Well, last week the idiots at Diamond Publishing decided that they’d royally screw over every comic book store in the country by not shipping any new comics that week. Fortunately, (outside of Indie Comic Week, which was awesome) DC was kind of to release Blackest Night #6 and Holy Hell In A Handbasket, what a way to ring in the New Year! If you thought issue #5 slapped you around, then just wait until you crack open issue #6. Again Geoff Johns is able to keep us guessing, to pull new and fresh tricks out of his bag that upset the status quo of comic book writing.
Blackest Night #6 starts off not with the dead, but with the resurrected. This time the rings haven’t gone just for the dead heroes but any hero that was once dead but came back to life e.g. Superman/Doomsday, Wonder Woman/Hades, Green Arrow/Parallax. These heroes who cheated death have now been forced into serving the Black Lanterns which pretty much screws any chance of beating them. From there, the issue hands us Atom & Mera receiving help from Deadman, Lantern John Stewart trying to beat an entire planet of Black Lanterns all racing towards earth, Guardian Ganthet becoming a Green Lantern and all of the rings searching out others to draft into the fight. Curious what a Blue Lantern Flash, Sinestro Corps Scarecrow or Orange Lantern Lex Luthor might look like? Then I’m pretty sure Blackest Night #6 is the comic you’re looking for.
What makes Blackest Night #6 so good is that you keep guessing from second to second. Whereas with the first four issues Geoff Johns was laying the groundwork for his epic, five and especially six is where he’s started throwing serious curve balls. The idea that the Black Rings can attack those who were brought back to life is not only a great plot point but also a nice poke at how comics kill heroes and then bring them back with annoying regularity. Add to that the little subtle clue Johns’ drops about Bruce Wayne (read it to find out) and then the idea of recruiting others in the DC Universe to become Lanterns and you have a comic book that blows your expectations away page after page. This is how giant epic crossovers should be: huge, exciting and leaving the reader disoriented as to how it will all end and what the post-Blackest Night fallout will be.
The art by Ivan Reis continues to be top notch, as if he knows just how good Johns’ story is and doesn’t want to seem like he’s not up to the challenge. Every panel is a work of art and colorist Alex Sinclair should be given a serious pay raise by DC. His choices allow Blackest Night to leap from the page and land in the reader’s lap. The only off-putting part of Blackest Night #6 is that it’s the last issue until February. I know it’s only a month but the way #6 ends it’s a long, long wait. Blackest Night #6 joins issues 1-5 in being a building block to one of the most important comic book stories of the last twenty years.
