"But I Did It. And I Still Do": Last Thoughts On Geoff Johns & Matters Of Life & Death In "Blackest Night"

12.

Should anyone doubt how carefully and deliberately Geoff Johns has structured "Blackest Night", they need only turn to the opening page of the book's prologue. For in the comic's very first two panels, we're shown what appears to be a throwaway, mood-setting example of portentous superhero cosmology, a reduction of the physics of the Big Bang to a punch-up between "light" and "dark". But it's a foreshadowing, of course, of the revelation in chapter 7 concerning the game-changing existence of "The Entity", described by Ganthet at 7:21:1 as "The living light bestowed upon this Universe that triggered existence itself". And so those first two panels establish right from the off that "Blackest Night" is to be a story of a Manichean war between "light" and "darkness", life and death, while the third panel follows that information up by telling us something of the super-heroic footsoldiers who'll be fighting in the frontlines of that conflict.

But in panels four and five of that first page, it's the sub-text of "Blackest Night" that's being introduced every bit as much as it's the raising of the superheroic dead that's being augured. Because while, on its surface, "Blackest Night" will be concerned with a host of hyper-powered melees between the forces of order in the DCU and the undead armies of Nekron and his lieutenant Black Hand, underneath those events run a more subtle and moving meaning that underpins and informs all of of those big punches being thrown and ring-beams being projected. For, put simply,


"Blackest Night" is a tale that's concerned to discuss how human beings try to make sense of death just as much as it is a widescreen comicbook adventure about a war between various superfolks and several very large armies of zombies. And it's the unpretentious and down-to-earth reflections upon the harrowing business of facing up to the facts of death in the real world which ground Mr Johns tale, which lends it a measure of force and emotion that all the super-powered brawling compacted into its pages couldn't of itself generate.

And that's why the prologue's initial page ends on the blank tombstone of what the superheroes in the DCU believe to be The Batman's tombstone. For "Blackest Night" is, of course, to be a blockbuster event in which dead superheroes are raised from the grave. But it's also going to be, in its own way, a story about how none of us, fictional or otherwise, can ever understand enough about the facts of death to reduce its harrowing presence to a comforting truism on a block of stone. It's a theme that will be concluded at the end of "Blackest Night", where Barry Allen and Hal Jordan are shown gathered once again at the Wayne family's


burial plot after almost 250 pages of struggle and bafflement. And where other such "cosmic" books which have touched on so much tragedy might end on a comforting note of faith, a belief in life eternal, in good folks going to their deserved reward, and a purpose for all despite the confusion and suffering of everyday existence, Mr Johns gives his characters an untypically limited, baffled, pragmatic, secular and existential epilogue to close the story with;

"I don't know why the Earth or the sky or people exist. And the fact is I'll probably never know. But I do know one thing, Barry. When you told Black Hand we were the ones that give life purpose, you were right ..... Ganthet thinks there's a bigger picture to it all. One we'll eventually see ... I don't know." (8.39/1-2)

For though the arch-protagonist Nekron will be defeated in "Blackest Night", and a sense of order will be restored to the DCU, the superheroes who emerge alive from the war will know no more about life and death than you or I do, and in many ways, that's the whole point of the entire story. And in the place of comforting homilies and spiritual pablum, the closing meaning of "Blackest Night" is that the only way to deal with the realities of death is to refuse to allow them to define for us the meaning of our lives.


13.

Just about every character given a moment of screen time in the eight chapters of "Blackest Night" has had their personality and their behaviour distorted to a considerable degree by the way in which they think and feel about death. Hal Jordan, for example, believes at first that he doesn't fear death, that "Death is overrated" (3:18:6). But he's soon revealed to be so very scared for Carol Ferris that he's willing to race off to her defence without even considering how his colleagues on Earth, and the planet itself, will cope without him. (3:18:5) Barry Allen's so disconcerted

by the inevitability of his own mortality that he can't bring himself to slow down from his obsessive desire to help others in order to experience something of a life of his own. (3:19:4) William Hand kills himself and seeks to do the same for everyone else because he's so alienated by an existence in which "Life was an accident. It has no meaning. It has no purpose." (8:14:4) Even the Guardians, who've attained eternal life, have kept death at bay only at the cost of forgetting who they were and why they ever vowed "to guard the universe". (7:1:3) Death, it seems, can't be avoided, let alone defeated, and the consequences of trying to cheat it hardly bears the thinking of.

None of this, of course, means that "Blackest Night" isn't a grand and entertaining superhero crossover. But it's also very much a story of terribly confused and sometimes even very frightened men and women struggling to find a way to cope with the fact that, regardless of the various gods and afterlives that crowd the great beyonds of the DCU, death awaits them and everyone else too. Death is the comic-book power that they can't ever control or even truly make sense of. Nekron might be a punchable foe, but death itself in "Blackest Night" can't be understood, ignored, negotiated with, suppressed, or even embraced.

14.

