DCU Comic Book Reviews

GREEN LANTERN #43

Tale Of The Black Lantern

early September 2009

Written by Geoff Johns

Pencils by Doug Mahnke

Inks by Christian Alamy

Covers by Doug Mahnke and Eddy Barrows

Synopsis

Scar, the Guardian of the Black Lanterns, opens up the Book of the Black to take part in the birth of the first Black Lantern.  The heart of William Hand is filled with death.  And he is happy.  He hears the voice of death and has for as long as he can remember.  William’s parents own a mortuary; his childhood was surrounded by death.  He has always had a fascination with death.  He even stuff dead animals, including the family dog.  As a young man, he witnessed a battle between Green Lanterns and Atrocitus.  In the battle, William retrieved a cosmic rod.  Over the years, William fought Green Lantern a number of times, always losing.  He traveled to Coast City to kill Green Lantern, but was taken by the Gremlins and Evil Star, who experimented on him.  It brought him close to the “darkness.”  He could hear and touch death.  He saw those that died.  And those who died and were resurrected.  The voice calls to William and says he wants them all back.  William travels to his parent’s home.  He kills his entire family.  Then kills himself.  Scar appears.  She literally spits out the black power ring and gives it to William Hand.  He is the first Black Lantern.  He is the embodiment of the Black Lantern Corps. 

Review by Binkley (e-mail)

Johns is the perfect writer for this kind of story, in which we learn the origin of a well-know villain. He wrote several of these stories during his run on the Flash a couple of years ago, defining and the rogues in a way no one had done before.  In these stories. Johns finds a way for the reader to understand who the villain is and why they do the bad things that they do.  These stories don’t generally generate sympathy for the character, but more of an understanding of who they are and where they come from.  So, I suppose it should come as no surprise that this is typically good Johns comic.  For those not familiar with William Hand, it provides the cliff notes version of his history and then provides the scenes setting the stage for “Blackest Night.”  More importantly, Johns gets to the core of William Hand, presenting him as someone whose evil tendencies are not the result of some outside influence (although his father being a mortician is somewhat connected), but rather being something is just a part of who he is.  William was not abused (in fact, his family loved him even if they didn’t understand him).  He was not brainwashed and is not guided by greed.  William is just disturbed, which makes a lot of the scenes with his family even creepier than they already are.  This is a brilliant prologue and definitely has me eager for the upcoming mini-series. 

This is a pretty gory and disturbing comic, which is both wrong for a super hero comic and something that will sell fairly large and thus will be seen as typical of the genre but also right for a story about death.  Blackest night, after all, is a form of a zombie movie with the dead coming back to life, so you should expect a certain level of creepiness in the story.  It will be interesting to see how people will react to it and whether there will be some sort of backlash.  “What do you mean you see his brains come out of his head?  They actually drew that?”  And, yet, I think the single page spread will probably become an iconic image in the years to come.  For good or bad, who knows?  But people will remember it. 

For as much as Johns excels at telling a great story, I think the true heroes of this story about a villain is the art team of Doug Mahnke and Christian Almay.  Not only are they great artists, but they are asked to re-draw a lot of published material, recreating 25 death scenes (with 7 others listed but not shown, although Mahnke drew Bruce Wayne’s death originally) from DC’s rich history.  Plus, they had to draw the aging effects of the Hand family and the various shifts in time of Green Lantern, including Hal’s time as Parallax.  It is an amazing job. 

Normally, at this point in the review, I would provide a detailed breakdown of the various scenes and what issue in which they happened, hoping that some were actually reviewed by me (and this setting up links that’ll get you to root around the site).  But I am not sure I really want to try to figure out the 25 death scenes let alone the various references to Green Lantern stories.  Too much, I say.