Justice League #34

The best team stories are the ones where different characters all have a different role to play in some way that's more sophisticated than whether their superpower is to communicate with sea life or run very fast. Justice League #34, "Unlikely Allies," is a fascinating phase deep into a very deep strategic game with several players representing several different sides. We can't actually see who has what planned, but in this issue, Geoff Johns gives us a glance at a few players' cards.

Aside from the classic heroes whose interests are presumably aligned, we have front and center Lex Luthor, who has been teased as a good guy in stories going back to the Sixties. This always ends with him turning out to be a very dark agent practicing duplicity or a self-interested party capable of serving the greater good when it serves his interests. We've seen the former in 1961's Death of Superman and Kingdom Come and the latter in Final Crisis, Injustice: Gods Above and many other stories. Since Forever Evil, it's been hard to decipher Luthor's game plan, but we know by the end of JL #34 that he is masking his true intentions and is allied with Owlman. This makes it more tantalizing to re-read the scene where he asks Wonder Woman to use her lasso on him but she does not, because he has apparently engineered that interaction very carefully to seem like a conflicted figure in order to keep her from actually using her lasso and discovering his deception.

That revelation, however, isn't the "bwah hah hah" revelation of evil that it might be in a simpler story. Owlman was possibly being forthright in Forever Evil when he proposed an alliance with Dick Grayson against the stronger members of the Crime Syndicate. While we can't expect the best of Owlman's desire to take possession of the super-powerful offspring of Ultraman and Superwoman, he may have some endgame in mind that is not entirely at cross-purposes with the Justice League.

What makes it credible that the moderately-evil characters in this ongoing story might be allied with the heroes is the looming threat of a purely-evil menace as discussed by Cyborg and seen in Justice League #34. The sentient ring from Power Ring, now fighting for control of Jessica Cruz, has indicated that its intention is to lure the being who destroyed Earth 3 to Earth 0 so it can take possession of Superwoman's child, the very same objective that Owlman has. It is unclear, though, how these three sides square off, except that it is unlikely that they are all aligned. Owlman probably does not crave destruction for its own sake, and would prefer to be as powerful as possible on some Earth or another. Luthor, no  doubt, would like that same outcome for himself, a vision that could place them into alliance or eventual conflict.

The spare information we have about the really evil characters is that some unknown character is helping the Anti-Monitor find worlds to consume, which is feeding him energy for an anticipated battle with Darkseid. Darkseid, the conqueror of Earth 2 and would-be conqueror from the DCNU's earliest stories, Final Crisis and countless previous works, has nonetheless been allied with our heroes against the Anti-Monitor in COIE. The win our heroes need to engineer may involve playing the two evil forces against one another. This story is likely to play out on a grand scale over the coming months, with tie-ins galore, certainly including Earth 2, likely the Green Lantern/New Gods Godhead miniseries, and possibly Multiversity, although in the past Grant Morrison stories have maintained separation from other plans other than a few minor points of tie-in.

The heroes see a deeper game, with Batman and Superman planning to snare Luthor, but perhaps not nearly as deep as the game really is. Johns is setting up one of his epic crossovers such as we've seen done – usually quite well – over the past 7 years. Among other mysteries that he's keeping secret is the identity of the character who is allied with the Anti-Monitor. Johns has a flare for going "big" with his villains, which makes me wonder if he'll bring Superboy Prime, one of his regulars from pre-Flashpoint, into this story, or perhaps Volthoom from Green Lantern lore, although he has also used characters as obscure as Nekron and Qull of the Five Inversions, and could possibly draw from just about any story in DC's past, but it is more Johns' style to use an existing character here, whether prominent or obscure, than present us with someone totally new.

The main upshot is that we are approaching a story on a grand scale and this issue is an important one on that path. The action scenes in JL #34 and even the revelation of Captain Cold's duplicity seem like minor sideplots while the grand design moves forward. We know, in the main, that good will prevail, but there could be some wonderful sound and fury along the way.

Forever Evil #7

Geoff Johns is, as we already knew, orchestrating serial events, now in the New 52 as he did for much of the past several years beginning with Infinite Crisis. Trinity War led right into Forever Evil, and it's long been apparent that another event would take the baton, in due time, from this one.

While it followed many familiar patterns from pre-Flashpoint continuity, Forever Evil ended on an original note, or at the very least blended a large number of stories we'd seen before. Johns did some of his most inventive work in creating or adapting new characters in his reimagined Crime Syndicate, although most of that squad, save its own Trinity, is now dead.

Probably the single greatest surprise of the series is that the heavy hitters of the Justice League did absolutely nothing to defeat the big bads. Batman and Cyborg played supporting roles in the victory, but most of the Leaguers needed to be saved themselves, thereby disproving the old adage that every major DC event ends with Superman punching something.