It's not that "Blackest Night" is a despairing text with a hopeless meaning. If it were, Black Hand would the hero of the tale rather than it's most despicable and yet pathetic character. In truth, "Blackest Night" is a comic book whose pages are filled with great and improbable victories, long-lost lovers reunited, overwhelming adversity overcome, and thrilling hi-jinks in the face of impossible odds. What's more, it all concludes with the discovery of a glowing White Lantern, a symbol of the knowledge that's been hard-won and of a more hopeful future that lies in wait for the DCU. As Hal Jordan says at the story's end ;

"I can feel it out there ... urging us to break away from the past and the Blackest Night ... and head into tomorrow." (8:37:5/8:38:1)

But, for all of the above, "Blackest Night" is undoubtedly a comic book that's concerned with more disturbing and difficult issues than is typical where the big line-leading event books are concerned. And it's well-worth noting that Mr Johns shows no sympathy in "Blackest Night" for the typically simplistic and feel-good solutions to the problems he's discussing that are so often offered in popular entertainments. There's no simple pseudo-psychological or religious models being used to underpin the meaning of "Blackest Night", no "five stages" to acceptance or godly signposts to ease our burdens where our thoughts and experiences of death are concerned. Indeed, the conclusion of the tale is that death itself is the wrong concept to try to engage with. Even the superheroes can't make sense of it. Instead, the message of "Blackest Night", if it can be said to carry any so simplistic a meaning, is a commonsensical and pragmatic one; it's life and the business of being alive that we need to focus our attentions on, not death.


Trying to create a worthwhile existence, and attempting to be true to ourselves while striving to do our best by others, may not in any way be a unique, profound or sophisticated solution to the problem of being, but it's no less worthwhile for all of that. After all, any kind of practical reflection on how to cope with grief and the fear of death will inevitably sound simplistic, because after all these centuries, we still know nothing of death beyond the fact that life is here, and then it isn't. To many of us, that's all there is to know. (It's a point so wonderfully made by Montaigne in "Of Phisiognomy", if I may be forgiven a digression away from comics for a moment. Philosophers may encourage us to spend our lives preparing for death, he writes, but "If you know not how to die, take no care for it, Nature her selfe will fully and sufficiently teach you in the nicke, she will exactly discharge that worke for you; trouble not your selfe with it.")

And just as Mr Johns makes no attempt to demystify even comic-book death, he never lets his characters experience a Disney-moment when the blissfullness of life overwhelms and transforms them, leaving them joyful in their hearts and productive members of society. Rather, experience is won at a great cost in "Blackest Night" and the gravitational pull of despair and meaninglessness is always there. Indeed, not even all of those resurrected at the end of "Blackest Night" want to return to the harsh and vulnerable business of living. "I don't want to come back." says Boston Brand at 2:7:3, and he's no more glad to actually find himself hale and hearty in the veil of tears by the end of Chapter 8.

Life is indeed hard in "Blackest Night" and then you really do die, but the whole point of Mr Johns story is that death and the inevitability of dying isn't what's important anyway.

15.

Bar a brief two-page teaser concerned with the vile William Hand and his skull-licking activities, the first chapter of "Blackest Night" begins untypically with a scene that actually illustrates the lessons that our heroes will learn by the end of chapter eight. Cleverly enough, it's not the Green Lanterns, whose heroic behaviour and sacrifices takes the forefront in these first few pages, who are used by Mr Johns to foreshadow the meaning of the end of "Blackest Night". Instead, the business of loving life and finding reasons to do so, rather than dwelling on the fear of and experience of death, is shown being put into everyday practise by tens of thousands of the citizens of Coast City during a parade and an accompanying fly-pass by jet fighters and costumed heroes to "to honor the super-beings who gave their lives protecting the world" (1:3:10).

Coast City was, of course, the site of a massacre of seven million women, men and children by the alien tyrant Mongul, and the folks who live there now have made a conscious decision to do so despite the awful history of their new home. They have, in essence, made a determined and public commitment to reject the fear inspired by the fate of those who occupied the city before in order to begin life over again in difficult circumstances. It's a declaration of purpose which the Heroes Day parade allows them to express, a collective enthusiasm for the very business of breathing, and of being privileged to do so as a member of a decent civil society. And it's that awareness that life has to be embraced, rather than the fact of death permitted to constrain their choices, that's so notably absent in the parallel scenes shown of how that day is celebrated elsewhere in the DCU. In a Smallville cemetery, in the superhero graveyard of Metropolis, and by the apparently-final resting place of Ronnie Raymond in Pittsburgh, mourners are shown gathered in a spirit of quite understandable despair, bent with the weight of the misery of their loss.

Of course, it's not that Mr Johns and Mr Reis are suggesting any lack of sympathy with those who are struggling to cope with the passing of their loved ones, anymore than we're being told that dancing in the streets is the only productive way to engage with the process of being truly alive. Rather, we're being shown that the people of Coast City have as a community faced the reality of the catastrophe that destroyed their home. With time and reflection, they've been able to commit themselves to rebuilding their city and its society, and they're conscious of how important it is for them not to bow before the awful meaning of what was done to their slaughtered families and friends and neighbours. Their wounds are less raw, their lives enriched by what they've so sadly learned, and they've grasped how to approach their days in a way that Hal Jordan clearly hasn't, as he flies above them and convinces himself that a determination not to give in to despair is a profound enough response to the suffering he's witnessed. (1.4)

For it's not that Mr Johns is proposing that we simply celebrate life and ignore death, as if lotus-eating was the best way to deal with uncertainty and pain. He's certainly not suggesting that mourning is an inappropriate and counter-productive process that a more positive perspective might best replace. Instead, he's simply counterpointing, as he does throughout "Darkest Night", one scene that shows how death can't be made sense of with another that recommends paying attention to the process of embracing the fact of being alive instead. And by chapter 8, both Hal Jordan and Barry Allen have begun to learn this lesson, the former in an appropriate and vaguely spiritual sense, as we might expect of a man who owns a magic ring, and the latter in the rational fashion that we might presume a police scientist would follow;

