Some Post-Blackest Night observations

I’ve purposely waited a week to make any comment on the Blackest Night finale and the series as a whole. But now that I’ve gathered my thoughts, I can reveal my major peeves about the crossover:

1] Hal Jordan is the ultimate hero of this piece.

I saw it coming before Blackest Night started, but I had hoped Geoff Johns would surprise me. However, he still views Hal Jordan as the coolest guy in the universe and probably has several t-shirts to prove it. At this stage Johns needs a Hal Jordan blow-up doll really bad and I might spring for a hotel suite so he can it out of his system.

2] Deputizing Lex Luthor and co into the rainbow corps.

Disliking Lex as a Lantern isn’t surprising to me, since I hate most of the non-green ring-wielding variety of corps. There, I said it. I only like the Red and Yellow lanterns, but I think there should only one red ring and one yellow ring. Maybe red and/or yellow rings could it seek out different wearers on different occasions. The red lantern story could not only be a ‘who is the angriest hero/villain in the DCU at a specific moment in time’, but could also explore ‘why hero/villain is so angry’ and that’s already two sides of a story. Ditto the Yellow ring. Alternatively, maybe DC could make The Quest for the One True Red Lantern their next big event and then The Quest for the One True Yellow Lantern could follow that.

Back to Lex: I thought they tried to make him relevant to a story that was a bit beyond his circle.

The other deputies? The thing with Scarecrow becoming a Yellow Lantern is perhaps an interesting idea, but it could cause DC more problems than they can handle if made permanent. The Star Sapphire Wonder Woman seemed really unnecessary.

3] They didn’t resurrect Ted Kord.

This was also predictable since bringing Ted back would reverse what That Writer has done and whatever That Writer does is considered DC canon the instant he does it. Johns is smart enough to not undo anything That Writer writes or suggests to others to write, because that would be heresy and threaten to split DC in two.

Also, while alive Ted Kord was one of the heroes who spent the least amount of time on-page with Hal Jordan EVAR. Go back through your back issues. You’ll see I’m right. Now, if Ted had begged to be on Jordan’s JLE way back and sucked up to Hal, Hal would’ve talked to him more and in turn Johns might’ve liked Ted more. Since Hal is the cool kid and doesn’t talk to Ted, Ted must not be cool enough to resurrect in Geoff John’s opinion.

Although, Ted is back in some form in Booster Gold...

4] The whole Kendra-Shayera thing

I’m not going to say a lot here. I shall however say this: I love Kendra and have always sort of hated Shayera. Don’t ask me why, because Shayera isn’t anywhere as annoying as Donna Troy. Kendra's got so much spunk while (for me) Shayera is just sort of there.

Here’s hoping Brightest Day pans out well.

Organically created major comic events and webcomics…

My comments on Blackest Night have been sparse, because I’ve been so excited by the event that I didn’t want to jinx it. The reason for my excitement lies in the fact that Blackest Night premise seems organic to me.

Allow me to explain. If you know the history of the guardians (who they are and some of the stuff they’ve done) and the GL Corps (how they operate) only superficially to mildly well, you would believe premise of Blackest Night. It’s even believable that Nekron would try to exploit the above. Blackest Night seems to be the product of organic extrapolation in that sense.

Yet more organic creation for your enjoyment:

A while back, I came across a superhero team webcomic called Awesome Storm Justice 41, which was created via spontaneous organic collaboration: an internet forum discussion turned into a webcomic with multiple collaborators. It all started when internet forum members were just playing around with superhero ideas when a commenter noted that it sounded cool and came up with the name Awesome Storm Justice 41 right there. The peeps on the forum loved the name and adopted it for actual webcomic project. They even had an open call for character concepts (hero name and proposed powers) to be used in webcomic. It must’ve been quite a feeling to be part of this type of spontaneous event. It’s a comedy webcomic, by the way.

Please note that this post was NOT meant to suggest that Organic is always better, as is illustrated with this image: