Who Is Nekron?

If you’re reading this, you’re on the Internet, and if you’re on the Internet, you probably know by now that NEKRON is the evil force behind Blackest Night. Unless you are a complete comics obsessive like me, your response to this news was most likely “Wha? Huh? Who Nekron?!?”

Nekron is an old Green Lantern foe dating back to one of DC’s very earliest mini-series, Tales of the Green Lantern Corps (1981). It was actually one of the earliest DC series I ever read, though long since lost from my collection. Nekron rules the Realm of the Dead, a nebulously-defined region of cosmic real-estate that’s not quite Limbo, not quite Purgatory, where the souls of the dead await passage to either Heaven or Hell. Nekron was content enough to lord over the spirits in waiting until Krona arrived, opening a rift to the universe of the living. Krona was an immortal, so when he “died”, the paradox ripped open the wall between Nekron’s grim domain and the living universe:

Scans from Green Lantern Annual #7 by Steve Vance and Ron Lim

Peeking through the rift, Nekron decided he wanted some of that action, and sent Krona and an army of dead Green lanterns to kill the Guardians of the Universe and widen the rift to allow his escape. Hal Jordan and the living lanterns managed to beat back the invasion, but Nekron hasn’t been the same since. His appearances since then have been variations on the same “raise the dead to invade the living world” trick, and it seems that Blackest Night is his biggest, most ambitious plot yet.

The revolving-door nature of death in the DC Universe is itself a major theme of Blackest Night, so I suspect that Nekron’s ambitions are going to end up being the reason for that instability. We don’t know how or why he was made ruler of the afterlife, but for a time, he was only one aspect of death in the DCU. As told in some Captain Atom comics I last read 17 years ago and in Nekron’s Wikipedia entry:

“Captain Atom has a run-in with Nekron in the pages of Captain Atom #42 and #43 (June-July 1990), in which he is described as "Death as the Ultimate Opponent." Black Racer, also making an appearance, is coined "Death as an Inevitability," while Death (prominently known from her appearances in Vertigo titles) represents "Death as the Release, as Mercy, as Compassion."

Death and the Black Racer are both out of the picture these days, with Vertigo characters famously off-limits to the DCU and the New Gods characters having been exported to an alternate Earth, so that may leave Nekron as “the” Limbo/Purgatory gatekeeper. We can probably assume, then, that Nekron has a purpose; to process and usher dead souls into the afterlife. It appears he’s been hoarding the souls of the dead heroes and villains all these years, planning Blackest Night, and as a result, it’s been much easier for dead souls to come and go. If so, Nekron is a cosmic-level slacker who hasn’t been doing his job at all. Like a disgruntled worker surfing "Monster.com" on company time, Nekron spends all of his time scheming to conquer the realm of the living, while letting his “IN” box fill up. I don’t know if he’s been doing the same piss-poor job with civilians, but all signs point to “Yes" at least as far as deceased supporting cast members are concerned.

This idea even fits in pretty well with publishing history, since the majority of Black Lanterns we’ve seen died after Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1985, which lines up approximately with Nekron’s debut (and discovery of the living realm) in 1981. In other words, so far, we haven’t seen any Black Lanterns who died before Nekron got ambitious and started paying attention.

Meta, isn’t it?

If so, his defeat (we assume!) at the end of Blackest Night could lead to a sacking and change of management in Limbo. Maybe the Spectre will get the job. Presumably, that would also lead to a slate of redemptive resurrections and/or passages to the afterlife. I could see a mass resurrection, with a few characters electing to go to their final reward peacefully, knowing that they will pass forever. I always enjoy seeing obscure characters get dug up and dusted off, and I actually have read all of his previous appearances, so I’m interested to see Nekron’s big push after all these years. Whatever happens, the metaphysical implications are pretty staggering for the DCU, and should make for good reading.

Ghosts of Blackest Night in the 30th Century!