"We all live for different reasons, Hal. It's up to us to figure them out." (8:39:2)

Life, it seems, isn't something which the folks of the DCU can rely on to provide them with clear and inspiring reasons to be. Life has to worked at, consciously defined and redefined in an attempt to keep the meaninglessness that's symbolised by death at arm's length. It's a hard road, this business of being alive, this constant discipline of resisting despair and doubt. And yet, by not providing his characters with facile answers, the knowledge they do acquire becomes all the more inspiring. And for all that Mr Johns seems determined to constantly emphasise that there are no easy answers for how to live in the wake of an encounter with death, he's also exceptionally careful to provide examples of characters who've come through the most challenging of times and created a purpose for their own existence. The best example of this can be seen in the depiction of Barbara Gordon, the only character we're presented with who's faced up entirely and successfully to the very worst that the DCU can throw at her. She knows that death, and a great deal of the cruelties of life too, can be utterly beyond her ability to control, but she's learned to focus instead on what she can achieve with all that's been left to her;

"When I was in physical therapy, there was a sign on the gym wall. It read, "No matter how dark the night gets, the sun still rises in the morning." Every day, I'd wake up two hours before dawn. Back then it'd take me that long to get into my chair, clean up and go outside to watch the sunrise. But I did it. And I still do. I love life, Dad. I love it every single day." (2:3:4)



And she shows how well adapted she is even down to the commonplace minutia of her everyday affairs by letting her father know she's brought enough coffee for the both of them "to last until sunrise" (2:3:5). She's created for herself a life constructed from hard-won knowledge that extends down to the tiny but not irrelevant details of her everyday existence. Barbara Gordon is the one character in "Blackest Night" who's faced up to death and learned without reservation to "love every single day", to concentrate her energies solely on the things that she can control rather than being distressed by the circumstances she can't.

16.

There are moments in "Blackest Night" when all the grief and unhappiness that's been buried in the sub-text escapes into the story itself, and events start to feel truly disturbing and even somewhat distressing. The deaths of the Hawks and Gehenna, for example, are slow, protracted affairs, cruel and hurtful, and reading them can feel as if we're being asked to focus on the spectacle of their deaths rather than the meaning of them (1:38/9 + 3:24). And yet, there's no mistaking, with a touch of reflection, that the intentions of Mr Johns are, if I might put it so, honourable rather than prurient. Each of the scenes which put to use the familiar and on-occasion upsetting conventions of horror also carry with them undeniable echoes of how the real-world grief and fear inspired by death can affect those who've come into contact with it. Hawkman and Hawkwoman's murder, for example, illustrates how death so often occurs before we can say all that we wanted to, with Kendra expressing her love for Hawkman only when it's too late for the two of them to act on such honesty. And Carter Hall's rage at Kendra's death reflects those paroxysms of despair and ire that a lack of closure caused by a cruelly unexpected death can so often inspire. The undead superheroes themselves speak with the kind of unyielding brutality that guilt and regret do, as everyone who's lost a loved one can surely recognise. It's that characteristic and awful mixture of apparently trivial and yet overwhelming shame, such as when the undead Ralph Dibny

reminds Hal Jordan of his "scoping out Sue when she was wearing a skirt" (3:10:3), and of the more fundamental and impossible longings, expressed by the undead Aquaman when he tells his wife that they can be together if she'll just let herself be killed (2:20:2). And running throughout "Blackest Night" is the sense of that terrible and yet impossible-to-resist aching to see lost loved ones alive once again, the utterly crushing disappointment caused by which can be seen on Barry Allen's face at 8:35:2, when he realises that Ralph and Sue Dibny haven't been resurrected.

"Blackest Night" is in so many ways a terribly, terribly sad book, as much as it's also an unmistakable superhero romp. There's little that's in any way unambigiously joyous in its pages before the resurrections of chapter 8. It's a book saturated with an unavoidable sadness, the capriciousness of fate, and the memories of loved ones who'll never be met again.

17.

The solutions that Mr Johns suggests in "Brightest Night" aren't intended to be read as a philosophical treatise. Nor is he constructing any kind of survivors manual, and it'd be doing him a considerable disservice to suggest that "Blackest Night" is anything of the kind. But for all of that, what's notable and admirable about the tale's sub-text is not simply its pragmatic and - it's hard not to think - hard-won conclusions, but also Mr Johns refusal to indulge in spiritual pap. There are no easy answers here, no attempt to sell comforting untruths, and that's something that's never been represented in this way and to this degree in a mainstream superhero comic before.

There's no eternal reward on offer that can relied upon by our heroines and heroes in "Blackest Night", just a better way by which they might begin to learn to cope with the things that they most fear.

It's a business that's been unpretentiously done, buried underneath a text that's all the better for its presence, and, all in all, "Blackest Night" is a damn sight braver and more ambitious comic book than I think Mr Johns is often recognised for.

18.

Having spent far more time with "Blackest Night" than I ever expected to, I find that I've learned to admire Geoff Johns's obvious love for the superhero genre and his conviction that it doesn't need to be fundamentally changed to appeal to a mass audience. What it needs, he seems to believe, is simply to be made explicable and meaningful. The costumes don't need to be dropped, the powers don't need to be simplified, the code-names don't need to be replaced or even ignored. Instead, Mr Johns appears convinced, in his "Smallville" scripts as well as his comic-book work, that a wider audience already exists for superheroes in their classic form, with all of the depth and detail of their continuity, with all of the traditions of costumes and secret bases and odd aliases and so on. The key, it seems, lies simply in giving the reader the basic information of who's before them and what their purpose in the story is, while ensuring that, no matter what the surface of things might say, there are elements of real life being discussed that are somewhat more weighty than the question of, for example, who's faster, Superman or The Flash? And armed with those convictions, it seems that Mr Johns has faith that even the most complicated of superhero narratives can be navigated and enjoyed by readers with none of a fanboy's commitment or knowledge of continuity.

