Top Of The Pile: Blackest Night #4

From one epic to another, DC's Blackest Night continues to dominate my comic reading list and has now reached the half-way mark (it's an eight-issue mini-series).

In this issue, the various Lantern Corps have left the heroes of Earth to "hold the fort" as they go off to find the source of the Black Lanterns power.

Earths' defenders, sort of being lead by Barry Allen's Flash, are doing the best they can against the overwhelming hordes of zombie-demons.

However, the ominous, slowly rising, black power battery count finally hits 100 per cent this issue and things take an even bleaker turn for the planet as The Black Lantern battery materialises over Coast City and the leader of their corps in finally revealed.

As you'd expect from the team of Geoff Johns and penciller Ivan Reis, this is terrifying, in-you-face horror (of a superheroic, comic book kind) with a solid mix of desperate heroics and grim gore (the Atom appearing from inside one of the zombies was a particular shocker) to keep the pulse racing.

Meanwhile - in outer space - (in Green Lantern #47) Hal Jordan's Green Lantern, along with the Indigo Lantern, is forced into an uneasy alliance with his old enemy Sinestro to fight the zombified Abin Sur and the Black Lanterns discover - to their cost - that the rage-driven Red Lanterns don't actually need their hearts to continue fighting.

And if you were wondering where the DC Universe's "Big Guns" were during all of this, Blackest Night: Superman wrapped up with issue three of that particular mini-series with Superman, Superboy and Krypto finally giving the undead Psycho Pirate a good thrashing in Smallville, while on New Krypton Supergirl was tied up with her own living dead issues but is now 'trapped' on the planet by the zombie-repelling shield that has been put in place.

Blackest Night, and all its crossovers and spin-offs, has so far managed to maintain an incredible momentum with pretty much every writer involved (and artist) raising his game to make his particular segment worthy to stand alongside the Johns and Reis main feature.

While I am quite happy to go along with the ride, and confident that Geoff Johns will deliver a powerful conclusion to the story, my one wish is that it has some lasting impact on the DC Universe (and particularly the 'revolving door' policy as regards superhero death; a central theme of the Blackest Night series) .

The main fault I had with the whole Final Crisis story - as broad and epic as it was - is that reading DC comics now there seems no real indication that it ever happened, when you'd imagine something that large scale would have changed the face of the planet.