Thursday, April 08, 2010

Care to join me in over-thinking certain elements of Blackest Night #1-8?

If so, I've got a post doing just that at Blog@ this morning. And on the subject of Blackest Night finally being over, I should take a moment to thank Geoff Johns—he unknowingly granted two of my 11 half-joking requests for Black Lanterns! (If you weren't following Blackest Night, Aquababy showed up in an issue of Green Lantern—and Red Lantern Mera puked acid blood-puke on him—and Rainbow Raider showed up in Blackest Night: The Flash).

1 comment:

Jacob T. Levy said...

In flipping through the books (I didn't buy any of them except the resurrected-series stunt issues and Secret Six), I got the impression that someone had confused Dove with Dagger (of Cloak-and-).

In-story you're certainly right about both Batman and Superman, though I have the impression that Superman was kept legitimately busy over in BN: Superman. (Aside: We used to get single issues of the Spectre series showing why Spectre didn't just show up and solve the problem in the big crossover of the day. Now we get whole miniseries about Spectre or Superman being off the playing field-- Day of Vengeance, Final Crisis Requiem, Superman Beyond, BN Superman. An odd storytelling development.)

But The Trinity have *almost never* all been major players in a crossover as far as I can tell, except for the conceit that Infinite Crisis was about what happens when they're not playing nicely together.

COIE: Batman hardly figures at all, and Wonder Woman does very little except die. Basically set in Green Lantern's cosmos, with lots of space for the new characters (Harbinger, Pariah, Lady Quark, etc), the non-Earth-1 characters, and Flash.

Legends: The exception. All three matter.

Millennium: A Green Lantern story in which other heroes show up. Neither WW nor Batman matter much.

Invasion: Batman barely registers.

War of the Gods: A Wonder Woman story in which other heroes show up. Superman barely registers.

Final Night: Batman barely registers.

Genesis: Of this we do not speak.

Final Crisis: Wonder Woman barely registers.

etc.

This is generally all to the good-- the crossovers would get boring fast (boringer faster) if they were all Trinity all the time. And it makes a lot of sense for Green Lantern's cosmos to provide the setting for big cosmic crossovers.

I'd be pretty amused to someday see a page in which Batman says to Robin, "the red skies/ shadow demons/ angry gods/ zombies/ etc have moved on from Gotham. Let's get back to work on our case. Either the cosmically-powered heroes will fix things or they won't. I don't want to go stand around watching, when we've got a murderer on the loose in Gotham and it's not like Green Lantern is going to come catch him for us."