DC's latest epic crossover, Blackest Night has been pretty good so far, though the second issue seemed featherlight compared to the first, and told us nothing we didn't already know. Except, of course, that we've already been here. A couple of times.


In 1998, DC's JLA annuals were haunted by "GHOSTS", as the various JLA'ers were haunted by the dead from their pasts. (Note that by now, many of those "dead" have since returned.) I don't have most of these, but if the Green Lantern, Flash, and JLA Annuals I do have are any indication, it looks like the Bernie Wrightson covers were the best things about 'em.


Ignore that innacurate-but-excellent cover; Flash Annual #7 saw the Flash, haunted by the flickering, barely coherent speed force ghost of Johnny Quick. He finally has a heartwarming ghost-hug with Jessie Quick, but no point does Johnny become a zombie and attack Flash.



Green Lantern Annual#7 is a different story however, as Kyle Rayner finds himself meeting his fellow Green Lanterns for the first time, as hideous, undead revenants! You'll recall that in 1998, the Green Lantern Corps were still dead, Mogo was destroyed, and the Corps disbanded, leaving Kyle Rayner the sole Green Lantern. Nekron shows up, taking advantage of the supernatural forces behind the larger "Ghosts" storyline to elbow his way back into our universe, and sics the Lantern Corpses on Kyle, before being subdued. We'll be talking more about that guy soon.

No, the true force behind the haunting in the Annuals is revealed in JLA Annual #2. It turns out Felix Faust, in one of his many bids for immortality has awakened an ancient Egyptian wizard, Hermes Trismegistus, and angered him enough to cause all this mess with the ghosts.

All of this, indeed, all events in the story so far, is of secondary importance to the GHOST OF VIBE:

Yes, Paco Ramone returns, looking for his former team mate, Aquaman. The Ghost of Vibe is accompanied by eerie strains of old school electro Break dance music wherever he goes, and soon Ice, Steel, and other dead JLA members re-emerge as well. At the end, Vibe leads them to dog-pile on the evil-wizard-possessed Faust:





Five years earlier, in the 30th century, The Legion of Superheroes 43-48 (1993) saw a multi-issue saga that had the 30th century heroes caught in a struggle between Mordru and the White Witch. Mordru raised an army of the undead, among whom were such dead Earth heroes as Vigilante, the Justice Society, and Jason Todd:


As if that weren't bad enough, the Legion had racked up quite a body count by this time in this continuity, so eventually, all of the dead Legionaries showed up for a Live Legion versus Dead Legion showdown:



So yeah, DC has done the "Undead Heroes return" thing before, albeit never on the Scale of Blackest Night. It remains to be seen how Blackest Night turns out, but lets hope we at least get Black Lantern Vibe out of it, before we're through.








.

Kevin O'Neill Draws Tales of the Bizarro World!

If there is any DC character Kevin O'Neill was born to draw, its Bizarro, and this Tom Peyer- written short from 1998 gave him full run of Bizarro world, despite that world "not existing" in canon at the time. Mister O'Neill's work is polarizing; you either love it or hate it. I quite like it myself, and hope you enjoy "BIZARRO MUST THINK", a tale of one monster's demented bittersweet fantasy:

Say it with me now:
BIZARRO CODE
Us do opposite of all earthly things.
Us hate beauty.
Us love ugliness.
Is big crime to do anything perfect on Bizarro world.

Poor, poor lonely Bizarro. But don't feel too bad for him - he did get his own version of Bizarro World, eventually.




"Bizarro Must Think"
Script: Tom Peyer
Art: Kevin O'Neill
Story scanned from Adventure Comics 80-Page Giant, DC Comics (October 1998)

Matter Eater Legends: Tenzil For the Defense!

Now that Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds has finally wrapped, it looks like almost all Legion of Super-Heroes stories still “happened” somewhere in continuity, albeit maybe not in the timeline we thought they did. The original Legion that debuted in Adventure Comics #247 has been restored to its rightful place in the Earth-1/New Earth/Earth-Wherever-the-Hell-It-Is-That-All-the-Main-DC-Books-Take-Place timeline with most of their history intact, the exception being pretty much everything that happened after Crisis on Infinite Earths and the attendant erasure of Superboy from the Legion's timeline...

