Hearkneing back to silver age mentality, Blackest Night is not just the dead coming back, but the implications of why a character would die, and why another would return before he was missed. With the recent Batman RIP, and the death of Captain America in the Marvel camp, it’s an interesting statement on the fallibility of an icon versus the immortality of the comicbook hero. Taking place primarily in it’s own limited series and the Green Lantern titles, it also has it’s own share of spin-offs like Tales of the Corps, and other major DC titles such as Blackest Night: Superman, Blackest Night: Batman and Blackest Night: Titans.

In the modern age of comics, gone are the summer blockbuster crossover that are almost set in their own alternate reality before it wraps up and normalcy is returned. There aren’t huge game-changing events that are quickly retconned to never have happened in the first place. What we have instead are truly universe changing continuities, and the next ‘event’ is more often an evolutionary series built upon the last major story arc. From Civil War to Dark Reign, and in this case from the ‘Rebirths’ of Barry Allen and Hal Jordan to Final Crisis to Blackest Night.

The other trend lately is for these events to be written and overseen by a primary writer. In this case Geoff Johns seemingly takes over for DC PTB Grant Morrison, and quite simply exceeds any expectations. If you simply describe the plot outlines for almost any of Johns’ work, it sounds deceptively simple. There is a profundity to the work that the defies the simple synopsis; Hal Jordan comes back, There’s a corps for each colour of the spectrum, The Black Hand could destroy the universe. It’s the questions posed to the reader, both moral and ethical, that Johns weaves into the work that make this series not only the biggest of the year, but one that should cause deep repercussions in the DC universe for the future.