Michael Bendis. Even after the tenth-year anniversary, the significant impacts of Blackest Night and John’s run on Green Lantern are still felt for fans of comics.
In 2019, DC Comics gave Blackest Night the tenth-year anniversary treatment with the release of a new omnibus, new trade paperback collections, and even an essential collection, giving new fans a one stop place to collect the basic story. The run has also been immortalized over the years in three Absolute format editions by DC, one volume each of Rebirth, Sinestro Corp War, and Blackest Night. It can also be currently read on the DC Universe app and comiXology. Hunting down issues of this run and storyline used to be difficult and costly, but over the years the many reprints have brought those prices down.
In conclusion, if you have ever wanted to read a great superhero space opera horror epic, Geoff John’s run on Green Lantern is it. John’s invented new corps and characters to love and hate. New alien worlds and morals, battles of color (from the art) and emotion, Blackest Night engaged the world in which not many Green Lantern stories, or even event storylines had. It brought back fans and brought new ones in. To this day at my local comic shop I still have conversations about this run and this story.
