Hm.

Well, he did it. It's done.

I don't mean the event, Blackest Night. I mean, that's done too, but more importantly it seems that Johns has accomplished that which he set out to do from the very beginning of his run on Green Lantern.

He's revived the Silver Age.

There is absolutely no denying anymore that that was his ultimate goal with... well, most of the stuff that he's written, I guess. He started slow by bringing Hal back. Ok, so we Kyle fans were a little miffed, but whatever, the book was good! Who cares? Then, all of a sudden we had a Multiverse again, Joe Chill killed the Waynes and Clark Kent was Superboy with the Legion. Fine, minor changes. No biggie. He got a bit bolder when he resurrected Barry, but it's hard for anyone to argue with that decision because it happened in the form of an excellent book. No beef.

But now...

Hal and Barry have a conversation toward the end of this book about why only those 11 specific characters were revived while everyone else returned to the grave. My problem with this scene, and really the ending of the story as a whole, is that I KNOW why those specific people came back. Oh, I'm sure there will be an excellent explanation in the pages of Brightest Day and it will lead into another 5 years of incredible stories by one of the absolute masters of the form, but c'mon.

Geoff wanted his toys back.

I'm of two minds about this trend at DC over the last 10 years to wipe away the 80's and 90's as if they never happened. On the one hand, there was a lot of uneccessary crap in those eras. A lot of things happened that didn't make sense, or were just gimmicks, or whatever. Returning the DCU and, specifically, the Justice League to it's most iconic format, with it's most iconic characters in their most iconic clothes is definately a move that has it's merits. I mean, these guys are legends for a reason! Fantastic characters, every one of them, with the potential for decades worth of stories yet to be told.

On the other hand... Does that mean that nothing can ever change? One of my favorite things about DC when I first started getting into comics was the legacy aspect of the characters. Kyle was Green Lantern, but there had been another guy before him who died and now Kyle had to live with this guy's legend on his shoulders. Wally was the Flash, but there was another guy before HIM who passed on his mantel when he died. Something about this concept... that characters died and new characters continued their missions. It felt... I dunno, real. It made the universe seem real.

This has been an amazing, exciting series with a breathtaking finale that set up an awesome series of plotlines leading into the future. But even so, I'm left to wonder... Are the days of progress, of moving forward with real changes dead at DC? Is that a bad thing? SHOULD characters never die, should the status quo stay the same forever? Is that the secret to building legendary stories? Or should we take the history of a universe, fictional yet with the illusion of independent existence, seriously, moving forward after major changes rather than reality punching them back to the way we remember them from our childhood?

Who knows?

This book was fantastic. Can't wait for the Brightest Day.