It will be fascinating to see whether he's right in that belief or not.


A little later this week, there'll be a look at the new "Earth-One" Superman by JMS and at the Grant Morrison take on the character in "All-Star" too up here on TooBusy. And then, the latest Secret Six graphic novel by Gail Simone, and the Walking Dead too, and of course our weekly visit to the world of 2000 ad. You'd be very welcome to pop in for any of those, I assure you. And, of course, as absolutely always, my best wishes to you; may you have a splendid day!

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Ensuring The Atom Feels Small: More Thoughts On Geoff Johns & "Blackest Night" (Part 2 of 3)

Continued from Monday last;


6.

Thankfully, "Blackest Night" isn't a mainstream comic whose creators have confused the meaningfully obscure with the creatively meaningful. This is, after all, and as we discussed, a book designed to be as popular with a general audience as it can be while maintaining the attention of the committed superhero fan. And so, to take but one example, characters explain themselves in "Blackest Night". They explain themselves to themselves, they explain themselves to each other. "The truth is I am afraid of one thing. I'm afraid to get close to people." (8:1:1/2), Mr Johns has Hal Jordan declare to no-one but himself and we readers as the eighth and final chapter of "Blackest Night" begins, as the end of everything looms. It's one of a super-string of examples of a style of writing which has no time for any fashionable degree of ambiguity, and which displays a untypical reluctance to rely unduly on the skill of the artist to carry much if not all of the meaning of

events on the printed page. In short, Mr Johns has no time for what passes as naturalism and knowing restraint in some of today's comic books. Characters in "Blackest Night" are there to be identified, events to be precisely described, and the emotional context of each scene signed up at its beginning and summarised at its end. Nobody on his mostly-crowded pages is allowed to even appear to digress from the story at hand, and there's a strong sense that Mr Johns would rather not have his characters say anything at all than allow them to ramble away from the spine of his tale.

So fixed are Mr Johns's characters in their narrative purpose that they can often sound, to the reader not racing from page to page in pursuit of the skillfully dispersed plot revelations, rather stiff and two-dimensional. Individuals they may be, with their own personalities and agendas and even speech patterns, but Mr Johns's characters are never designed to pass as real in a sense that might satisfy a creative writing teacher on a weekend express-yourself-like-the-masters course. Instead, his women and men and sundry aliens are written to serve precise emotional purposes as well as specific plot functions; they're always placed in the service of the story and they're rarely if ever allowed to shake free of those responsibilities.

But then, the fact of the huge weight of action set-pieces and character development combined with the finite page count in "Blackest Night" mitigates against Mr Johns adopting anything but the most rigorous and in part traditional of scripting approaches. Scenes that might have been extended, and indeed scenes which might have been delayed, in a monthly book needed to be delivered in a specific form at a particular moment as "Blackest Night" was published month-by-month. In truth, there was no room for anything but brevity and clarity in the script for "Blackest Night", but a great many comic book writers have proven themselves impervious to accepting the need for such discipline in the past, and in the degree to which he serves his story rather than his ego, Mr Johns stands head and shoulders above the vast majority of his contemporaries.

Textbooks dedicated to the teaching of the business of writing fiction always, always, declare that plot and character are in truth the same essential quality seen from different perspectives, as if they were fundamental particles in a story-telling physics whose essential nature relies upon the position of the writerly observer. And if there were to be a version of Vogler or McKee which took the business of writing comic books as seriously as it ought to be taken, then Mr Johns's work would surely be the example chosen from today's mainstream books to illustrate the paradox and practise of that essential business of plot/character.

7.

Mr Johns's determination to make his scripts as reader-friendly and purposeful as possible brings to mind the work not of his fellow Triumvirs, but that of the most commercially successful of the generation of writers who came to prominence in the last half of the Seventies. The absolutely unmistakable influence of writers such as Chris Claremont and Marv Wolfman re-appears constantly throughout "Blackest Night", the shade of a comic-book writing style where every important thought and feeling was expressed with exactitude and detail, whether in speech balloon or narrative caption. It's a style adopted and adapted by Mr Johns that's most obviously marked in the scene between Kid Flash and Barry Allen at 6:11:2, where characters who know enough about each other to be getting along with the fighting in the midst of a great zombie-punchup digress into apparent irrelevancies in order to keep any unfamiliar readers up to speed with how one fast-running character relates to another;

Barry Allen : "Call me Barry, or Flash, Bart. "Grandpa" makes me feel old."

Kid Flash : "I'm your grandson from the 31st century. You are old."

There's absolutely none of the reluctance of many of today's writers to put to use such Shooterisms on display in "Blackest Night". Put simply, inclusiveness trumps self-consciousness, for Mr Johns obviously believes that his readers both need and deserve to be informed of who's on-panel and why they ought to care about them, and literary pretension comes a considerable way down his list of priorities. Indeed, it's self-evident from the pages of "Blackest Night" that Mr Johns is concerned in every scene with three simple, and yet so-often elsewhere-contravened, principles;

1. keep the reader informed about what's happening and to whom
   
2. ground action and reflection in emotion and make the emotion absolutely relevant to the plot
   
3. present each scene in as visually an exciting and eye-catching form as possible.
   