The event's possible death was teased but Dick Grayson literally came back from the dead. We've seen the death of the Nightwing character, but DC's ninth-oldest superhero lives to fight another day.

The great original stroke of the series is that a group of classic super villains saved the day, not in a supporting role, but doing almost all of the heavy lifting. Luthor prevailed as the central figure, leading the more powerful members of his team, slaying two members of the Crime Syndicate, and single-handedly saving Dick Grayson, Batman, and Superman. This leads to Luthor asking for JLA membership in Justice League #30, seizing to capitalize on his role as a human savior with no superhuman powers.

But, despite Luthor's plausible story while lassoed by Wonder Woman, is this all just an act? Luthor surely has the ability, whether with self hypnosis or some other means, to fake his way around that test. The older story guiding the narrative here might be 1961's "Death of Superman" story in which Luthor pretends, over an extended period of time, to turn good in order to lure Superman into a death trap. Despite outward appearances, perhaps Luthor is doing so here. Evidence of this is his unilateral invitation of Shazam to join the Justice League despite his ongoing disdain of superpowered beings. Maybe Shazam's strength will be utilized by Luthor in a future devastating strike against the Justice League. This would hearken to another existing story in which Luthor used a mind-controlled Shazam as a weapon against Superman, Kingdom Come. The richest possibilties might be for the story to explore Luthor as a hero for several months, then have him find out, to his own surprise, that he'd been acting that way as a ruse involving self hypnosis, with the heroes struggling to fend off his betrayal.

Johns was also used misdirection in his clues regarding the bigger threat to come. While it seemed all along (and still does, to Superman at least) that Darkseid was the threat behind Earth Three's destruction, we find out at the end that the Anti-Monitor is the muscle behind the event, but someone still unknown is the mastermind. This is in keeping with Johns' love of throwing the biggest villains into a surprise reveal, and he's used the Anti-Monitor for this purpose before, with one page at the end of Sinestro Corps War Special #1 containing Sinestro, Parallax, Superboy Prime, Cyborg Superman, the Manhunters, and the Anti-Monitor. Johns also used the Anti-Monitor in Blackest Night. Here, we see a war of unsurpassable proportions building: The Anti-Monitor and his unseen master are planning an attack against Darkseid. In order to gain power for these attacks, he consumes the energy of a positive-matter universe, and he began with Earth Three. As I observed in an earlier post, destroying Earth Three is precisely how Crisis on Infinite Earths began, so Johns is setting up a sequel to that event. For those who are keeping score in the New 52, Darkseid has been turned away from an attack on Earth Prime, and has devastated Earth Two, nearly conquering it. Now we see that his nemesis has taken Earth Three for its sheer energy, and we have the makings of a battle that could carry over to any of the 49 other Earths as well.

Again, we see Johns riffing on older stories on an unprecedented level, as even Infinite Crisis was a sequel to COIE. Forever Evil #7 managed to remix old themes just enough to avoid the series being a forgettable retelling of ideas we'd seen before. Johns continues to keep interest going, but he's teetering on the edge of a Crisis of Infinite Story Recycling.

Forever Evil #1-4

As a homicidal Superman from an alternate universe rages unstoppably across the pages of a DC company-wide event, he is met by a confident Black Adam, who finds himself easily swatted away and the menacing alternate Superman continues unchecked.

That was a powerful dramatic moment in Forever Evil #3, penned by Geoff Johns. And the same description applies to a powerful dramatic moment in Infinite Crisis #6, penned by Geoff Johns. In the earlier story, the alternate Superman was Superboy Prime; in the more recent one, 7 and a half years later, the alternate Superman was Ultraman. Both stories have a primary menace from Earth Three, and a lot of the same characters on stage for a seven-issue event. One recalls art critic David Quantick's quotation "Pop will eat itself." Maybe Geoff Johns' company-wide events will eat themselves, too.

The New 52, or DCnU, is a reboot of the post-Infinite Crisis universe which began in the very issue I cited above. In many ways, it's a hard reboot, but as an allusion to the Sinestro Corps War (another company-wide event by Geoff Johns) reminds us, major portions of previous history are still in continuity. This messy blend between hard reboot and soft reboot don't improve the reading experience. We're reminded that Batman briefly wore a yellow power ring, but within pages of this, we are shown Catwoman marveling over being invited into the Batcave. Perhaps once that was a shocking moment, but in extremely recent DC history, that was old news. Likewise, to see that Batman had prepared a countermeasure for each member of the JLA was a striking moment back in Mark Waid's JLA story Tower of Babel.

