Daily Dose of Awesome: Blackest Night

Ever since the stunning finale to the Sinestro Corps War, I had been excited for Geoff Johns' next major Green Lantern event, Blackest Night. Well, the wait did eventually come to an end. Long story short, this series is stellar.

The "HSQ" in the first issue isn't quite as high as the Sinestro Corps one-shot, but it is still pretty high. The momentum carries into the Tales of the Corps issue and the latest issue of Green Lantern.

It's the zombie apocalypse on a galactic scale and I loved every second of it. I was worried about all the tie-ins that were going to be released. I wanted the story to stay in the pages of Green Lantern like the Sinestro Corps War. If all of the issues are as good as the three that I've read, I say bring the tie-ins on.

This is huge, not like other events where there's talk about the scope of the event, this is serious business. I really can't wait to see what comes next.

My only quibble is with Batman being a zombie. SPOILER ALERT!!!! for those who haven't finished reading Final Crisis. Batman's not dead. Darkseid zapped him to the past. All of the heroes think he is dead, but he is, in fact, alive and well. This just begs the question how he comes back as a zombie; you'd think the rings would know whether or not a person was really dead or just MIA. Some of the heroes talk about how his skeleton is missing, but that makes even less sense. If his skeleton is in the present, and he's in the past than he should just be a pile of organs and skin in the past, that clearly isn't the case.

I was one of the people who wasn't fond of the idea of bringing Barry back. Oh, he's a great character, that's not the problem, but his death in Crisis on Infinite Deaths was really well done, being both heroic and noble. More importantly, he managed to stay dead. He made the occasional appearance that teased at his return, but inevitably he went back to being dead. Now, he's just another in the long list of dead characters who have come back. Reading Green Lantern though, changed my mind. It was nice having him back. Also, he acts as the audience identifier for people who may not have been reading Green Lantern. His lack of knowledge in regards to what's been going on makes it easy for characters to come out and say it so that new readers aren't lost.

Speaking of Barry's return, I do like the fact that the zombies harbor a sort of resentment towards the characters who have died and managed to cheat or escape death. It's an interesting angle that other zombie movies never got to touch on since the circumstance never came up.

So far, this series has delivered everything you'd want out of a superhero comic. Great character development and interaction, a huge, and surprisingly creepy, threat that seems like more than our heroes can handle, and a building suspense. When I saw that final panel in Green Lantern with John facing his worst nightmare, my jaw practically hit the floor.

I am quite confident that I can declare this series awesome.