And anyone concerned with trying to make sense of how the author's books consistently hit the very top of the bestsellers chart need only to begin, I'd argue, with some reflection on how Geoff Johns always focuses in each individual sequence on these same three issues time after time after time; purpose, feeling and the presence wherever possible of the spectacular, if not at least the visually intriguing.

8.

Geoff Johns is, in truth, a practical writer unconcerned with anything beyond the best way to tell a specific story while respecting the needs and tastes of his various potential audiences. What works is what works, and that's that; he has no interest in reinventing the wheel if it won't turn more smoothly than the one he has. And so, to take but one example, his stories are as full of good old fashioned establishing shots as they are of double page Image-esque indulgences, for he's learned to ignore the fashionable theories that proclaim how modern audiences have experienced so much of the media that they don't need the broad detail of what they're experiencing explained to them. For what might seem like "obvious information" to a media theorist is the province of good manners to Mr Johns. He never assumes that his readers will recognise Gotham City and what the city signifies simply by, for example, the presence of Barbara and Jim Gordan standing by the Bat-Signal. And so Mr Johns works with Mr Reis to ensure that his audience is informed that this Gotham is a dark and threatening place where the skies are starless and low and gargoyles stud the skyline. (2:3:1/2)

So concerned is Mr Johns to speak to an audience beyond the hardcore fan-base, even as he constructs his stories from a hundred-weight of hyper-muscled superheroes, that he even commits the heresy of having his characters refer to each other by their names, or at least according to their relationship to each other, when they're first introduced to the story. It may not be an example of Eisner-esque genius to, for example, clearly show Barbara Gordon in her wheelchair or to have her refer to the old gentleman before her as "Dad", but it is an example of a welcoming attitude which must surely account for a good measure of Mr Johns's sales.

9.

There's no such thing as an unimportant sequence in "Blackest Night". Every scene is a water-cooler moment, every scene is focused and, in one fashion or another, intense, and "low-key" is a relative term that means a series of panels where no-one is actually being threatened with a terrible death quite yet. It's an approach that can become wearing and indeed exhausting if the reader attempts to tackle "Blackest Night" in a single sitting, but it's a technique that undoubtedly helps Mr Johns's work thrive in the monthly marketplace, where each relatively-expensive issue written by Mr Johns begins at a high-pitch and builds upwards from there. At its best, it's a method of turning everything up to eleven, and then eleven again, which makes each individual issue seem packed with incident and significance.

Because it is.

And with each of these watercooler moments being played out one after another according to the principles of clarity, emotion and spectacle we discussed above, there's an interesting basic grammar used to affect the pace at which each sequence is experienced by the reader. As with most comicbook scripters, Mr Johns writes to the page, ensuring that each side has a particular purpose and theme, and that both progress from the first to the last panel. And, as is of course standard-practise too, Geoff Johns often uses that final panel as a "page-turner", as an enigma of some kind to snare the reader's attention and compel them to read on. "Blackest Night" is absolutely full to bursting of such page-turners, from the zombie Ralph Digby's assault on Hawkman at 1:35:3, to the off-panel arrival of Aquaman at 2:5:5, to the reveal of the presence of the Anti-Monitor at 8:20:6. And by manipulating the degree of jeopardy and mystery at the end of most pages, Mr Johns can control to a degree how speedy the reader's experience is.

It's an approach that has its disadvantages too. When one cliffhanger follows inevitably on after enough, as occurs particularly when the later chapters of "Blackest Night" arrive, there's never a breathing space where the reader can disengage, catch their thoughts and process events. The constant charge from big deal to bigger one creates a mental breathlessness that can obscure the emotional sense of the piece as much as it exhausts the sense of occasion of each universe-changing set-piece.


But Mr Johns can also choose to use those page-closing panels in a far less typical way too. He often closes his pages in such a way as to inspire the reader to pause rather than read onwards. It's a trick that he tends to use in "Blackest Night" when he wants his audience to pay attention to a key character moment, and in particular, a character moment which emphisises the major themes of the book. And so, where the traditional final panel on a comic book page encourages the reader to move on, Mr Johns is often demanding quite the opposite. In the first chapter of “Blackest Night”, for example, page 8 closes on Damage’s admission that he “can’t face anyone”, that he’s been traumatized by the loss of his comrades in the Freedom Fighters. But Damage himself isn’t even in that closing panel, and while the scene of mournful statues may foreshadow a grim future, the art doesn’t compel the reader to turn the page at all. Instead, the audience is encouraged to stay where they are and think about what they’ve been shown, to stay in the moment as its been sublimally suggested that they do. It's a business which helps to establishes Damage as more than just one more superhero on parade, and creates a more substantial bond between reader and character through the focusing of attention on the misery that his witnessing of a mass murder has caused.


This technique is a highly-functional way of slowing down the action and compelling the reader to focus on the page’s purpose. (It also serves to break up the endless charge forward through dramatic plot-events.) It's a fairly uncommon narrative trick, for reasons which I find hard to grasp, and its effectiveness can be seen again and again in "Blackest Night"; in the shot where a tiny and emasculated Atom sits almost lost amongst the everyday minutia on his desk (1:21:5), and where Lex Luthor responds to what seems like a global apocalypse by announcing that "it's every man for himself"(. 4:9:5) Character is established in relation to theme (*3) while there's a greater variety of pace quietly added to the experience of reading the tale. A relatively minor point, it might be thought, but it illustrates the craft of Mr Johns, and the care he takes to control the sense of his work and even the speed at which it can be enjoyed.