As Forever Evil continues, we see familiar plot devices that are still in continuity, having survived the Flashpoint reboot. We see other familiar plot devices that are "new" to the characters but old to us, and as the two kinds of scene intersperse, I find myself asking if I'm supposed to be thinking "Oh, yeah" or "Hey, wow!" and gradually ceasing to feel invested in the story.

When this story began as Trinity War, I felt like many scenes were excellent, showing us the DCnU in fascinating scenes, with J'onn J'onzz and Shazam confronting Superman for the "first" time. It was clear in these scenes that their meetings were unfolding in very different ways from the previous continuity, and with better characterization this time around. As Trinity War gave way to Forever Evil, there's been less that's in any sense new, and more rehash of old themes.

It doesn't have to be this way. In a sense, the DCnU began in the mid-2000s with Geoff Johns showing succinct flashbacks (in Blackest Night, among other places) to early DC history that took the facts from the 1960s JLA (the same lineup, costumes, and villains) but adding the richer characterization that didn't exist in the 1960s. And so we see egos clashing as several Alpha males (and one Alpha female) had to find a new dynamic where none could dominate the others. This was new. This added something to the lore, making it better. Forever Evil dabbles in adding new things to the lore, but it feels like the tires are stuck in old ruts and will follow the same paths we've been led down before.

Perhaps there is a grander payoff in store. This story began with the destruction of Earth Three. It is hard to overlook the fact that a central element in DC lore, Crisis on Infinite Earths, also began with the destruction of Earth Three. In both cases, a common enemy bent on the destruction of everything that wasn't his destroyed the world of the Crime Syndicate before posing a threat to the worlds of our heroes later on. This itself was a grand thematic gesture, as it was the introduction of Earth Three back in 1964 that gave us the notion of a vast multiverse (and not just a pair of alternate universes).

If Johns is starting off with Earth Three in order to take the older story and reinvent it, with Darkseid now taking a role like that which the Anti-Monitor played before, we may be in the middle chapters of a series of events which will turn into a longer epic that adds to the existing lore instead of merely repeating it. If so, then Forever Evil, at least the earlier portions of it, may be recorded as a doldrum in a grand, memorable story.

If, however, we see in predictable fashion, the Justice Leagues escape from their prison, the forces of Luthor and Batman gradually gain in power before winning a climactic fistfight against the Crime Syndicate, then I'm going to have to question if following this epic was more entertaining than pulling old issues out of my collection to re-read stories that were at least original when they were new.

Blackest Night Review

"The dark things cannot stand the light." So we were told at the end of the first eight-page Green Lantern story back in 1940. It's one of the world's most basic metaphors. The evil we fear is darkness; good is the light that makes it go away. Hal Jordan's oath borrowed the idea from Alan Scott's, stretching his responsibility to include even the "blackest night". For the heroes of the DCU, with Green Lanterns front and center, Blackest Night has come and passed.

For DC Comics itself, Blackest Night has been anything but. In February 2010, DC's seven top-selling comics had at least some link to the event, with the series itself easily outdistancing Marvel's top offerings. Fan reaction has been positive to glowing. Particularly given the grousing that crossover events can generate, Blackest Night has been one of the standout success stories of its kind. The second major event built around Geoff Johns' longer opus magnum run with Hal Jordan as Green Lantern, this series will live fondly in many readers' memory beyond the eleven months it dominated the comic book stores.

The story clearly does a lot of things right to get readers happy: There is big action, mystery, and surprises. Because this was a story where characters could actually die (for good, as well as temporarily), suspense meant more than in a typical issue where the hero has to survive. Encounters between heroes and Black Lanterns were full of emotion -- with the emotion being an important plot element, no less. While the biggest DC characters got their own crossover miniseries, minor characters who had not been seen in years or even decades made appearances. And besides all of the flashbacks, the Flash was back, with Barry Allen seeing some of his first action in years. While the "Trinity" and others had their crossovers, Blackest Night was frequently a buddy flick, the Hal and Barry Show. Barry had the best lines, telling the second-stringers that they were now Superman and Wonder Woman, and staring resolutely ahead when he tells us what we had to know -- that the Black Lantern rings may be fast, but he's faster.

