It would have been easy for writer Geoff Johns to take the obvious route with Blackest Night.He could have settled for the menace of every dead hero and villain rising up, fighting the living, and then when all seems lost, the multi-hued Lanterns would team up, combine their lights and erase the shadow that's fallen across the universe.
Instead of playing it safe, here he eliminates the obvious solution quickly and then builds on the existing mythology and makes it even more involved. That's good, because since about the halfway mark this series has teetered on the edge of becoming tedious.
Virtually every spinoff story has been the same - the undead attack, it looks bad for our heroes, and they manage to elude death at the last moment by some mechanism or another.
Even the main series has been guilty of marking time while events played out. But Johns has managed to keep it fresh (if a bit gruesome at times, with grisly deaths aplenty) as unexpected events continue to pile up.
The series also leans heavily on penciller Ivan Reis with inks by Oclair Albert and Joe Prado and colors by Alex Sinclair. Reis turns in loads of stunning work here, with more than one impressive splash page (including an amazing cavalry charge page).
There are a couple of big plot points that I can't really discuss without giving too much away - one makes for a good cliffhanger, but another revelation is mighty difficult to swallow, given what we know about the DC Universe - but as origins go, it's not so major that it harms the story in any way.
So far, this has been a darn good series. We'll see if the creative team can seal the deal with the final issue next month. Here's hoping!
Grade: A-
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