As constant readers know, I read the
Blackest Night event for the first time in its individual collected hardcovers --
Blackest Night all at once, then
Blackest Night: Green Lantern all at once,
Green Lantern Corps, and so on. This was not, as many people advised me, the best way to read these stories, but it would be the way that some unsuspecting person might read them if they picked up just
Blackest Night at the bookstore, and that was the way I wanted to experience and review them.
As I prepared to continue reading
Brightest Day and a number of other books that spin-off from
Blackest Night however, I wanted to take an opportunity to read the
Blackest Night saga again -- and this time, in order. Using the
Blackest Night Reading Order as a guide, I lined up just my
Blackest Night,
Green Lantern, and
Green Lantern Corps hardcovers, and dug in.
It is a different, interesting, better, and worse experience reading
Blackest Night in issue-by-issue order. By the time I finished reading the three hardcovers individually, I wasn't confused about any plot points that reading issue by issue illuminated; that is, I didn't gain any greater understanding of the story reading it in order than I did by series. What I felt were unrelated tangents in the individual books still seem to be unrelated tangents read intersected; the places I felt the story marked time book by book it still marks time read together.
It did, however, seem a bit more fluid.
[Contains spoilers]For instance, the Spectre makes an early appearance in
Blackest Night, and then never appears again in that series. He returns for a fantastic two-part story in
Green Lantern (well-written by Geoff Johns and moreover magnificently drawn by Doug Mahnke) that's never mentioned in
Blackest Night, and as such while the Spectre issues in
Green Lantern fit between the pages of
Blackest Night, it's clear they're just using up
Green Lantern pages while
Blackest Night's going on. But whereas the Spectre's appearance in
Blackest Night seems incomplete and his appearance in
Green Lantern seems unnecessary, read together they make a loose whole that mitigated the problem. Worse, in that it's more obvious, but better, in that it works more cohesively.
In a similar way, Green Lantern John Stewart appears early in
Blackest Night and then all but disappears until the end, without much role to play. He gets a single issue all to himself in
Green Lantern that doesn't quite work in that, with all the attention on Hal Jordan and Barry Allen and the DC Universe heroes throughout the book, a single issue focusing on just one character right in the middle is too strangely quiet and disconnected. However, reading
Blackest Night and
Green Lantern interspersed, the John Stewart chapter again serves to unify the two series, and specifically this is an instance where the cliffhanger at the end of the John Stewart
Green Lantern issue picks up at the exact same moment in
Blackest Night. If it's a little jarring, it's also nicely fluid.
Another example is a late sequence in
Blackest Night where Sinestro gains White Lantern powers, proceeds in
Green Lantern to lose them, nearly die, and then regain them, and then continues back in
Blackest Night as if nothing happened. That issue is strange in
Green Lantern because Sinestro doesn't have the White Lantern powers in the chapter before, and then the issue ends with "Continued in
Blackest Night," part of what makes the
Green Lantern book an awkward reading experience on its own. Now at least, even if the White Lantern
Green Lantern issue still seems obviously inconsequential, it does at least gain some context sandwiched between
Blackest Night issues.
Indeed, these were the parts of the
Blackest Night saga I liked the best -- when Hal left Barry in
Blackest Night to seek out additional Lanterns in
Green Lantern, when the Indigo Lantern Munk leaves
Green Lantern to provide help elsewhere in
Green Lantern Corps, and when the Corps abandons their own title entirely to appear in one of
Blackest Night's many eye-popping two-page spreads. Though I'm undecided whether the entire
Blackest Night saga ought have been collected by series or by issue, there's a unique joy that comes from reading these issues in separate books and have the characters jump -- as if by magic or osmosis -- from one volume to the next and back, something that can only be replicated otherwise by actually reading the separate periodical issues. Maybe there's too much continuity and crossover in comics, but I maintain this kind of overt celebration of a shared universe is the key thing that makes comics distinct from any other media.