For all of that, the story delivers on its thematic promises in odd or erratic ways. Remarkably, though Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps ranged across many star systems, almost fifty percent of the main series takes place in one fixed spot in Coast City, no bigger than a baseball field! The identity of the villain was withheld for a while, then revealed in an interview; when he arrived, he was almost without personality, a point the story itself asserted. The "rules" of the Black Lantern conflict, as they were revealed, absolutely defined the course of events, but were arbitrary, unforeseeable, and unexplained. Why did the Bruce Wayne clone's skull provide the black power rings? It just did. Why did Dove have the ability to dissolve Black Lanterns? She just did. Why did the seven beams of the seven lanterns have no effect on the Black Central Power Battery? They just didn't. That many prophecies (such as Sinestro saving the day) were fulfilled was never mentioned. The story ran its course and ended with all of those questions unanswered, most of them surely never to be answered, and no reason left for us particularly to care what their answers would have been.

This sort of disconnect was a serious liability in Johns' previous company-wide crossover, Infinite Crisis. That story began with the "Trinity" airing grievances aimed at one another. It ended with that superest of trios walking happily off into the sunset (and a year's furlow) together, with the grievances forgotten, not resolved.

Blackest Night, however, has a deeper meaning, one not rooted in the superheroes of the DCU. What plagues the heroes in this story is the way they remembered their lost loved ones, a concern we all face in real life. The "hearts" that grieving tears out in the real world are the metaphorical ones, the emotions of those left behind in a pain that can occupy and weaken the survivor for however long, until the living turn back to life. This meaning was implicit by the time the series had hit issue #2, but was never developed further nor explained for the benefit of all readers. So the deep meaning with real-world relevance -- a rarity among comic books -- came early and then the action and unpredictable twists driven by rules we learned as we saw them took over.

For the meaning inside the world of the DCU, we find out the upshot in the final pages. Death, for now, really means death again. And the future for the living is bright: Geoff Johns (and Dan Didio) have finally gotten the band back together: The Satellite Era of the Justice League has all [but the Dibnys] of its members alive and well (or will as soon as Bruce Wayne climbs out of the past). Kendra Saunders has been replaced by the Hawkgirl who joined the JLA in the Seventies. Aquaman looks like he hasn't looked since the early Eighties. The Martian Manhunter's two years off have ended (he was sidelined for longer than that in the Seventies just from lack of interest). And with the return of the original Firestorm, it looks like the Justice League, deemed untouchable by Hal in Blackest Night #0, has had their clock reset. At least those individuals have -- whether or not they reform the team remains to be seen. But it's clear that a larger design, restoring all of the figures of DC's shining years of the Bronze Age, has been completed. Getting there came from a hot-selling, fast-moving series that kept us all entertained for almost a year. The world has been refigured into the Satellite Era's image. Now, how is that going to go?

Best of the Decade #7

It's been often observed that the hero of a serial cannot be allowed to die, for the sake of the series, and therefore the drama is lessened. This has often been doubly true of superhero comics, wherein the hero not only must survive, but also win. When this constraint is lifted, the results can be shocking and powerful. And that's just how Blackest Night #1 ended.

The Silver Age Hawkman and Elongated Man represent a decade and a half of the prime years of the Justice League of America; they were among the first and the last, respectively, JLA members to have joined during the Satellite Era when the comics showed a bit more complexity than in the feel-good early Sixties, but were still a venue in which the good guys always won. Moreover, Elongated Man was always a very light-hearted hero, smiling and wisecracking his way through cases. When you put a character like that into a dark situation, the darkness is felt all the more so. This added to the impact of the Dibnys' victimization at the hands of Doctor Light in Identity Crisis. And to the impact of the Black Lantern Dibnys attacking Hawkman and Hawkgirl as the first appearance we'd seen of a Black Lantern in action. We didn't know what the rules were, but it proved to be about as dark as possible: Black Lantern Ralph Dibny spoke with whimsy ("Hiya, Winged Wonder!") while his actions spelled bloody murder. Carter Hall's bloodied face and Ralph Dibny's rotted, grinning maw turned the whole genre from superhero to horror.

However, this affair ends (potentially, any of the foursome could end up resurrected; but then again, they could remain dead), this scene will never be forgotten by DC comic fans.

At #6, we'll see a scene that plays the opposite end of our expectations -- a story that sold us an unhappy ending all the way, and then showed us just what the hero was made of.

Superman: Secret Origin #1

The artist takes a pencil and traces an oval where the face will be. Rather than touching the pencil to the paper and drawing it in one solid curve, the oval is composed of many shorter arcs, parallel, intersecting, concentric. Each one nudges the outline from where the previous faint lines had begun, adjusting them, repositioning the curve, correcting it. The pencil is flipped and the eraser rubs some graphite off the page; a sleeve wipes the rubber and dust away, and then the pencil goes back to work. At some point, a mannequin-like shape is there, and then a face is drawn inside, outside, and over it, without ever erasing the original imperfect outline. Eventually it will have life. Eventually it will be a face. Little strokes keep touching it up, making it better, or at least different. 

