Weekly Comic Book Review

By: Geoff Johns (writer), Ivan Reis (artist), Oclair Albert and Joe Prado (inkers), Alex Sinclair (colorist)

Everything was good! Cover to cover. Art. Story. Lettering. Everything. The art team, already superb, took it up a notch. Long-lost lovers, white lanterns, silvered manifestations of life, hazy mists of power, and faces frozen in fear, joy, greed, anger and love jump out of the pages. The art especially evokes.

Yet, it was not just the first-class job of Reis, Albert and Prado that did the job. Alex Sinclair has made the Blackest Night come alive with his work on colors. Also, Nick Napolitano’s work in this issue has me commenting for the first time on the work of the letterer. Most of the pages in this book are suitable for mounting or framing.

The last issues of Green Lantern, Green Lantern Corps and Blackest Night have built the tension of the last 8 months to the point of snapping. Everything had come down to Sinestro, linked to the power of life itself, facing off against Nekron, the unbeatable force of death and darkness. I would love to give details or examples of what happens next, but the story is so rich that I don’t want to spoil even slightest detail. Johns had built up a compelling plot, filled with characters we cared deeply about on an epic scale. The twists and turns of the conclusion were fast and slow at the same time, and I felt myself rushing and pausing over every panel. When the conclusion of the plot finally hit, I was so primed that it blew me away. Then, Johns dropped the denouement on us, with the roller-coaster of joy and grief polishing off this brilliant event. Intellectually satisfying. Emotionally satisfying. With a taste of mystery leading into two major unanswered questions in the DCU…

Finishing this comic, with the quiet talk between the Flash and the Green Lantern, two old soldiers who have been through fifty years of adventure together, made me feel like I did when I read issue #12 of Crisis on Infinite Earths. Johns and company pulled off an epic that people will be talking about twenty-five years from now. I am giving my first “E” rating ever.

Grade: E (E for Epic… The only grade reserved for those rare books that transcend the medium.)

-DS Arsenault

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