Death in Comics, Blackest Night & Geoff Johns' Explanation Thereof

Over the course of the past few months, DC has been embroiled in the “zombie” and multi-coloured ring-filled linewide event known as Blackest Night. At the onset of this crossover, readers were promised by DC editorial and Geoff Johns that the story would seek to provide an explanation of the nature of death and its revolving door in the DC universe. Hit the jump for some thoughts on how this series has lived up to that manifesto and my thoughts regarding the revolving door known as death in comics.

Brian Dickey, whom you can reach at grunt136@gmail.com, is a long time comic book enthusiast who only recently returned to the hobby we all love.  He brings you today's guest post on the nature of death in comics and how it relates to the event that pulled him back into comics - Blackest Night.

Blackest Night Got Me Back Into Comics

As such, I must both curse and praise it for that.  A little bit of context before we delve into the official magic making. I stopped reading comics back in 2000, on the crest of my teenage years and right before Marvel started the Ultimate Universe. 

Throughout the past decade, I tried to keep a tenuous connection to comics by catching up on happenings with Wikipedia, TV Tropes (it's not just about TV), and other various online resources dedicated to comics and the spoiling thereof. 

However, last June, I learned one of my top three favourite heroes, Green Lantern, would be headlining a major event in the DC universe - what we now know as Blackest Night. I researched and found out that Green Lantern had been revitalized during my absence from comics and was now hailed as one of the best comics on the market. This caused me to make the fateful decision to follow this Blackest Night storyline and catch up on recent issues of Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps before it started. Fortunately, and unfortunately for my wallet, this led to me sliding back down that slippery slope into the monthly grind that is comicdom.

But enough about that. One of the primary reasons this event interested me enough to reenter the comics world was Geoff Johns' statements, which you can read in full here, here, and here, that he would be exploring the nature of the revolving door of death in the DC universe during this event. 

To my ears this sounded like the story was going to be a metatextual commentary on the needs of comic publishers to continually kill off and revive big name characters to drive up sales, or something of the sort.  While this wasn't to be the crux of the event, it is still prudent for us to examine how Johns has lived up to his claims of examining death in the DC.  However, while I'll be focusing primarily on Blackest Night for this comparison, it will also touch on death in general as it relates to comics.

You Gotta Die If You Wanna Live

Since the modern age of comics began, many of our favourite heroes have died at one point or another. Some died for long periods of time, such as Barry Allen, while others barely stay out of play for an entire issue, like the recent Kyle Rayner death and return. 

Originally, these longer deaths seemed to serve the purpose of opening a hero slot for a more modern legacy character to fill the void. Most of the legacy characters, at least post-90's, were a little edgier and reflected the “extreme” nature of the 90's. Over time, most of these long term deaths were undone, with Barry Allen closing the door on the longest term death at DC. Perhaps history will look on the reversing of this death as the official end of the Post-Crisis universe and the start of a new era.

Other deaths in DC comics have been short term events that either serve to drive up sales, like Superman, that were quickly reversed or storylines that were quickly undone, like Hal Jordan's rebirth as the Spectre and, later, as his current Green Lantern incarnation.

Essentially, it appears that death is a rite of passage for most of DC's bigger name heroes. With Bruce Wayne's “death”, all of the Big Three - Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman - have entered, if not completed, their cycles of death and resurrection. Perhaps a possible explanation could have been that to be a true hero one must face and overcome displacement from the living world like many of the myths and legends of old. 

Death As The Revolving Door

Getting back to Geoff Johns' interpretation of death, Johns gave us his explanation for the nature of death in the recent Blackest Night #5. It reads much like the retcon of Hal Jordan/Parralax as the fault of a yellow fear bug that readers were not aware of at the time. In this case, all previous resurrections have been attributed to the unseen hand of Nekron, a powerful avatar of death in the DC universe that has appeared a handful of times in various Green Lantern stories of old. 

The explanation stated that their return to life wasn't part of some heroic conquering of death, in the vein of a Greek myth, or related to an inherent confluence of strength in their spirit or even some purely comic book science or magic based solution. They were simply “allowed” to return to life by Nekron, yet apparently still remained connected to/subservient to Nekron's will and their rebirths were merely a means to serve as sleeper agents that would be activated when he rose to end all life in the universe at some future time.

How does this work as an explanation of death?

To start off, the idea of our resurrected heroes as sleeper agents for Nekron does make partial sense. It explains why some of the most powerful characters in DC's stable were allowed to be resurrected while other, less powerful ones were not. 