Superman is a work in progress. I first realized this when I was nine and he was forty, when the movie portrayed details differently than the comics I'd been reading. Jor-El had white hair instead of black. He wore a shining robe instead of a green shirt. And many other details, important to me, had been changed. The unescapable conclusion was that the movie must be flawed; I preferred the familiar to the new.

Around that time, my teacher asked me if I could bring a comic book to school. They wanted to have one of the art teachers make a poster featuring Superman and needed an example for her to draw him from. I proudly brought in one of my late-Seventies comics, with its two dozen pages of Superman drawn by Curt Swan, countless panels for the art teacher to choose from as the basis for her poster. When I saw the final product, three feet tall hanging inside the main doors of the school, I was aghast -- she had chosen the best drawing in the comic for her purposes, but it was the wrong Superman -- the Earth Two Superman, who was posed heroically in an ad for DC Comics, unrelated to the story. Something about his face was wrong, but -- more appalling for me -- his chest symbol was flat at the bottom instead of coming to a point. I felt like a traitor to the cause of artistic truth; given a chance to personally select the vision of Superman that my whole school would see, I had introduced the "wrong Superman". It distinctly upset me, in a way I couldn't explain to anyone.

A decade later, I was in college. I hadn't read many comics over the previous six years, and had totally missed the changes wrought by The Man of Steel. When I picked up Time Magazine's 1988 article on Superman turning fifty years old, and read that Luthor had been turned into a businessman who had dated Lois. I felt about this Lex Luthor probably like Pope Leo X had felt about Martin Luther. The article didn't explain that there had been a "reboot", so I imagined that somehow old Silver Age Lex had figured out a way to woo devoted, Silver Age, Kurt Schaffenberger Lois away from Superman, and I didn't much like the thought of it. It seemed to be not merely an artist decision in one serial but a sign that somehow the whole world had gone sick and wrong.

If the editors had known how sour my reaction was, they would have winked at the camera, Clark Kent style, when they saw me, a few days later, buying a Superman comic at the college bookstore. This was a turn of events that surely would not have taken place if the Time article had led me to believe that everything in Superman's world was just as it had been when I'd stopped buying comic books. And when I picked up that issue to see that Brainiac had also been radically transformed from the android I'd known him to be, I didn't like it, but I was interested. This sent me down the path that led to buying large numbers of back issues, eventually owning the entire sequence from Man of Steel to the then-current day. It would have been foolish not to be self-aware enough to recognize that my reborn interest in the Superman series was a product of the new directions they had taken. And when an artistic decision provides me with something I enjoy, I can't readily call it bad.

And yet, having accepted the principle of reinventing periodically The Man of Tomorrow, having learned about his past versions as well as those that followed Byrne, I had recently come to worry about Superman. I knew that many fans still yearned for the same Superman I had been raised on in the Seventies while, contrarily, other fans who had embraced (or known only) the post-Byrne Superman were upset by the reintroduction of Silver Age elements in recent years. Overwhelmed by the many little tweaks in Superman's mythology -- and big ones -- coming from Dan Jurgens, Mark Waid, Geoff Johns, Darwin Cooke, and many others, I felt like the pencil drawing from my opening paragraph had been made, irrevocably, into a smudged and smeared blur, with every facet of Superman's visage sitting on the page for only moments before someone sought to erase it. While many fans were bothered immeasurably by some detail of Superman's latest version, I felt like he was more than anything lost in the multiplicity of version. How could I really care what kind of tail fins the rocket that Superman rode to Earth had if the absolute rock-solid canonical version from the Bronze Age was reimagined on an almost biennial basis?

If you'd asked me, even days ago, I would have told you that the Byrne reboot had retroactively become the worst thing that ever happened to Superman because it opened a Pandora's Box of relative truth in Superman's mythology, making every detail not only tentative, but evanescent like vapor. Whereas once it made sense to print a Superman encyclopedia, logging all of his significant history in a prestige volume, now Superman was lost in the multiple accounts, never again to be an icon, just the central figure in a cluttered scrapbook full of so many alternate versions of Bizarro, Krypto, and Supergirl that you couldn't tell the current one from any of the outdated ones. I feared that Geoff Johns had no chance of meaningfully setting the record straight with his upcoming Superman: Secret Origins, and that all he could do was add another voice to the cacophony.

When I read the first issue, just hours ago, I was very pleasantly surprised.