*3:- the nature of the theme itself, and these scenes, is something we'll discuss next time in the concluding part of this piece.

10.

The same technical control of his craft can be seen in the manner by which Mr Johns approaches the structure of that over-familiar tradition of the line-wide superhero epic. On the one hand, his approach is, as we'd expect, exceptionally respectful. He's careful to constantly present his readers with the moments which any experienced mainstream comics fan would expect of a post-Crisis On Infinite Earths crossover. Each chapter of "Blackest Night", for example, contains at the very least one lovingly detailed shot of a gathering of superheroes who aren't typically seen collected together. Barely ten pages have passed before we're shown a small army of costumes gathered in Valhalla, the superhero cemetery in Metropolis, and the massed scenes of heroes and villains intensify in terms of number and spectacle until they culminate in the crowded battle between super-powered zombies and their opponents from the side of the good at 8:11/12.

It's as if Mr Johns has sat down and taken notes to ensure that there's no trope he's failed to incorporate in "Blackest Night". There are unexpected team-ups in each chapter, from that between Mera and The Atom and Indigo-1 at 3:12:1 to the presence of The Scarecrow and Lex Luthor in the team of Lanterns that assault Nekron at 7.2. There's even the recurrent motif by which heroes facing impossible odds are saved by the arrival of all manner of unexpected and super-powered cavalry, from Wally West's arrival at 5:7:1 to save Barry Allen from Nekron, to John Stewart being rescued from an undead army at 5:10:11 by the appearance of an army of, oh, just about everybody.

11.

But Geoff Johns is as keen to reinvigorate the crossover as he is to celebrate its traditions, and by doing so, to increase the immersive quality of them. For the sheer predictability of the line-wide blockbuster has led to readers knowing so much of how events will precede that even the more relatively-daring examples of the breed can seem rigid and over-familiar. In particular, the battlelines which have so often been drawn between the presence of the "good" mass of heroes over here and the bad gals'n'guys serving a very tall and menacing super-baddie over there has been playfully and quite deliberately complicated by Mr Johns. Instead of an irregular and predictable force of superheroes led by the JLA serving as a hyper-muscled battalion to save the day , "Blackest Night" sees the fight led by a small cadre of both protagonists and antagonists who've never been associated with each other in any way before. More than that, the traditional group associations of the DC Comics universe are redrawn in "Blackest Night" so that characters from both sides of the comic-book moral divide are in part allocated to one of seven different Lantern Corps. Yes, the Justice League are represented, but so are several of their opponents. It's a clever trick, for all that it threatens to so complicate matters that even some experienced readers might find the business of keeping track of events too tiresome to persevere with. Novelty is added to the conventions of the genre, and the reader is encouraged to re-draw their mental maps of how characters relate to each other, increasing their involvement with the story at hand. New costumes are presented, new identities are temporarily assumed, and new loyalties created, which creates a sense of fluidity where many years of crossovers have seemed hidebound.

That "Blackest Night" finally plays out according to the conventions of the genre is hardly the point. Short of actually allowing Nekron to destroy The Entity and wipe out all life in the DCU, victory was always going to be won by the side that had Green Lantern in their ranks and Superman in the reserve. Everyone looking like a zombie in lycra was always going to return to dust. But the journey, from Flash and Green Lantern's meeting by Batman's grave to the last-panel appearance of a white lantern, has been a less-familiar experience, its structure made far more complex and involving, and, with the reserection at the end of a dozen once-dead superheroes, the whole proceedings have led to a new status quo and a new set of enigmas for the audience to become involved with.

12.

Maintaining the attention and involvement of his readers is so very obviously a process that Mr Johns gives a substantial amount of thought to. Each of the first five chapters of "Blackest Night", for example, contains an obvious intensification of jeopardy, from the betrayal of the Guardians in chapter one to Nekron's reclaiming of the reborn superheroes in chapter 5. It's an obvious and necessary business, of course, but it's a job well done. And yet by the end of chapter 5, it seems as if Mr Johns has somewhat painted himself into a corner. After all, short of allowing the superheroes now commanded by Nekron to commit some terrible acts of mass murder, what could be more challenging to the equilibrium of the DCU than what Mr Johns has just done to its marquee-headlining characters?

It's actually worth a round of applause from even the most cynical of observers to note Mr Johns's solution, which is to fundamentally change the rules underpinning his own story in the last three chapters of "Blackest Night". That this involves a certain measure of narrative cheating is undeniable, for secrets which have been unforeshadowed are suddenly revealed and used to ramp up the drama another few cosmic notches. But for all the dei ex machina, Mr Johns not only very effectively increases the level of threat again and again, chapter upon chapter, but he also changes the very nature of the fictional world that longstanding readers have been immersed in; again, the audience is forced to engage and re-engage with the material in order to incorporate the new

information with the old comic book paradigm. In chapter 6, the audience is suddenly informed that Ganthet is a power-ring factory (6:13:5), capable of creating new ring-powered superheroes to change the balance of the showdown with Nekron. Chapter 7 brings with it the knowledge of The Entity (7:18) and a completely new and far more disturbing cosmological history for the DCU, and at 8:13:3, the reader is presented with the fact of Nekron's reliance on Black Hand in addition to the mysterious reappearance of a host of reborn superheroes.

