The impression I keep getting in these massive crossover events, when I pay any attention to them, is that they seem like a great excuse to shove all the second- and third-stringers from a given setting through a sieve and see who comes out in one piece. I never feel a strong urge to worry about the pillars of the narrative worlds in question - the Superman or Batman or Cyclops or whoever - because they're clearly there only to observe the massive stable-cleaning and get drawn in beautiful poses of noble grief after the fact. Even Final Crisis, a title my main fantasy squeeze Grant Morrison must surely have realized was ironic, suffered from this as much as any other crossover event; though it killed Batman, mostly I read it thinking, Who the hell are these people and why am I supposed to care about them?.

I keep having the same reaction as I read Blackest Night, only more so. Aqualad? The Elongated Man? I realize that these characters have been the focus of high melodrama in recent years, but I honestly cannot get it up to care very much. Ralph and Sue had the only happy marriage in comics history, then that got taken away from them and now their dignity, too? No thanks. The most egregious example of characters being put through the ringer on auto-pilot has to be Hawkman and Hawkgirl. Yes, yes, they got whacked. Actually, that's what they do. I find it difficult to be affected by the deaths of characters whose deal now is that they are continually dying and being resurrected.

I simply find it difficult to be that concerned about death and resurrection in a storyline that is explicitly predicated on the impermanence of death. I cannot take death seriously in a book about the return of the long-dead. I just cannot. It's right there in the premise. Every comics universe has at least a few resurrections and DC is no exception. That's cool, I have no problem with it overall. Soap operas are built using a tool box of basic plot twists, returns from the grave most definitely among them, and comics are usually soap operas with highly specific costuming requirements. So, OK, sometimes people are going to die and come back. I know that. Am I now supposed to be shocked by deaths of characters I consider minor at best, or resurrections of same? Maybe I didn't read typical comics when I was a kid but even I have figured out that happens all the time.

I don't mean to sound like a negative ninny, it's just... OK, take my current favorite counterexample, Grant Morrison's Batman and Robin. Batman is dead, long live the Batman, et cetera, but we all know Bruce Wayne is coming back. I know it, your family knows it, dogs know it. That's not the point of Batman and Robin, though. It's not a book about Batman dying and coming back, it's a book about what happens while he's gone. That's way more interesting to me, personally, because it's all about questions of identity and agency and the impression that can be made by a person even in their absence.

Blackest Night, however, mainly seems to be about entirely new, previously unknown forces marching onto the page, throwing people and grotesque caricatures of dead characters at one another, and marching back off. Yes, the dead say some mean things to the living when they're fighting and that's a little harsh, and yes there's been some good art. Still, so far, the way it's been little more than building up and up and up and up and up to some big final showdown is a little tired, a little tiring and not nearly as interesting to me as it would be if the dialogue consisted of more conversations and fewer one-liners. I know that when it's all said and done there are going to be beautiful panels depicting the funerals of the famous and I will ooh and ahh a little at seeing so many faces rubbing shoulders but that isn't enough to excuse what I consider to be a slightly ridiculous storyline for no reason other than that it is defeated by its own theme. News flash: the dead don't stay that way in comic books. We know. Thanks for that. Maybe if the storyline were about the Green Lanterns having to figure things out and bring everyone together I would care more, but the fact that a whole new corp just... waltzed into existence? Again, no thanks. If DC want to bury some of their most compelling characters in a landslide of references to the archives, OK, fine, but let them dig their own way out. At least leave them that much agency.

There are things I've really liked in this series. Well, OK, there will be. I like that a ton of canceled books will get one more issue in January. I like some of the art. I like the gothed out uniforms on the Black Lanterns. I like the original Black Lantern's origins story. The rest of it, though, seems like a lot of card-shuffling to me. It doesn't leave me wanting to know what happens next, it just leaves me wondering if I'll recognize anyone.

I'm a completist, though, so I went ahead and reserved all the books that will get me different colored power rings in a couple of months. Even a weak storyline becomes a winner when it's backed by just a little shwag, or at least it does when one is as easy as I apparently am.