Everybody knows what a superhero is. A person who has superpowers, beats up the bad guy and saves the city. However much has changed since that time. Some heroes die now. Others fail to save people. They are no longer the invincible champions the readers used to see them as. “The Blackest Night” is a story about the emotions the superhero community and the reader brought on by deaths of heroes or the ones they failed to save.
It is sad when you see your favorite hero die in the pages of comic books. It brings a sense of hopelessness and it is upsetting. It was even more upsetting when something out there is using black rings to reanimate the heroes that we once admired and uses these corpses as puppets to kill other superheroes. This is the main drive of “The Blackest Night”. This greater evil is using these bodies not only to trigger an emotional reaction from the reader, but from the heroes as well. “Why?” you may ask. The answer is as defiling as the zombies’ resurrection-to rip out living hearts. They then absorb them into themselves and create rings for the newly deceased heroes.
This eight issue saga was a page turner every month. Every time, there was always some twist that always made you wanting to read the next issue. Whether it be when Green Lantern and The Flash wait unsettlingly as the dust settles only to see the zombies of their former teammates coming to kill them or when reanimated corpses of Elongated Man and his wife brutally kill Hawkman and Hawkgirl in the first issue.
It amazes me in everyway how someone could take such a cliché idea as a zombie apocalypse and turn it into a story that was last year’s must read for any comic book fan. The art was also truly spectacular. It was a different style then what the artist was more used too. It was more realistic and true to its name, very dark and horror movie like. As an avid reader of comic books, I highly really recommend this to anyone- artist, storytellers, even people who never read comics. If you liked “Watchmen”, then “The Blackest Night” is something you might want to check out The Blackest Night website to see if you are interested.