And so, it's not simply that the level of jeopardy in "Blackest Night" keeps increasing. It's also that the playing field itself is continually being changed, made more impossibly difficult and challenging for the characters in play and, in being so altered, it's transformed without warning into a quite different arena than the one it appeared to be at the start of the story. For where most crossovers are concerned to generally return a publisher's products more or less back to the point where they were when the fighting began, albeit with a few changes to the status quo on display,"Blackest Night" is, at heart, a far more radical, and involving, business.

To be concluded;

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Some Thoughts On Geoff Johns And "Blackest Night" (Part 1)

1.

Of all the members of the writerly triumvirate which currently dominates the monthly sales charts, it's Geoff Johns that appears to receive the least considered attention and the most grudging critical respect.

Grant Morrison is the post-modern counter-culturalist, beloved of the most chin-stroking of bloggers. (*1) He's the comicbook-writing alchemist creating new and playful forms out of the detail and detritus of out-there theories and pop-art four-colour traditions.

Brian Michael Bendis is the blue-collar counterweight to Morrison's arty intellectualism, the down-to-earth, outward-looking hybridiser of the superhero with the dynamism of any number of popular literary and visual forms, the lover of the spoken word and the connoisseur of the grit of noir wherever he finds it.


But Geoff Johns is, by contrast, and for all of his undoubted popular success, often seemingly perceived as being no more than that enthusiastic and competent bloke who writes about nothing more than superheroes, about lots and lots of superheroes. He's seen neither as a significant writer beyond his success in pleasing the ever-diminishing hardcore market, nor as a source of innovation who's achieved anything more noteworthy than a highly-efficient and commercial distillation of long-standing superhero traditions. At best, he's credited with bringing something of a no-waste, story-centred focus to comics learned during his time helping to make movies, but that in itself appears to carry with it little fascination or cultural cachet. At worst, he's decried as an unlikely amalgam of corporate climber and continuity-obsessed fanboy, the man with the knowledge of how bureaucracies can be conquered and comic shop devotees beguiled.


But, having spent some time in the company of "Blackest Night", and having found a great deal more at play in its pages than I ever expected, perhaps I might be forgiven for adding so belatedly a few thoughts to the babble concerning the work of Mr Johns, who's in so many ways a far more inventive and radical writer than he's commonly given credit for.

Or perhaps, I ought to say, that Mr Johns is a far more inventive and radical writer than I've ever given him credit for.

Mea culpa.

*1:- That includes me, by the way. In fact, I'm stroking my chin at this very moment.


2.

It'd be a simple-minded business to ascribe the success of "Brightest Night" to Mr Johns having the ability, if not the cold-blooded cynicism, to provide the established audience for superhero events with even more of the same, with a intellectually-freebased concentrate of every over-familiar genre trope that cape'n'muscles devotees have learned obsessively to expect and drool over. But the truth is that the explanation for his achievement in selling so very many copies of "Blackest Night" can't be one that simply reduces the book's success to a formula involving hundreds and hundreds of superheroes knocking hell out of each other interspersed by brief and sentimental heart-to-hearts. After all, those are the components which constitute, to a greater or lesser degree, just about every other superhero book today. And if commercial success is simply a question of arranging and rearranging those familiar components of costumed violence and tearful soap until a critical mass of superhero-ness is reached, there'd be far more writers with the commercial heft of Mr Johns working for DC and Marvel today.


3.

It's not that "Blackest Night" is a book that's dear to my heart, for it isn't. But it is a comic that I've come to greatly admire. In that at least, it's remarkably similar to Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev's "Scarlet", a project which might appear on the surface to have little in common with "Blackest Night" at all. For both books are, in their quite different ways, concerned with tapping into the strengths of the superhero genre while seeking to capture the attention of readers unfamiliar with it. They're also both written with the intention of merging decompressed and Silver-Age storytelling techniques into new forms which preserve the capacity of a comic to provide a detailed and complex read while also delivering a requisite number of spectacular set-pieces.

But where the books are radically different, beyond the obvious matter that one is full of quite literally hundreds of thousands of super-powered characters and the other has not a single traditional costume in sight, is that "Darkest Night" is a thematically far more daring piece of work. For though it's on the surface a straight-forward and rather furrow-browed and serious-faced sequence of superhero set-to's, "Darkest Night" is


grounded in a sub-text that's unpretentiously and yet forcefully concerned with the experience of raw grief which accompanies an unexpected death. Or, to put it another way, scratch the surface of "Darkest Night" and underneath all those comic-books deaths is what appears to be something of a morality play concerning how to survive a loss which leaves everyday life at best suddenly meaningless and at worst a source of ineradicable despair.

And we'll come to that unexpected and touching sub-text later on this week, after we've discussed something of the text itself, and tried to perceive a glimmer of why these event books produced by Mr Johns sell to so many more readers than most of his competitors can ever dream of reaching.


4.