...You know, there's no way to write some of this stuff without sounding like a complete, gibbering loon.

Unfortunately, that means that the entire “Five years Later” Legion was wiped from the slate in favor of whatever new path the adult Legion forges from here on out. I can live with that, I guess, but it also wipes out the awesome and hilarious solo adventures of Tenzil Kem, a.k.a. Matter-Eater Lad, including “Tenzil For the Defense”.



Matter-Eater Lad was the longtime Legion member whose power was to basically eat anything. He became emblematic of the goofy nature of the early Legion of Super-Heroes era, but was hardly the goofiest thing they had going, or even the goofiest individual member. Nonetheless, his return to the 5YL Legion saw him played for laughs, and Tenzil was much needed comedy relief in the otherwise somber proceedings at the time. In his own blog, Writer Tom Bierbaum described how he wrote Tenzil as a Peter Venkman type of irreverent hero, a move that ended up being a truly inspired choice. This way, at least we're laughing with, and not at Matter-Eater Lad for a change. We first saw “the new Tenzil” in LoSH vol 4, #10 trying to get through space customs with an unorthodox form of currency:



Matter-Eater Lad had been out of the Legion picture for a long time, having eaten the reality-warping Miracle Machine in Superboy and The Legion of Super-Heroes #251, and subsequently being driven insane by its strange, cosmic energies. He recovered, but was drafted back into his home planet’s screwy compulsory political system, where he was an overwhelmingly beloved Senator. He returned to his unwanted political duties with a sense of freewheeling abandon, actively trying to get thrown out of the Bismollian senate by blowing taxpayer money on several increasingly-popular documentary shows, including the fact-ignoring and sanity-defying “Wild Archaeology”:




Of course, the shows are so popular that he ends up bringing in more money to his constituency than he could ever effectively piss away, therefore the people love him, and the government hates him. After awhile, interest wanes, and Wild Archaeology is canceled to make way for a courtroom drama: Tenzil for the Defense! Tenzil is only half-interested until he finds that his first case involves former Legion leader Polar Boy, arrested for inciting dissension at a pizza parlor. Remember that Earthgov was shadow-backed by Dominators at this time, so Tenzil knows that there is no way that Polar Boy is going to get a fair trial. Tenzil throws himself into Brek’s defense the only way he knows how; unapologetic, madcap stalling antics, and one of the funniest courtroom scenes I’ve read in comics:





Tenzil wins the case but wisely hauls ass off Earth with Polar-Boy in tow, still wearing his Braino costume, before anyone has too much time to think about it. This was a classic issue, with some truly hilarious moments. It also led to another couple of epic Tenzil/Polar Boy adventures, but those will have to wait for another day. As of Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds #5, Matter-Eater Lad is among a few still-missing characters that the Legion needs to locate, so let’s hope he eats his way back into the spotlight soon!

Blackest Night Thoughts

Blackest Night has been years in the making, and looks like it might actually pay off. Issue #1 was good, creepy stuff. The panel where Green Lantern rings up all of the DC Universe dead, shown below really points out how casual DC's disposal of their superheroes has been over the last 25 years or so. That's not even counting what I'm sure is easily three times as many villains, and countless supporting cast. The ending was quite distressing, but effectively so. I wasn't really expecting much from this, but the first issue was a good start.


The question remains; Will they use this as an excuse to resurrect a bunch of characters? Any of these guys? All of them?

An important point: These zombies aren't zombies. Zombies have a whole set of rules that Black Lantern Ralph and Sue Dibny weren't following. These Black Ring entities are possessing the bodies, manipulating the bodies, and mimicking the former occupants, all the better to be evil, but they aren't zombies.

It's okay, kids, that's not Golden Age Superman ripping out Krypto's heart, that's some...thing using Golden Age Superman's body like a sock puppet!