I expected good writing. What I didn't expect was the approach. Maybe Johns' notion of Kryptonian guilds should have tipped me off. The genius of this issue is how well it weaves different eras of Superman together. Johns neither embraces the Superman of my (and his) childhood slavishly nor invents, with a flourish, his own. He begins the issue almost exactly like Man of Steel began, showing young Clark coming to acknowledge his burgeoning powers during a game of football. He changes Clark's age, and moves the game from a stadium to the sandlot, but clearly Johns, suspected by many of being a shill for the Silver Age opened with conciliation, giving Byrne's version the first say. Later, of course we saw Silver Age touches and "Movie" Superman (before moving from film to comics, Johns was Richard Donner's assistant). And if you'd asked me this morning, I would have told you that seeing homages to Smallville was the last thing I wanted to see in this series, but when I saw the red jacket and the hormonally-inspired flashes of heat vision, I admired the spirit of peacemaking. And, crucially, the grace with which it was done, doing no damage to the overall fabric. By the time we saw the issue end with another pinpoint nod to Byrne's first issue, with Clark putting on a Martha Kent rendition of the world's most famous tights, we had a story whose seams were evident only to those who'd seen the constituent parts before the sewing began.

Superman is the Great American Hero, and America is a country that was saved by a quirky Constitutional fiat called the Great Compromise. If Superman was being torn apart in a creative tug of war, Geoff Johns has refused to pick sides. He's come down hard on the side of not favoring sides. Ultimately, the kind of tail fins the rocket has don't matter so much as the adoption of a version of Superman that reminds a plurality of fans of Superman. What could be more pleasing to Superman than to have everybody win?

In Brightest Day

The Worlds' Series

Two monthly series. Four events. Sixty-seven issues and counting. That is the slate upon which writer Geoff Johns and some very talented artists have rendered the Green Lantern mythology anew.

The story stars Hal Jordan, but features dozens of other Green Lanterns, including four other men who hail from Earth (and in fact, from the United States). It is an intricate braid of DC's post-Crisis history, Hal's Silver Age history, some evocative stories by ace writer Alan Moore, numerous retcons, and, naturally, a lot of new material. The signature devices of the Green Lantern series have been the creation of structures within which most past storylines fit neatly, and in which the broad details of future storylines are easy to anticipate. These structures combine old story elements with new ones, and have the feel of Greek tragedy, with timeless prophecies guiding the story along as though it is on rails. These prophecies of doom are in complete opposition to the norms of superhero comics, in which good must prevail, and the hero must triumph. In fact, because this new story of Hal Jordan reverses his earlier downfall, the story is a sort of anti-tragedy wearing tragic clothes. As it twists and turns new and old story elements around one another, it also winds backwards and forwards through time. Flashbacks to the past are frequent, as are prophecies of the future. Prophecies within flashbacks tie in to the present. Events are told mosaic style, being introduced briefly, then receiving elaboration later. Tiny clues to later storylines have been planted far in anticipation of their bearing fruit, leaving us to wonder how many future stories have already begun before the current plot has unfolded. There are echoes of Silver Age stories so subtle that only an aficianado can catch them.

For all this, being as complex as you could ask on a structural level, the story is easy to understand issue-by-issue, and for this, along with a shameless love of its heroes, the series has lofted Hal Jordan to among the very top selling characters in comic books. 

Redemption

Green Lantern Rebirth reversed Hal Jordan's downfall and death by reimagining the earlier stories, explaining his path of destruction as a sin of weakness, not evil itself, but rather allowing an evil entity to possess him. The separation between the man and the sin is made extraordinary explicity, putting him to battle against the giant yellow space insect embodying fear, appropriating the name, Parallax, that had earlier been applied to Jordan himself. As their battles unfold, we see Jordan sometimes inside Parallax, Parallax sometimes inside Jordan, and at other times, the two of them face-to-face. When the nature of Parallax is made clear, it is identified as the sentient embodiment of the yellow impurity inside the Central Power Battery, the embodiment of fear, and therefore of evil.

More than any other element of the relaunch, this retcon of the earlier story has been derided as an overly-convenient disposal of the non-heroic end Hal Jordan underwent years earlier. It is the first time, though, that we can see the new run pile up elements of the Silver Age Green Lantern (the second Green Lantern series, following the Golden Age series starring Alan Scott). Because it is in Green Lantern Volume 2 #9 that the impurity in the battery, the color yellow, and evil are mutually associated. In that issue, we first see Sinestro's yellow power ring and learn that the impurity can be used to create a power similar to the Green Lanterns' but opposite in orientation. In abandoning the Nineties story, Johns pivots to the Sixties and finds the basis of his story there. The yellow inside the green is evil; fear is weakness; courage is strength. Johns paints a Hal Jordan who is neither as good as the Sixties made him out to be nor as bad as the Nineties did. Hal is no longer a man born without fear nor a hero turned villain. He is a man that will overcome great fear. Who gave into it, but will overcome it. His weakness is overcome and the universe forgives him, returning him to life, along with his victims and enemy.

