Here Come Blackest Night Spoilers!

The climax of Blackest Night #7 made perfect sense to Your Obedient Serpent.

Sure, everyone's been anticipating that BN would climax with some kind of "White Lantern" moment, but most everyone -- including Your Obedient Serpent -- has assumed Geoff was grooming Happy Hal for the role, what with his sampling ring after ring.

Of course, each successive sampling demonstrated that Hal simply wasn't SUITED to wielding anything but Will. His big moment of Avarice? Two hamburgers. His greatest Hope? "I hope you'll stop asking me." Carol's whole arc in Blackest Night has been the essentially unrequited nature of her love for Hal.

Hal's got drive and focus and determination, but he doesn't have a lot of passion. He's just too narcissistic. And Johns has been highlighting that by having him Taste the Rainbow.

At the same time Johns has been distracting us by decorating Hal's digits with different neon colors, though, he's been establishing those passions as part and parcel of Sinestro's character. Fear and Will were always there, but we've also seen his lost and secret Love, his Rage at the Guardians, his Hope for a "better", more orderly world, and his Compassion for those who suffer because of "chaos".

And he Wants. He Craves. He Covets. He wants the respect and honor that was once his, and is now Hal's. He wants Power. He wants to be the Greatest Of All Lanterns -- and this, too, has been part of his for as long as Fear and Will.

Hal is simply too pure. He's a Green Laser, a single frequency of Ego and Drive and Will.

Sinestro can wield the White, and should, because, of all the ringslingers we've met, he and he alone has mastered all of the emotional spectrum.

Though Guy has almost as strong a claim, come to think of it.

In Brightest Day....

This made me laugh out loud:


I may have to print it out and post it at work.

Speaking as a long-time fan of the Green Lanterns, who's read the book(s) through all the ups and downs since 1970 or so, this multi-year arc that Geoff Johns has been writing is the Best Damned Run Of Green Lantern ever, one of the best things DC has done in the last decade, and Blackest Night is shaping up to be the "Final Crisis" that Final Crisis wasn't.

Honestly, it's a big part of why I still bother with superhero comics.

After, what, five years of non-stop Big Events and Red Skies Crossovers from both major companies, after a year of working in a comic store, and after my Fanfic Epiphany from a couple of years ago, I've come very close to burning out on commercialized adolescent power fantasies.

But Johns is good, and Blackest Night is not so much an Editorially-Mandated MegaCrossover as it is the logical climax of the story he's been telling for the last five years.

Still and nonetheless... "They turned Green Lanterns into Care Bears" is spit-take-worthy.