Blackest Night: Green Lantern Corps.  Written by Peter J. Tomasi and illustrated by Patrick Gleason.

Imagine what would be your worst ever movie-going experience.  Mine would go something like this…

I’m watching Star Wars for the very first time.  Luke and all the other pilots are preparing for battle: Luke says good-bye to Han, gets a kiss from Leia and gets in his ship.  Then there’s a huge battle in outer space: Luke has the last shot to destroy the Death Star, Darth Vader is overhead, Obi-Wan says, “Use the Force, Luke” and suddenly…

Luke and Han get medals!  The robots are all shiny! Chewbacca growls!  The credits roll.

For some inexplicably bizarre and stupid reason the reels have been switched, the scene was snipped, the dvd skipped – whatever the reason, I’ve just seen the conclusion to an epic film but the final battle scene was missing!

Can you imagine what that would be like?  How awful that would be? – Well, congratulations! Because that’s what it’s like to experience the new hardcover collection Blackest Night: Green Lantern Corps.

The entire Blackest Night story is a huge, sprawling event that takes the structure of The Sinestro Corps War and, like every sequel to a blockbuster event, does it exactly the same but this time it’s much, much bigger!

So instead of it just being two main books and some one-shots, this epic took place through three books that had intertwining stories, along with a bunch of three issue mini-series, plus a month of one-shots that revived canceled titles for a single issue, and on top of all that there was a mini-series that dealt with characters from the various Roy G. Biv corps. 

With more than fifty issues making up the entire tale, there were obviously going to be some challenges when it came to collecting the entire sprawling storyline.  But how to overcome those challenges and ensure the new collections worked both individually and as a large, multi-volume epic?

A while back, I wrote in my review of The Invincible Iron Man Volume 1 that I was astonished the way Marvel inserted a one-page note in the collection that explained that a whole bunch of stuff had happened to Tony Stark off-stage, that there was a story that completed changed everything that I’d been reading, but I couldn’t read that story because it wasn’t in the collection, and, in essence, I’d just have to trust them and go with the flow.

At the time I was dumbfounded that a company could publish a collection of stories that would be so incomplete that they would in essence add a footnote to explain a major event rather than show it. How could they hope to grab new readers if this is the way they treated them?

Well now, DC has done Marvel one better.  They saw their competition’s mistake and they learned from it.  But they learned in the wrong direction. They saw Marvel’s stupidity, and then raised them.  It was like they said, “Wow, was that dumb.  But we can do worse!”

Blackest Night: Green Lantern Corps has eight issues of GLC goodness: it starts with an introduction that tells “The Story So Far…” and then quickly kicks into gear as dead corps members become re-animated corpses (which is kind of a neat pun, the “corps” becoming “corpses”),Mogo is endangered, Kilowog gets pissed off, Kyle is mortally wounded, Guy gets possessed by one of the evil corps. There’s passion, betrayal, love… the book has it all.

On the final page of the second last chapter of the collection, Guy Gardner leads a militia of multi-colored ringed warriors with the battle cry “… Let’s bring the pain to Nekron!” It’s a thrilling call to action as they fly towards an uncertain fate…

And you flip the page and…

Guy Gardner is saying “Let’s power this bad boy up!” and all of the Green Lantern corps members are smiling and their rings are all glowing brightly. And then there’s a splash page. And then Guy says, “Well, our big green light bulb’s all shiny and screwed in tight.” And then Kyle says something and they chat and they joke and they smile…

And I swear that anyone reading these stories for the first time in their collected form would say, “What the hell?!?  Did I miss something?  Did I buy a misprinted edition?”

Because, unlike the page that is reproduced here, there is no mention of any other books that should be read because the tiny caption “Follow the corps into Blackest Night #8” has been removed from the page.  There is no indication that the story concludes in the final chapter of the Blackest Night collection, no description of what happens in that issue, and there is certainly no mention that this volume is therefore incomplete and will not make any sense without that story.

No note from the writer or editor.  No background information on the stories in the other books.  No interviews with the creators.  There are a couple of extra pages in the back of the book with the variant covers and some character sketches of the characters as Black Lanterns.  And that is it.

Oh, but the final page of the volume is an advertisement that says “Follow the complete Blackest Night saga in these graphic novels.” Which isn’t very helpful because it doesn’t say where the story concludes.

Here’s what would have been a truthful description to put on the book’s back cover: “Blackest Night: Green Lantern Corps has eight issues of adventure.  And a ninth issue that’s an epilogue to a conclusion of an epic battle that isn’t in this book but probably maybe hopefully appears somewhere else.”

One would have to think that at some time the question must have arose in DC’s editorial department, “How should we collect all of these issues for the fans who will re-buy the stories to have them on their bookshelves, for those who wait for the trades, and for bookstore readers who might buy one of the books without having knowledge of the other collections? How do we communicate that this is a multi-volume story that has to be read as a complete work? How can we best serve our customers?”

The short answer: not very well. 

The longer answer: they’ve got some serious explaining to do.  Because to collect the various issues of the company’s biggest crossover series without acknowledging that there are other books that are essential for the story to make any semblance of sense, to slap a logo on a book and hope that it will suffice, to not even write a description of what happened or say where the story concludes, to leave that sort of gaping hole in a book…

It’s like never finding out whether that damn Death Star got blown up or not. 

And for an industry that is trying to grow its market share through bookstore sales, that is just dumb-ass stupid.

— Kevin Pasquino