For awhile there, Neil Gaiman's Death was the personification of Death in the DCU, but that hasn't been the case in some time. I think they've also tried to suggest that the Black Racer "was" Death, but that never really stuck either, and regardless, he's off the table now too. The fact that there's really nobody to usher the dead into the afterlife these days may play a part thematically in Blackest Night.

I will be very disappointed without an appearance by Driq of Criq. Driq was the (ahem) short-lived zombie Green Lantern introduced in Green Lantern #217. Driq was great, by the way, a Green Lantern so learned and valuable that his ring wouldn't let him go after he died.

What's With the Ambush Bug Delay?

"This is DC backing Ambush Bug completely. Other times when we've done Ambush Bug, it was kind of like guerrilla warfare."

So what’s going on with Ambush Bug: Year None #6? Issue #5 came out months ago, but the sixth and final issue remains a no-show. The series was edited by Jann Jones, and in an apparent effort to duplicate earlier Ambush Bug series’ inclusion of Julius Schwartz, Keith Giffen depicted Jones as a character in the series, a sidekick of sorts to DC Editor-In-Chief Dan DiDio.

That whole aspect of the series fell flat, in my opinion, as Dan DiDio has hardly earned the beloved figurehead status of a Julius Schwartz. Jann Jones has since left DC Comics for personal reasons. Maybe she was written into issue #6 and needed to be removed, but if so surely that's an afternoon's work for Keith Giffen? It shouldn't be that big of a deal to get the book partially redrawn, but much of the creative team is in the dark. We've all heard the rumours. If there was some sort of…irregularity…in the editorial relationships that led one party to leave DC’s employ, surely holding up this book for over six months seems like a good way to keep drawing attention to the (hypothetical, of course) situation. Apparently, Jones had to lobby DiDio to get Ambush Bug: Year None on the schedule in the first place, so perhaps there’s a whiff of spite here, as well.

"16. When will we see the last issue of the Ambush Bug series?
DD: It is being completed as we speak – the last issue is on my desk. It’s one book that I can say quite honestly that hit the editor’s desk and got stuck there. We’re just making a couple of revisions to the story, and I felt the likenesses were a little too complimentary, so I had to make them a little worse."

Yeah, we keep hearing that same flip "explanation". To the extent that its become a running joke at Newsarama. Is he waiting for the pages to sprout wings and fly themselves to the printer? I just want my fucking Ambush Bug comic, really. I'm sure the bowdlerized version that does emerge is gonna be awesome. Who knew wacky comedy could be so dramatic, eh?

Again With the Doom Patrol

I’m a total mark for the Doom Patrol, as well as being a Metal Men fan and a Keith Giffen fan, so the upcoming Doom Patrol comic, with its Metal Men co-feature, why its like they made a comic just for me. Scattered childhood Doom Patrol sightings via reprints sustained my interest in the squabbling band of freaks, and Grant Morrison’s work with Richard Case on the book in the early 1990’s is still counted among my all-time favorite comics runs. It got a bit too crazy for me after the book switched to Vertigo, and two subsequent series had their charms, but never quite caught on with a large enough audience to last for long. So DC is going back for yet another try with the original group, while maintaining that everything “happened", somehow:



But things don't look to good for the Byrne era holdovers, frankly. I don’t expect the new stories to be as weird as the old, but I hope that Giffen maintains the sick and wrong relationship between the Chief and his merry band of misfits, given the dysfunctional dynamic that was established previously. I also hope we eventually see some of the other, odder members show up. Dare I suggest a Crazy Jane cameo at least? And hey, if anybody else could write Mister Nobody...! I'm not familiar with Matthew Clark, but his art for this looks quite nice.

Co-featuring the Metal Men with art by Kevin Maguire is a stroke of genius, too, given the oddball nature of the two teams. Maguire can’t keep up with a monthly book, but a backup feature should be more his speed. I notice that they kinda quietly switched back to the softer, human faces for the robots. Good. Between the two, I'm all over this.