Besides the obvious explanation that DC needed to revive them eventually for monetary reasons, in-story it gives Nekron access to some powerful firepower for his army. He probably should have made their connections to death a bit stronger though. Wonder Woman, Superboy and Bart Allen have already returned to the land of the living/had their connection to Nekron severed after only 10-20 minutes of being Black Lanterns, as shown in various tie-ins.

Apparently Nekron never bothered to consult a basic guide to villainy during the eons of preparation he had for this attack.

Johns' Actual Explanation of Death

While I can see how this explanation works, the entire reasoning behind it strikes me as extremely weak for a topic as large and divisive as death in comic books. Attributing all the deaths and resurrections that have occurred to the invisible hand of Nekron, in the service of his long term plan to conquer life, is a minor retcon. It's in the exact same vein as the explanation of Hal Jordan's time as Parallax as the result of a space bug that we never saw prior to the explanation. But the biggest gripe I have with it is that it strikes me as a completely unprofessional, fan fiction style of writing.

Calling Johns' build up of Nekron as fan fiction-esque may strike some as too harsh. But stick with me here. It screams, “Look at my villain! Respect him! He is so hardcore that he has had a hand in many major stories we have read over the years!”. Building up a villain by having him ride the coattails of dozens of stories just isn't good writing.  His threat is then implicit only on the retcons added to his backstory at the time of his appearance in this event.

Now, Johns has succeeded in lifting up his new pet character, Nekron, to steal the spotlight in any issue regarding death. Your character dies? Now you gotta use Nekron or at least reference him. This could possibly be alright, but it has been done in a very improbable way. There was never any sense before that he was this powerful. Nekron hasn't even done much directly, in story, other than kill and raise people. There was little foreshadowing and even less direct action on his part. 

Most of his claimings of resurrected heroes, like Superman, Wonder Woman, etc, have already been undone in ancilliary titles with little effort on anyone's part to undo the reclaiming of these formerly dead characters. But the characters in the story give us shocked looks just by seeing Nekron, as if he is different from any other random super villain they meet, and the audience is told he was one of the Guardians of the Universe's first enemies. So we, the audience, are expected to take Johns and the characters at their word that he is one of the biggest baddies ever, i.e., Johns' wish fulfillment to create the biggest bad in the DCU, despite there being little to no evidence that it is the case. 

In fact, Nekron can more specifically be described as fitting the bill as a literal Black Hole Sue, a character whose very presence causes other characters to act as plot enablers to show great or powerful the character in question is. Everything we have read up till now, written by a litany of writers, was all in service of building up just how powerful Nekron is without ever actually giving a reason or showing why he is. This is a very amateur way of making a villain a universe level threat. Johns did not have to write a new scenario to show how evil he was, he just retconned Nekron into old stories where the other writers did not know they were writing about him. I'll say it again, this is fan fiction level of amateur writing that is just plain lazy.

Nekron isn't even an explanation, really, he is just a simple plot point. An actual explanation of death would entail presenting an idea into the collective universe that other writers could use and expand upon in subsequent stories. Johns' creation of the various emotional colours is such a case. For years to come, this idea could be used and even expanded upon. Once Nekron is defeated though, there is nothing about this “explanation” that can really be used in service of another story. Sure, we can retcon it into some flashbacks, but can this idea be taken by another writer, or even Johns himself, and be used in the future. No, it's a dead end plot point created simply to make his all-consuming evil seem more badass. The only real effect of it I can see is it gives DC an excuse to create Black Lantern Superman, Wonder Woman, and Green Arrow toys.

All Death As a Retcon Doesn't Work

This style of writing didn't strike me as too amateurish when he created an avatar of fear to explain why Hal Jordan fell from grace. This could work because, in the grand scheme of things, this is a minor plot point in the overall universe. It didn't completely change the nature of many past stories.

Plus, this idea was able to grow over the course of many issues into his concept of the emotional spectrum, with Parallax becoming a genuine threat in the Green Lantern mythos. The concept even had the potential to progress into multiple avatars for the numerous coloured corps.

However, the nature of death itself is something that affects every story, character, writer, book, etc. that has or will come out of DC. Death is a subject that touches every aspect of the human experience, both real and fictional. It requires a writer to delve deep into his talent well and provide story points that have some meat to them. Rather than spend the fourth issue of this series spinning wheels till Nekron's reveal, perhaps Johns could have delved into Nekron's head and given some actual commentary on death. Instead it was dealt with in the course of a couple of panels during the next issue which, if it isn't obvious, is the main source of my gripes. 