There was some discussion on the
Collected Editions Facebook page as to whether
Green Lantern Corps was quite necessary for an issue-by-issue reading of the
Blackest Night saga. Though I myself decided initially that it wasn't necessary -- recalling from my Green Lantern Corps review that
Corps only intersects with the main action of
Blackest Night toward the end of the book -- I made a last-minute decision to include it in my re-reading. This was influenced largely and subjectively by my remembrance that Munk goes from
Green Lantern to
Corps and that
Corps later re-intersects
Blackest Night; I felt no such compunction to trade Dove from
Blackest Night to
Titans and back, but as the ties between the main series,
Lantern, and
Corps were so strong (and that Peter Tomasi writes
Corps and then
Brightest Day with Geoff Johns, and that I'd be reading the new volume of
Corps not long after this), I ended up looping it in.
It does inevitably make for some unusual cliffhangers -- Kyle Rayner dies, there's a bunch of action with Barry and Hal in the other books, then we rejoin the struggle to revive Kyle; and also Guy Gardner becomes a Red Lantern, we leave
Corps for the two-issue Spectre story in
Green Lantern, and then we return to
Corps right in the same place.
This latter loop is especially strange (
Corps #44,
Lantern #50-51,
Corps #45), but has more to do with
Blackest Night #6 coming before the other issues and
Corps #45 dove-tailing right into
Blackest Night #7 than it does with any real reason that
Lantern should interrupt
Corps. Personally, I rather liked reading
Lantern #50 and #51 in one sitting, rather like an "extra-sized episode," but probably one could put the two
Corps issues together before or after the
Lantern issues here and understand the story about the same. Essentially, there's a little wiggle room for re-organization based on personal preference here and elsewhere.
I am still undecided whether I'd have wanted DC to collect
Blackest Night as one volume with the main series,
Green Lantern, and
Corps interspersed. The answer with
Corps is likely "probably not," given difficulties like the one above and given that book largely stands on its own. With
Blackest Night and
Lantern, the answer is closer to "maybe" because interspersing the books benefits
Lantern considerably, though not necessarily the main series. Still -- as I might have said the first time around -- the uniformity in the art of the
Blackest Night and
Green Lantern volumes individually gives each one a distinct identity, and I would find it distracting to be reading one volume where the art kept changing, much like it's distracting in the
Sinestro Corps War volumes; that's an argument in favor of DC collecting
Blackest Night the way they did.
Overall, I've been impressed with Geoff Johns's "event" writing over the past five years.
Infinite Crisis and
Blackest Night are significantly more readable than
Zero Hour or
Final Night, due in large part to Johns focusing the story within the event series, rather than the event series being just a through-way to the events' various crossover titles, as was DC's previous custom. But Johns and company's inter-title crossovers never quite work for me in collected form, as is the case with
Sinestro Corps War; even as the different parts lead in to one another, there's such an artificial emphasis on Hal Jordan or the Corps in every other chapter as to seem unnatural (not to mention radically shifting artists).
The same is true, for instance, of the Batman crossover
Resurrection of Ra's al Ghul; the general quality of that crossover aside, the necessity to have each chapter focus on a different specific character when numerous titles are involved comes off as artificial when read in a collection (see also
Cataclysm,
Contagion, and so on). I'd like to see Johns and company write an inter-title crossover more like
52, where each character gets an ongoing subplot, than the current piecemeal approach; in that way,
Green Lantern Corps might've fit more naturally with
Blackest Night and
Green Lantern because they all would've been telling the same story (and if the artists could follow a certain segment of the story across titles, as they did for
Batman: No Man's Land, even better).
I like
Blackest Night as a story different from the way I like
Final Crisis;
Final Crisis is cerebral and meta-textual and layered with double-meanings, while
Blackest Night is great because it's just the opposite, a DC Comics superhero story not caught up for once in streamlining or correcting DC's continuity. Reading it in single-issue order is not essential, I don't think, but it increases the number of explosions and thrills and near misses, and I think that's worth experiencing.
Flashpoint differs from both
Blackest Night and
Final Crisis in that it has no intersecting series or miniseries whatsoever, just tertiary titles -- if that holds true for DC's next crossover event, somewhere down the line in the newly relaunched DC Universe, maybe we can interpret that as some lesson DC learned from the collection difficulties with
Blackest Night.
Don't miss our official Blackest Night review, back when the books first came out, in which I consider among other things the rather strange nationalist sentiment inherit in the Blackest Night story.We'll continue from here to the
Green Lantern and
Corps Brightest Day tie-ins, and then
Justice League: Generation Lost and more. Don't miss it!
