THOUGHT BALLOONISTS

Blackest Night, or, The Continuity Shuffle, Part 2

My son Coleman has been buying and digging DC’s latest extravaganza, Blackest Night, and he was kind enough to lend it to me so that I could check in on the company’s latest twists and turns in continuity. Lately he’s been one of my windows into the DC Universe (along with Batman and Robin and the disappointing New Krypton franchise); thanks to him, I have a better idea of what’s now happening to the Green Lanterns and the various other “colored” Lanterns of the DCU, the reds, the yellows, and so on, who together comprise Geoff Johns' so-called emotional spectrum. This “spectrum,” in effect a prismatic retcon of the Green Lantern mythos, strikes me as one of the more interesting gimmicks with which the DCU mythos has been retrofitted in recent years.

Unfortunately, no offense to Coleman, I haven’t found much to enjoy in Blackest Night. Not my cuppa tea, and all that.

The Continuity Shuffle, Part 1

Final Crisis #1-2, by Grant Morrison (script), JG Jones (pencils and inks), Alex Sinclair (colors), et al. DC Comics, publisher. $3.99 per issue.

I've got an interest in serial continuity, particularly the involutions of superhero comics continuity. Most particularly, God help me, I've got a love/hate relationship with the torturous maintenance of corporatized, "mainstream," work-for-hire superhero continuity. My interest is a largely abstract research interest, meaning not enough to get me to buy and drag myself through tons of crummy comics just to track changes in continuity unless and until a writing project comes along that seems to demand the sacrifice. But I do track DC and Marvel continuity from a distance, and, when the talismanic name of Kirby is invoked, I get up close, knuckle down, and buy the comics in question. I often regret it.

On some level, the terms of my interest in superhero continuity are self-defeating, since I see said continuity as self-contradictory and unsustainable as anything other than a marketing strategy. The invocation of Kirby is a lure for me, but no more likely to make me happy in the end-all, because my interest in revamps of Kirby definitely falls into the love/hate category. I'm a skeptic.

Writer Grant Morrison, who is responsible for the fact that I've been reading more DC than Marvel comics lately, is mad for Kirby. He's in the process of retrofitting Kirby's Fourth World with new twists in order to effect changes in DC continuity. I'm talking about Final Crisis, a seven-issue event series with artist JG Jones, which comes as the putative endpoint of a series of jury-rigged event series I couldn't get myself to follow, including Infinite Crisis, 52, and Countdown. It's also a sort of sequel to a Morrison project I sampled only fitfully, the baroque Seven Soldiers.