*Spoilers*
“You’ve gotta be joking.” That’s the last line of Brightest Day 2, spoken by Deadman. It also sums up my exasperated reaction to this crapfest.
Let me start out with some positive feedback. In my last review I derided the Atom/Firestorm pages as bland; well, this week Firestorm fared much better. Johns creatively deploys the Atom’s power to explore some freaky properties that Professor Stein believes the firestorm matrix has begun to display. This comes as a huge improvement since the story shows potential in growing away from merely some cliche opposites buddy comedy to actually being instrumental in disclosing some of the unseen ramifications of Blackest Night. The other good thing is Hal Jordan isn’t in this book. Okay that does it for positive feedback.
This book is so bad, and reads even more disjointed than the first issue (if thats even possible to believe), that I can’t even be bothered to narrate its flaws. Therefore, I have decided to just go through the book and just cite its more heinous crimes against comic book craft:
- The only thing that is good about this book is basically a recycling of last issue twist on Aquaman’s power. Again a former black lantern shows to be afflicted with some distorted version of his/their abilities. I gave it a pass earlier only because this is something that Johns has been building towards. If you reread some of the Atom parts of Blackest Night you will see John sowing the seeds for understanding the black lanterns as automatons engineered at the the atomic level. Its an interesting plot thread that jibes well with both the Atom and Firstromm so I am glad that he is following through. However, the way this thread is unfolding leads a lot to be desired.
- It seems Johns has never read any Jason Rusch stories as Jason comes off completely out of character. In fact he shows no personality what-so-ever and is written as generic angry/whiny black kid.
At one point Jason inexplicably (I guess the justification is some desperate frustration) calls Ronnie whitey. Jason is a strong, smart and resourceful character. I don’t buy that this situation has left him feeling so powerless that he would resort to a racial slur in some delusional bid to feel in control. And even if he did, whitey? If you’re going to write him completely out of character at least give him some pzaz and go for honkey. - The ridiculous black manta scene is also recycled only this time we have a White Martian brutally slaughtering her family after realizing Martian Manhunter has returned.
- I came to Brightest Day hoping to see a story about J’onn trying to rebuild his civilization but instead Johns, in typical Johns fashion, give us a boorish retcon about daughters and White Martians and saviors. I can’t really remember as it was so bad I have already started repressing it.
- The Hawks are this week’s happy recipients of most bland story. Hawkman goes all cry for justice after seeing deathmasks Hath-Set has made of previous incarnations of both Hawkgirl(woman?) and him. There’s actually nothing exceptionally bad about these scence except I don’t see any reason to be invested in this story. This scene feels like it is misplaced in the narrative. The scene doesn’t work because Johns and Tomasi haven’t reestablished Hath-Set and his motivations yet. Hath-Set, like all the other villians so far, are just caricatures that want to see this arch-rivals dead because, well, they are their arch-rivals and that’s what arches do. I can’t seem to make myself care.
- Deadman is again reduced to an expository narrative device. Lame.
- Oh and if anyone was wondering if DC is run by hacks that wouldn’t know what creative writing looked like if Superboy-Prime punched them in the face, the big reveal is that the Anti-monitor is back from his long (almost three issues) hiatus.
Final Verdict: F+
I think you will find, if you re-read the issue, that the “White Boy” comment didn’t come from Jason, but from a voice within the Firestorm matrix which I’m guessing will turn out to be the Black Lantern Firestorm.
Thanks, Wheeljack. Good Call. You are absolutely right. I miss attributed that line to Jason because of its proximity.
I am also fairly certain it will be BL firestorm.
I was pretty disappointed in this issue too.
I think I liked the Firstorm scenes less than you did. I was never a huge Firestorm fan anyway. But the Ronnie Raymond I read wasn’t such an idiotic frat boy. Jell-o shots? Really? Asking Jason his favorite flavor? Most frat boys I knew had more personality than this.
I’m pretty sure Jason didn’t make the racial slur. If you look at the word balloons for “Hey” and “Shut up, white boy” they look like Jason’s but are grey instead of red. Pretty sure this is a residual black lantern thing.
I liked the “Black Manta scene” even less the second time around.
The stuff with the Hawks just felt random. It’s like you picked up issue 92 of a Hawkman series that ended with issue 50. I’ve read enough of Johns’ work on these character to know he laid the groundwork for this. But it was in JSA and Hawkman and it was something like 5 years ago. Maybe more. Now he’s coming back to tie up loose plot threads?
Could have lived without the Martian Manhunter ret-con. Johns couldn’t live without ret-conning him I guess.
Anti-Monitor? Again? Didn’t we just have Anti-Monitor yesterday? On, no. That was meatloaf. Same dif. I’m tried of both.
Yeah, I know virtually zero about Ronnie Raymond but the writers are def not endearing him to me. And I wouldn’t say so much that I liked it as much as previously I wasn’t interested in it at all while this week it has at least convinced me that at least it has a raison d’être.
Yeah after WheelJack mentioned it I opened up the book again and realized I just misread the word balloon because it right above Jason and the distinctiveness of the balloon is a little blurry because its in front of firestorm’s nuclear head. Mea culpa.
I agree Black Manta 2 was even more distasteful the second time around.
Yeah, Wheeljack beat me to the punch on that one. Doesn’t change much though. The scene and the book as a whole were bad.
Most of the Ronnie Raymond stories I read were when Ronnie was past his prime. They would add him to a team book like Extreme Justice or Power Company to try to boost sales. He never got the best treatment in these books. But he wasn’t some brain dead twerp. I hated the way Johns wrote the Black Lantern version of Ronnie. But I assumed when Ronnie was resurrected he’d stop being a parody of an 80′s-era meathead. So far, not so much.
Maybe this is a throw back to how Ronnie was in his heyday. But if that’s the case, Johns is willfully ignoring decades of character growth to revert the character to an era when Johns was a fan and not a writer. (Big surprise, right?) Thing is, that just makes no sense. The character should have grown and matured in the years since he was that guy. He was shown to have grown and matured. I have those books in long boxes at my parents’ house if Johns needs to borrow them.
[...] All in all, this series is off to a very promising start. Of the two bi-weekly events DC is currently running, Generation Lost stands head-and-shoulders above the more high profile Brightest Day. [...]