Summing up Hal Jordan's descent into villainy with one sentence (It was a bug/avatar of fear.) is okay in my book. Doing the same with the nature of death/resurrections in one sentence (Nekron did it.) is not. To spend months of marketing leading up to the event and making grandiose claims about explanations of death and hint that he was going to give us an amazing new Big Bad that then falls short with the explanation given and presents a Mary Sue-ish villain is disingenuous and a total failure in that regard (note, the event or story or content are not being challenged here, merely the explanation of death, its role in the DC universe and the statements made by Johns in building up this story).

The sad fact is that with the recent reveal of Aquaman's resurrection in the post-Blackest Night weekly, Brightest Day, it appears that the primary purpose of Blackest Night, besides offering some good art and fights, is to revive at least a few major characters that have passed away over the years. Perhaps the comics will give a massive resurrection with the defeat of death. Maybe it will seek to end the cycle of death and resurrection, too. Personally, I enjoy the occasional death of a main character, so that last option would leave me slightly disappointed.

What could have been done - the monomyth

Two words, Joseph Campbell.

Okay, maybe a couple more.  There is a reason Campbell's works, such as The Hero with a Thousand Faces, have been so highly influential in the works of popular culture since their conception. He synthesized his theory regarding the tropes of the monomyth, also known as the Hero's Journey, over the course of a long and storied career. The general theme of his work can be summarized that a hero's story follows the three act, broad themes of Departure, Initiation, and Return. 

Under those broad themes are many other subthemes that represent the massive varieties of storytelling options available in this theory. These ideas run through the stories of past to present, most certainly including heroes like Superman, and turns it into a tool that any writer can, and probably should, use to enhance their works. Take this quote from Wikipedia for example:

“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

Right there is all I believe one needs to start down the path of presenting an acceptable explanation of the nature of death in comic books. While not true for all heroes, for the greatest of them all (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and so forth), the conquering of death seems to be an integral part of their journey as heroes. 

After years of battling the evil in the world there is one last plane for them to conquer. Perhaps it is an entirely new, and maybe the last, journey they must undertake before they become true gods. But eventually these greatest of heroes will descend down into the depths of Hell, Hades, or any realm of death in the style of a Greek hero and conquer it. When they return, they can be ranked as gods among men, ready to shepherd the weaker ones of humanity under their guiding hands.

Nah, let's just say Nekron did it. It's easier than trying to enrich a hero's journey or deal with the struggles of life and death or even tell a simple parable like classic stories of old.

Conclusion

I know I have been a wee bit hard on Mr. Johns over the course of this post. But please don't get the impression that I completely hate this story. Blackest Night has actually been rather enjoyable. It may not be a quasi-deep super hero comic, but it has had its share of fun moments. For example, issue two even made Aquaman look like a major badass, so I think his impending resurrection could be worthwhile. Plus, this crossover has given us seven issues of a Green Lantern Corps comic that has shined head and shoulders above the rest of the event, and largely self-contained to boot. And most importantly (for me at least), the grandiose marketing and claims made prior to the event got me back into buying these floppy packets of words and pictures, so I can't really begrudge some misgivings or possible misrepresentations on the nature of death or possible explanations pertaining to it.

But, as this post outlines, this explanation of death and resurrection that simply states, “Nekron did it”, just doesn't sit well with me. It is about five shades too pedestrian for a subject with the amount of possible depth and impact as this. In addition, the series has raised more questions about death than answered at the moment, such as how anyone can ever die again without Nekron's involvement or even the possible defeat of the personification of death and how that will affect the life/death cycle in the DC universe, among many others. 

Perhaps the final issues will answer all of my questions and silence my criticisms, but it seems more likely that they will either a) be cast aside, b) not answered at all, c) answered in tie-ins that may not get read, or d) used as plot teasers for future stories. All four are not acceptable options for a story that was advertised as being self contained.

Enough ranting though. While, in my eyes, Johns has failed to provide a decent explanation of death in comic books, or at least DC comic books, he at least crafted an entertaining event. Perhaps more substantial answers will be given in these next two issues, but up to this point he hasn't lived up to those pre-event claims. If the marketing claims had been toned down a few notches, perhaps I wouldn't be judging him so harshly right now. 

Maybe a writer more more suited to explaining an overarching concept like death or the metatextual implications of it in relation to comics should have undertaken the task, such as Grant Morrison. He's already offered the meta commentary I was expecting on the subject in series such as Animal Man and Final Crisis. Even in Batman & Robin, Jason Todd got a meta point about death during that subpar Red Hood arc. But what could have been probably won't come to pass now, so we might as well sit back and enjoy the end of the Blackest Night ride. I know I will.

What about the rest of the Weekly Crisis readers? Did Johns' explanation of the nature of death and Nekron meet your expectations? Could it have been improved? What are your thoughts on death in comics in general?  Hit up that comments section and let me know.

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