I have to be honest: I'm completely off of Blackest Night again. I realize that it's the new sex and that it's selling like effing hotcakes so I guess everyone else is really into it, but it just doesn't click with me. Whereas last issue engaged me and made me feel like something interesting was happening, this issue - despite portraying much larger events - left me cold. No, more than cold; it left me annoyed.

It's what I was first saying about this series from the get-go: I find it hard to get it up for a bunch of overwrought melodrama about how the DC Universe (or Marvel's, or anyone's) might be coming to an end in this series. We all know the major faces are quite likely to pull through and that after a knockout finish we'll get beautiful panels of grieving heroes who go right back to business as usual. These big crossover events so rarely produce any permanent or even temporary-but-significant changes in the narrative worlds they afflict that it's hard for me to get the point of them other than sales. Even when such stories do manage major changes - such as the death of Batman - it's safe to assume they won't last.

For that reason, it's hard for me to take seriously the threat to a major character. I love Grant Morrison and happily daydream of being wooed right out of my flat-front slacks by some arcane secret he might wield but when Batman bought the farm in Final Crisis I felt like the strings of the puppets in these sorts of tales were more visible than normal. It didn't feel like it was driven by strong characterization; it felt like it was driven by a need to get Batman in the grave so he could be brought back again.

That's exactly what Blackest Night #5 feels like to me, too. Beautiful artwork, don't get me wrong, but every page would be improved by the removal of words from it. Whereas I find it hard to take seriously a permanent threat to one or two major characters, I find it laughable to take seriously a threat to the entire core cast of the DCU. There has been good writing here and there in this series but the big spread with all the major heroes having rings forced onto their fingers actually made me close the book, set it down and come back to it later out of sheer pique. It's the plot equivalent to someone giving a Hummer the Pimp My Ride treatment: already lame to begin with and unimproved by over-the-top adornments.

The one good thing - Batman fan that I am - is that the abrupt raising of Black Lantern Batman is followed by an equally abrupt dismissal of him that, to me, felt more dignified than most other risen characters' time on the page in this series. Using Zombie Batman as a trap was, in its way, an acknowledgement that even absurdities like Blackest Night have boundaries they'd just as soon not go beyond.

Tie-Ins:

Weirdly, the tie-ins from late November and early December were pretty good. R.E.B.E.L.S. is not a book I find very interesting but the last page of its tie-in issue, with Vril Dox being offered something a little scary, was pretty great.

Likewise, though I am not a follower of Booster Gold and I find the whole concept of teen mantle-inheritors a bit twee for my tastes, I loved Booster's sad reminiscence of the ways he feels he hasn't lived up to being a hero. The dramatic irony is bittersweet, as the reader knows Booster is apparently fated to become a great hero and here we see him still young and vulnerable and afraid in a human, accessible way.

The real star, though, has to be the Adventure Comics tie-ins featuring Superboy Prime. The main storyline about the 31st century is, well, whatever. Here I wave my hand with a dismissive flutter of my fingers. I'm sure it's quite good to people who like it, but I never read it. I only bought this one for the ring promotion and found the Superboy Prime storyline surprisingly good; insanely meta and inside-baseball, yes, as Superboy Prime learns of his own potential demise by reading the comic in which he's being featured while he reads it (and in the next issue goes on a rampage in the offices of DC Comics) but - in contrast to Blackest Night's off-putting degree of screechy melodrama - so deliriously over-the-top one can't help but enjoy it.

Adventure Comics' tie-in with Blackest Night is the screaming methed-out crybaby queen of the comic book dance floor, as is Superboy Prime to the world he inhabits and, further, as are fan reactions to him: so crazy messed up I have to love them all a little. I sometimes wonder if Superboy Prime is so hated and mocked because the story of an obsessive outcast convinced that the world doesn't understand his true genius or power, lashing out at all around him, may sometimes strike a little close to home in the realm of fandom. I also have to think that this has occurred to Geoff Johns, too, given his take on this character: amusing, frenetic, mocking and sympathetic all at once, a humanizing approach that extends beyond just Superboy Prime to the people around him. There is something genuinely tragic and horrifying about Superboy Prime's adoptive human parents living in constant fear, clutching at one another in the simultaneous realization that every opportunity to escape him would just result in another tantrum when he hunts them down again. If there were an ongoing Superboy Prime series written like this, by Geoff Johns, I would buy it. It would probably run out of steam halfway through the third issue, but I'd buy it anyway.