In time, those who would have been his victims, the "Lost" Lanterns, are saved by Hal and forgive him.

Then that leaves Batman.

In Darkest Knight

Heat flows from a warm body to a cold body. So does fame. And over the last twenty years, no DC character has had the spotlight so much as the man of the shadows, Batman. Portraying Hal Jordan and Batman as erstwhile rivals is not only good politicking for the less-famous character, it's also natural character development for both of them. Green Lantern would get attention from a rivalry with Superman, but it would have to be subtle. Superman doesn't have the ego or the opposition to what Green Lantern stands for. They are both heroes of bright and colorful light.

So Johns made Batman a hurdle that Hal had to overcome, in his past as well as present incarnations. Batman has appeared on-panel in every series where Hal has starred, and their relationship is never simply that of allies. The opposition of their tactics is developed at length in GL #9 (Volume 4, which is to be presumed from here on when I don't specify 'Volume 2') and how Hal's fearlessness grates on Batman is explained by John Stewart in GL Rebirth #1. The two trade barbs, punches, and eventually begrudging respect. But even as late as Blackest Night, we see flashbacks to a simmering rivalry in the early days of the Justice League, a retconned Silver Age history that grossly violates the tone of Sixties' comics, but feels true today. It's the history that these characters had to have had, but that we couldn't see until now, when the all-smiles era of superheroes has yielded to character development (at least, in moderation).

Making the Most of Moore

Just as Batman is at the pinnacle of fame among DC heroes, Alan Moore, who had a brilliant but limited tenure writing for DC, is at the pinnacle among comic book writers. Johns has built on Moore's past stories in both large ways and small. When Guy Gardner says "Mogo wants to socialize", Johns is making an in-joke by citing a former story's title, but it is worth noting that the writer of that story is the illustrious Mr. Moore. And Mogo, Moore's invention, has figured into Johns' version of the Green Lantern Corps in key ways.

The odd line aside, the nod to Moore ideas was more apparent when a pair of issues borrowed the Black Mercy that Moore had put onto Superman (and Batman) in an acclaimed story and gave Green Lantern and Green Arrow their turns with it. A one-panel glance at "For The Man Who Has Everything" appears in Blackest Night: Tales of the Corps #1, the second story of which closes with narration that quotes the 1985 story verbatim.

Another Moore invention appeared in the Green Lantern Corps Recharge mini-series, a character named Bolphunga the Unrelenting.

Still, this is small-scale use of Moore's ideas compared with the sweeping infliuence that the magnificent twelve-page story named "Tygers", which appeared in Tales of the Green Lantern Corps Annual #2 back in 1986. This story introduced a planet of demons, enemies of the Guardians of the Universe, one of whom used the gift of prophecy and an excellent poker face to become the instrument of death for Hal Jordan's predecessor, Abin Sur. This prophecy, and another depicting the end of the Green Lantern Corps, has become a defining element of much of Johns' run on Green Lantern. The demon Qull and his associates (retconned into a group of five aliens who have survived a massacre by the Guardians' Manhunter androids) have surfaced in flashbacks, with Johns building a new history around their encounter with Abin Sur, adding a return trip to their planet in Abin Sur's itinerary, leading to his death at the hands of a newly-minted associate (and murderer) of Qull named Atrocitus, whose role in the story has yet to conclude.

A more elaborate story that intertwined with the Sinestro Corps War was that the prophecy of the final end of the Green Lantern Corps seemed to start to play out. Several characters mentioned in the prophecy appeared in major roles, and the prophecy went a long way towards its conclusion until Green Lantern Corps #16 (written by Dave Gibbons, a frequent collaborator of Moore's) stopped at the brink with Sodam Yat and Mogo surviving mortal threats. Since we've since seen Sodam Yat alive in the distant future, the prophecy seems to have been invalidated.

Memory Lane

Naturally, the existing history of the Hal Jordan Green Lantern mythology (and that which came later with John Stewart, Guy Gardner, and Kyle Rayner) is the backstory of this run, but with a high degree of selectivity. Black Hand is far darker than his Silver Age self. But the little details are there in the old stories: William Hand did loathe his family (GL v2 #29). The Manhunters did rebel against the Guardians (JLA v1 #141). Hal and Sinestro do go beam-to-beam and Hal always wins, starting in GL v2 #9. It was even in the books -- Carol Ferris was attracted to Hector Hammond. Look it up in GL v2 #5 if you don't believe me.

