Blackest Night...The Experiment

So, this Wednesday, July 15, 2009, the eagerly anticipated Green Lantern event "Blackest Night" hits the stores. Blackest Night is gonna be HUGE!!! High hopes are have been infecting the interwebs for months now. Lots of fanboys are pumped and are expecting a huge DCU changing event not seen since the first CRISIS. And I am one of them...

To Clarify for those of you not aware of Blackest Night. It is a comic book event featuring Green Lantern and encompassing the entire DC Universe. It has grown from a story in the core Green Lantern titles and has grown into DC's Summer Event.

In it a low level GL villain named Black Hand has become the a ward of a powerful entity intent on bringing the dead heroes and villains of the DCU back to life to take over the world.
The story has been building in the Green Lantern books for months, years even.

New corps have been introduced over the past months all featuring a different color and different emotion. In Blackest Night all the new corps will somehow be involved in the dealings of Black Hand and the Black Lantern Corps.

For more information on this event check out any of the numerous comic book websites from newsarama to CBR to IGN. All of which have extensive coverage and previews of issues and interviews with creators...

I have found myself almost constantly thinking about Blackest Night(with boobies still edging it out for the top spot in my brain). Just the other day I has standing on my forklift at work and in lieu of working I was thinking about Blackest night... Who will come back? How will it affect the heroes of the DCU? How creepy can Black Hand get?!?

While thinking about it I thought of an experiment I would like to run.

Now, Comics companies like to throw around terms like "Great jumping on point" and "You only need to read the main series to get the whole story." I want to test those claims.

To run my experiment i needed a Guinea Pig, that is where my girlfriend Michelle comes in. If any of you know Michelle you know that she reads comic books also. But,much to my chagrin, she is a Marvel fan(Her all-time favorite books being Fantastic Four and She-Hulk). She is decently knowledgeable about DC comics but doesn't really read a whole lot of DC books. I have, in the past, gotten her to read Geoff Johns' JSA and she has a long standing refusal to read Green Lantern.(she is afraid that if she doesn't like it i will hate her. Which is a reasonable fear...)

Since she trusts me (a mistake as she will soon discover) she has agreed to be a part of my comic book experiment. Which is also a trick to get her to read more DC comics. (Shhhhhhhh, Don't tell her.)

Here is the procedure to my experiment.
I will give Michelle a brief catching up on GL. She will not read any other Lantern books. I'll just tell her briefly about the other corps and some of the main players.
We will both read Blackest Night.
I am reading all the mini-series that surround it. Michelle is just going to read the main 8 issue series.
We will discuss the book together, write our reviews, and then they will be posted on this very blog. Where you, the reader, can compare the difference in reading experience from someone highly involved(me) and someone new to the book and universe(Michelle).

If all goes well at the end of the 8 months, Michelle will be a Green Lantern fan and Geoff Johns will have written an easily accessible, self contained "BIG" event. Which is something not done in a long time. IMHO
The other side of that coin being that Michelle hates GL, I cry, and it proves that comic companies are once again full of shit and only tailor to the established, experienced fan. Which will eventually lead to the slow suffocating death of the industry because of the lack of new readers being brought in.
GOD, I really put a lot of pressure on Geoff Johns and DC ( Unbeknownst to them.)

I think this is a pretty cool idea. I hope you do too. Stay tuned for the results and reviews. Tell your fanboy friends to visit this blog also.

In the Name of SCIENCE !!!

Good Reading,

Dr. DJ Rothenbecker PhD
Scientist Extraordinaire