Reviews of a bunch of Zombie comics I picked up at the local comic shop over the weekend will be going up soon; Marvel Zombies 5 is out, and there are a couple of new Indie comics about Zombies that will bear paying closer attention to.

Meanwhile, I haven’t commented much on the now-ending DC event, ‘Blackest Night’, which involves various superheroes being brought back from beyond the grave as Undead of a sort, in service to an evil god of Death, or something.

Honestly, I tried reading an issue, and… I can’t say Blackest Night has anything in particular to do with Zombies as we typically think of them. I’m not entirely sure the Blackest Night comics have any bearing on what is traditionally thought of as sequential art, either. They seem more like a Mobius strip of internal references looping back on themselves infinitely while colorful fireworks go off in the foreground. Confusing.

Is the enormous crossover event unfair to Zombies, because it casts these particular Undead in a villainous role? *shrug* Maybe. But it’s certainly not a traditional sort of prejudice. These ‘Black Lanterns’ have superpowers, snazzy spandex, and fly around fighting for the anthropomorphic personification of a colored-coded concept. But so do the very-much-living Red, Green, Blue, Purple, Yellow and Violent lanterns. (Polka-dot lanterns coming soon). So if they’re villains, they’re also victims of Death itself. Or something. Honestly, after the page where Hal Jordan fuses with the godlike entity of fear to fight the incarnation of God’s wrath who has fused with the lesser god of Death Nekron (one of three DC death gods, Wikipedia informs me) while the other Rainbow Coalition Lanterns fight an army of revived Black Lanterns from across decades of comic book storytelling, I gave up. There’s fan-pandering deus ex machina, and then there’s fan-pandering deus ex machina with an entire host of actual Gods. From reading online, apparently the long-running story concludes when a White Lantern is created, by magic, and everything is made right. Via magic. So…

We at the ZRC will stick to dealing with comprehensible, if also reprehensible, anti-Zombie prejudice, and leave Blackest Night where it is.

Tags: Comics

This entry was posted by John Sears on Tuesday, May 11th, 2010 at 11:23 am and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.