The selectivity is what makes the long backstory work, and may other comic writers pay careful attention to the mastery Johns shows here. He does some "king-making", elevating some past foes to prominence while ignoring others. But he does so to build this grander story. Which foes get the greater role here? The ones who fit in to the long, eighty-issue plan directly and logically. A talking shark? No, not in the new continuity. A guy with the color motif black? Yes, definitely -- because colors have a large role to play.

The Rainbow Connection

It's simple and nonsensical, and yet strangely compelling: Each color of the ROYGBIV spectrum is an emotion. Each color has a corps. Moreover, as the story has it, the spectrum has two kinds of structure: Benevolent emotions to the blue side, malevolent ones to the red side. And, chaotic ones to the outside of the spectrum, orderly ones to the middle.

There are rules we know (blue stops red; yellow stops green) and those we don't. This simple structure took the green and yellow from old-time Green Lantern history, added in the Star Sapphires (who began as a Jay Garrick villain before vexing Hal Jordan) as violet and gave us four more to fret over. Symmetry, but broken symmetry. The orange corps has only one living member. The red spit their power out. The blue seem weak except when they are ungodly powerful. And the indigo are still somewhat of a mystery. The emotional spectrum made it easy to understand the general context but left all of the specifics for future stories. Twenty-some issues later, we've still got more to know about them and their interactions. This device has been played so well it's almost embarrassing to consider its childish simplicity.

Think about the Future

Qull's prophecy, and many others inside and outside of Johns' stories (think also of Booster Gold's time travel and JSA's last-page flashforwards), have provided a sort of in medias res device where flashbacks, prophecy, time travel, patterns that run across multiple story elements, and hints from the creators have wound the past and present into a braid that is easier to glimpse in parts than as a whole.

As a result, when seven issues coming well into the series tell the "Secret Origin" of Hal Jordan, it's not a digression from the larger story, but a way of inserting convenient details into the past so they can come to fruition right now. One issue after Secret Origin ended, a character introduced in it attacked our heroes. When we see Sinestro destroy Hal's plane in Rebirth #5, the event lacks context until Secret Origin's fourth issue. Piecemeal we get the story. This makes it worth of study. Otherwise, you might miss details like that the Indigo Lanterns' mission to spread goodwill was explained way back in GL #25. You might miss that Johns is bowing not just to Moore's excellence but also to his own extensions to the mythology when he reminds us years after the original panel of Kyle's ring-powered archery practice on Sinestro's back and the line, "Green Arrow says 'hi'."

By mixing the past, present, and future selectively, Johns' run has maximized interest and suspense. It is easy to tell that something is going to happen. It is hard to know what. When we were told that John Stewart would see his dead love Katma Tui again, we might not have imagined it would be with her as the Black Lantern zombie who rose in Blackest Night #1. Although it was possible to guess: The foretelling of their reunion came after the foretelling of Blackest Night. Clues have been embedded so deeply in the earliest parts of this run: The Emotional Spectrum and Blackest Night were first mentioned in Green Lantern #6. The individual colors were first listed by Cyborg Superman and a Guardian in Sinestro Corps War Special. Knowing that details can be so pregnant with meaning, we have to wonder about gremlins and the death of Martin Jordan. We have to look twice at Green Lantern Rebirth #2's line that hoping is what Superman does best.

We have predictions that Sinestro "Sinestro will be the greatest Green Lantern again" (Sinestro Corps War Special) and that he will oppose the Five Inversions' revenge. We know tht if the universe is to survive, willpower and fear must come together (GL #25) and that Sinestro will tell Hal Jordan "I can't do this without you" (GL #42).

Looking almost certainly further into the future, we have a prophecy that Hal will become renegade once more (GL #37) after the Guardians take away his greatest love. And -- don't miss this -- the universe will divide.

Top of the Charts

With layer upon layer of narrative masterstroke, Johns has put the Green Lantern series, more of an ensemble deal than the relentlessly Hal-driven covers would suggest, into the top tier of the DC Universe. Certainly where sales are concerned. Green Lantern is outselling any single title starring Superman or Spider-Man, and has been for some time. And it's not because Johns has given Hal a Betty to go with his "Veronica" (GL #20). It's not because he showed us the Anti-Monitor, Sinestro, Cyborg Superman, Parallax, and Superboy Prime in one panel. It's because he's using a richly intertwined narrative of Homeric proportions. This run has transcended the genre while stooping (the Emotional Spectrum) to its guiltiest pleasures of simplicity and Jack Kirby's art of always topping himself. Before Sinestro Corps War was over, we already saw the bigger thing coming, and now, with Blackest Night upon us, the next bigger thing yet is taking shape. You don't need to be Qull of the Five Inversions to see that Green Lantern is going to be successful well past this year.