{"id":2301,"date":"2009-07-13T09:28:44","date_gmt":"2009-07-13T16:28:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/?p=2301"},"modified":"2009-07-13T09:28:44","modified_gmt":"2009-07-13T16:28:44","slug":"the-dead-shall-riseexcept-probably-these-ones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/?p=2301","title":{"rendered":"The Dead Shall Rise&#8230;Except Probably These Ones"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Despite my moves away from DC Comics over the past three years, I have remained a firm Green Lantern fan and, as such, am unreasonably excited about this week&#8217;s <em>Blackest Night<\/em> #1.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s been some hubbub over who exactly is going to get the black ring and come back all Romero-y, but I&#8217;m fairly certain that these dead notables will not, and that&#8217;s a shame, because there&#8217;s some great story potential in every single one of these Black Lantern Could&#8217;ve Beens.  For instance:<\/p>\n<p>1. David Knight &#8211; Between <em>Superman<\/em> and <em>JLA: Cry For Justice<\/em>, James Robinson&#8217;s stock is not at its highest among the DC faithful right now, but I would freak out over a <em>Blackest Night: Starman<\/em> one-shot featuring Black Lantern David Knight going after his brother Jack.  Pallid zombie David in a black and white Starman costume would be a fitting counterpoint to <em>Starman<\/em>&#8216;s &#8220;Talking With David&#8221; issues, in which a black and white Jack Knight has an annual conversation with his dead brother, who is the only thing that appears in color in each issue.  Everybody buying those fancy <em>Starman<\/em> hardcovers would eat this up, and plenty of others besides who would love to see Jack show up to something other than a wedding or a funeral.<\/p>\n<p>2. Alex DeWitt &#8211; I&#8217;m probably going to get some flack for this one, but hear me out.  As the original Woman in a Refrigerator, I can&#8217;t help but think this would 1) be terrifying and 2) really mess with Kyle&#8217;s head, even more than the stuff that happened to him in the Sinestro Corps War did.  And also, since Blackest Night also promises to be a metafictive tale about the permanence of death in comics, it makes a certain degree of sense.<\/p>\n<p>I wouldn&#8217;t play it for a joke, either.  Just picture it &#8211; a stainless steel fridge, Black Lantern insignia clawed into the door, with a clawed, ragged, ichorous hand curled around the edge of the door, black ring on its hand.  You never see what&#8217;s inside, either.  Maybe just a glimpse when it drags someone inside (followed, of course by noises that disturb even Guy Gardner, who has been busy up until this point making bad Indiana Jones &#8220;nuke the fridge&#8221; quips to Kyle).<\/p>\n<p>3. The Red Bee &#8211; The Red Bee is a bit of a joke and gets a bad rap.  But Black Lantern Red Bee (the Black Bee?) would probably attack people with zombie bees.  If you map out things that I like about comics (Rann-Thanagar War = Hawkman and Adam Strange Vs. Space Zombies, as an example) then you can see how <em>zombie bees<\/em> hits the &#8216;fire&#8217; button for me.<\/p>\n<p>4. Power Boy &#8211; The post-Infinite Crisis Teen Titans roster was a great chance to inject some fun, kitschy new characters into the DCU.  Most of them proved to vary from ill-advised to one-note, but none of them were as obnoxiously odious as Apokaliptian Supergirl-stalker Power Boy.  The one good thing about the <em>Titans East<\/em> special was the murder of Power Boy, which left him with a hole through his chest analogous to the hole in his inspiration, Power Girl&#8217;s, costume.  Bringing him back as a full-on ravening villain is a great excuse to kill him again.<\/p>\n<p>5. Honor Jackson &#8211; Remember the ghostly hobo that sent a drug-addled Bruce Wayne on a vision quest in <em>Batman RIP<\/em>?  There&#8217;s no better reminder that he <a href=\"http:\/\/www.petitionspot.com\/petitions\/caseforacase\" target=\"_blank\">still hasn&#8217;t received a case in the Batcave<\/a> than another appearance.<\/p>\n<p>Who would <em>you<\/em> pick to bring back from the DCU graveyard?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Despite my moves away from DC Comics over the past three years, I have remained a firm Green Lantern fan and, as such, am unreasonably excited about this week&#8217;s Blackest Night #1. There&#8217;s been some hubbub over who exactly is going to get the black ring and come back all Romero-y, but I&#8217;m fairly certain [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[206,413,11],"class_list":["post-2301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comics","tag-blackest-night","tag-comics","tag-dc-comics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2301"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2301\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}