Blackest Night 8b

As discussed in my previous post, my hijacking of DC Comics discarded pre-New 52 Universe hinges on a rewrite of the conclusion of the Blackest Night miniseries. Let me sum up that series for those who haven't read it.

Blackest Night in a nutshell

With all the respective Corps of the emotional spectrum in place (e.g. the Green Lanterns of willpower, the Red Lanterns of rage, etc.) following the War of Light, billions of black power rings flood the galaxy.  Each latches onto a corpse and reanimates it as a soldier to bring about the return of Nekron, the entity of Death.  The means to do this is to elicit an emotional response in the victim matching a color of the spectrum (blue hope for the return of a loved one, fer instance) and then kill them to collect their, I don't know, emotional energy, I guess.

Fer instance, seeing the violet light of love in Hawkgirl right before 

zombies put a spear through her chest.

When enough energy had been gathered, Nekron was able to break out of his prison and materialize on Earth.  Once there, he revealed his ultimate goal to find the White Entity of Life (from which the emotional spectrum sprang) and then kill it, ending all life everywhere.

The plan actually went pretty well, with the White Entity not even defending itself against Nekron's attacks until Sinestro took on the power of the white light and became a one-man White Lantern Corps.

The official ending had the heroes using the white light to bring Nekron's chief zombie lieutenant, Black Hand, back to life, severing Nekron's tie to the world and sending him back to the Land of the Unliving.  For a grand finale, a bunch of characters, such as Aquaman and the just-killed Hawkman, were brought back to life.

I suppose that's one way to do it, but instead, let's fire up the Maybe Machine and run it through a slightly different ending.

When we left off at the end of Blackest Night #7, we were looking at this:

This is actually the opening panel of Blackest Night 8, 

but the closing image of BN7 is kind of non-informative.

In the My52 version of BN8, this fight doesn't go so well for Sinestro.  As in the original version, he discovers that killing Nekron's current body doesn't stop him as he just "jumps" into another convenient corpse.  Sinestro fails as the universe's protector, and Nekron is able to land a killing blow on the White Entity.

As the entity is dying, and taking all of life with it, Hal Jordan gets a cunning plan.  If the entities of the emotional spectrum are fractures of the White Entity, then returning them to the White Light should revive it.  He acts on his plan, releasing Ion, the Green Entity of Willpower from the Green Lanterns' central power battery.  When his plan starts working, and the White Entity starts to revive, the other corps are guilted into following suit, and eventually all the emotional entities are reunited into the White Light and the universe is saved.

A picture of Sinestro pondering the seven emotional entities, 

just to prove that I didn't make them up.

That still leaves Nekron kicking around, though, which leads to significant story change #2. Nekron was initially able to access our world through the wide open door left by the return of such previously-dead characters as Superman, Green Arrow and, most recently, The Flash (Barry Allen).  The only way to get Nekron out of this world is to close that door.  Just as Barry Allen was willing to make the suicide run in Crisis on Infinite Earths, he accepts his fate here and volunteers to return to death if it means locking up Nekron forever.

Another side effect of this door closure is to declare that character resurrections will NOT be happening under my watch.  This series doesn't end with the return of any characters, and any writers who killed off their characters expecting them to come back at the end are stuck gnashing their teeth in frustration.  Hawkman dead, Martian Manhunter dead, Batman dead, Barry Allen re-dead.

And that's where we end our revisionist writings and from where we'll kick off our stories in the next blog post.

   

My52

I miss comics.  I never really outgrew the adolescent wish fulfillment of superpowered comic book heroes.  The truth is they sort of outgrew me.  DC Comics was the publisher I held onto the longest, but eventually even it outpriced my budget and out-“matured” my sense of taste.  Recently, my comic hobby has been little more than reading Wikipedia and daydreaming about what I would do with the characters if *I* ran the zoo.

Then, a couple years back, DC Comics did something interesting.  In the fall of 2011, they just up and stopped writing their stories and started all over again (mostly) with what they called the “New 52”.  I don't blame them for seeking younger readers, but these newer, hipper, edgier characters were clearly not meant for me. 

Honestly, if the worst thing I can say about the Teen Titans is that 
Superboy has a tattoo, that just confirms I'm being a curmudgeon.

But then the armchair comic editor in me realized that, if DC Comics aren't using their old continuity, why couldn't I?  They've an entire universe of beloved characters and stories just collecting dust.  And while I'm not interested in actually writing individual issues (which is a big lie), I still boil with ideas of how I'd use those characters and what type of stories I'd tell with them.  Let's call this mental exercise "My52."

Except that I won't be starting exactly at the end.  While one of my goals is to refrain from any wholesale retcons, I won't feel guilty ending Blackest Night in the same way the original authors did: setting things up for the stories I want to tell.  So my continuity will hold true up through issue #7, but expect a significant rewrite of the finale in Blackest Night #8 in a future blog post.

Before I get into specifics, though, let's set a few ground rules.

1. I'm not a business.  I don't need to worry about concerns of income, marketability, or maintaining copyrights.  I don't care how popular Batman is, he doesn't need more titles than Flash.  
2. I have to respect what writers have done before.  Blackest Night #8 rewrite aside, this isn't a retcon exercise.  I need to make the best of what there is, not what I *wish* there was.
3. Because my comic reading was pretty slim there toward the end, I'm pretty sure some inconsistencies will creep in.  So while I won't intentionally rewrite timelines, I accept that some may get rewritten by accident.
4. I don't need to kill off characters to get them out of the limelight.  Characters I consider too boring or confusing or otherwise don't inspire me will just quietly get on a bus and go off to live new lives.  I won't need to explain where Beast Boy went to explain why he's not in my Teen Titans.
5. My52 will continue the concept of the 10-Year Sliding History which posits that all DCU history occurred within the ever-compressing past 10 years (an outline presented quite well in 1994's Zero Hour event.)  Because a lot has happened since then, I'm upping it to a 15-Year Sliding History.  The original Teen Titans have aged, characters will have had children, and so on.

Now, while it would make the most sense to pick up where they left off when they started their New 52, I have to confess I don't actually know that much about the comics published in the last couple years of DC's pre-New universe.  I think the most recent DC comic I read was 2010's Blackest Night 8-issue miniseries.  I liked it quite a bit, even if it was a bit gory (it gets a pass, though, because it was about zombies).

This is the Dark Knight, you know...rising.

What I do know is that Blackest Night ended with the return of several formerly-dead characters, such as Martian Manhunter and Aquaman, as a way to set things up for the future. So when it comes to selecting a stepping off point for My52, the end of Blackest Night seems like as good a spot as any.

An example of the Timeline presented in Zero Hour.  

For our purposes, change that "10" to a "15."

  

Coming up next: Blackest Night #8b and the starting status quo.

Alternate Endings

A very wise friend of mine once said something to the effect of "I don't have any regrets, but it is fun to sometimes dream of possible alternate endings."  That's pretty much what this blog is for. All the times I've found myself saying "If only I-" or "That's not how *I* would-" or "If I were in charge-" will find themselves enshrined here, both as a way to vent the ideas, but also as a way to fully formulate the thoughts and see where they lead.

Expect a lot of general geekery here.  I'm not into sports or music so much as I am into science and fantasy, and I've never fully outgrown some of my more adolescent hobbies like comic books and Dungeons & Dragons.  In fact, I've a sneaky suspicion many of my first posts will be right along those lines...