One of the most remarkable aspects of "Darkest Night" is how inclusive a comic it is, how welcoming it's designed to be to unfamiliar readers, despite the presence of such a mind-challengingly huge cast of costumes and a plot that's based on almost fifty years of DCU continuity. For, particularly where the first few chapters are concerned, Mr Johns has clearly set out here to inform new readers while simultaneously rewarding long-standing fans with a great mass of continuity-minded detail. It's a business that can be seen at work in the very first issue of "Blackest Night", where a two-page spread is put to use to show Green Lantern creating images of the more than 50 superheroes who've died since Crisis On Infinite Earths. It's a typical post-Image example of spectacularism on the face of things, a great mass of posing superheroes unconnected to each other and presented as if the very presence of so many muscles and capes are compelling in themselves. Yet, all those dead superheroes aren't the point of the scene at all, which is actually designed to accentuate the shock and despair that Barry Allen feels upon discovering how many of his colleagues have fallen since he himself appeared to die. Those stepped in continuity can identify the many costumes, and their enjoyment of the scene will undoubtedly be increased by the opportunity to do so, but knowing who, for example, Vibe was and how Aquaman died isn't essential when the meaning of the scene is locked around Hal's reluctance and Barry's upset. Continuity may greatly enhance the moment, but it doesn't determine it, and a curious neophyte reader might make a great deal of sense from events without needing to know anything more than what's already been explained in the book.


In essence, those who've regarded "Blackest Night" as yet another example of continuity porn have somewhat missed the point. This isn't a book that's solely obsessed with the business of superheroes, but rather a comic which, at its best, uses continuity to enrich the depiction of far more prosaic and everyday issues than whether, for example, one Flash is faster than another or not. And it's this apparently counter-intuitive faith that the superhero genre can be a vehicle for emotionally engaging tales, and that continuity can enrich rather than swamp such stories, that helps to lend the work of Mr Johns much of its individual character and its mass appeal.

In a world where Mark Millar, for example, is busy separating the figure of the superhero from long decades of comic-book continuity in order to sell the genre to a mainstream audience, Mr Johns seem convinced that another more traditional approach can yet pay dividends.


5.

If Mr Johns appears determined to retain all the trappings of the mainstream superhero genre, without permitting them to become the central, or indeed the sole, point of his superhero tales, he's also, as we mentioned above, apparently determined to put to use the decompressed storytelling styles of the 21st century without abandoning the more deliberate and data-heavy methods of the past. For it's obvious that he fully understands the audience-pleasing artistic conventions of the modern-era, of the trend for what we might call spectacularism. And so the post-Image visual status quo of sensational and frequent full-page and double-page spreads, of compsitions dominated by heroically posing superheroes, and of an absence of informing narrative options such as the much-maligned thought balloon, are all fully accepted and put to prominent and effective use in "Blackest Night". But, as we know, the opportunities for punch-throwing dynamism offered by the techniques of decompression have very often resulted in story-thin, emotion-free comics, and it might be feared that such a speedy and unsatisfying read would be on offer in the first chapter of "Blackest Night", where a full third of the content has been given over to splash pages.


But Johns and Reis have fastened to the solution to the disadvantages of decompression first offered by the likes of Bryan Hitch, whose "widescreen" pages are often composed of a mass of visual information that insists upon, and rewards, a great deal of attention. And so, no matter how intense and dramatic and saturated with superheroes the full-page designs of Mr Johns and Mr Reis are in "Blackest Night", they're rarely so lacking in detail that the eye can race on past them and the time spent reading the book reduced as a consequence to a matter of a few minutes. It's hard, for example, to quickly process all the mass of data presented by Mr Reis in his art for the two-page shot of the combined superhero and jet fighter fly-pass at 1:4/5, where the page becomes more and more crowded with the minutia of Coast City's celebrations as the eye descends downwards. At other times, such as the two-page spread over which Indigo One delivers a summary of the back-story of the different Lantern Corps (3:16/17), the rather static if beautifully-rendered art is peppered with a complicated mass of expositionary data while the piece's background reflects a variety of locales and characters from the DCU relevant to the tale. As a consequence, what might have otherwise have been represented as a rather uninteresting sequence of talking heads has been transformed into an eye-catching design that still serves as a substantial and purposeful read.


Elsewhere, a far more traditional style of tale-telling is pursued. Pages are often deliberately packed together into short and focused sequences heavy with captions and dialogue in order to compensate for the decompression elsewhere. It's a process which creates a staccato rhythm to the business of reading, where intense and traditionally text-heavy sections break up the progression of attention-focusing splash pages. (*2) Used with care, it's a method which provides each chapter with a variety of reading experiences. Even in Chapter 6, by which time the narrative is becoming rather cramped with one action-based dramatic climax after another, almost 40% of the pages are invested in relatively wordy scenes where the fighting, if it appears at all, is an element in the background rather than the central concern of events.


As a consequence of this deliberate merging of two separate storytelling traditions, the speed at which each chapter is read can be manipulated by the fact of where Mr Johns places the single and double-page spreads as his tale progresses; there's a notable tendency, for example, for two-page shots to be used with greater frequency as each chapter nears its end, increasing the pace of reading as the reader approaches closer and closer to each issue's main cliffhanging climax.

It's a skill which too many writers have failed to pay nearly enough attention to. For the choice faced by creators isn't that between a decompressed style and an old-school one, but rather one about how the two styles can be fused and put to their different and complimentary purposes. And in such a way does Mr Johns ensure, in collaboration with the estimable Ivan Reis, that "Blackest Night" retains that characteristic "widescreen" dynamism of modern comics while making sure that his scripts are as rich in information as the books he himself grew up reading.

To be continued;

*2:- It's a business that Maleev and Bendis pull off to a conspicuous degree of success in "Scarlet" too.


Next time out, and for the conclusion of this piece, we'll take a look at some rather less obvious - and indeed on occasion exceptionally subtle and rather emotionally dark - aspects of Mr Johns work on "Blackest Night", and then, after that, "All-Star Superman". It'd be heartening if you might consider dropping in if you've a moment or two around that time. And, of course, I wish you a splendid day!

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