Just finished off Brightest Day #24 from DC Comics over lunch with Scott. My experience with this twin comic book event started out strong. Blackest Night was done quite well and was a pleasure to read, kept you on the edge of your seat for many issues and was easy to follow.

Then the opposite came out, in the guise of Brightest Day. The entire series of Brightest Day was very complex with many players and their sub-stories felt more like meaningless chores than actual meaningful events that I could really get myself wrapped up in. There were a group of incidental characters featured throughout that primarily appeared in the theme of “use ’em or lose ’em” and I couldn’t really form a good emotional bond with any of them. The best thread in the story was how Boston Brand learned how to live again, but that was pretty much squandered in the finale of the story. Many of these second-string characters underwent life-changing events and I couldn’t really care one way or another. The entire series ended with each of the characters setting out on their own separate paths, as if the events of Brightest Day were just a dalliance. I was very excited at the end of Blackest Night, and I was really quite concerned after a few of the first issues of Brightest Day, it felt like the excitement-craft was parked on the tarmac and the engines were very slowly winding up. The entire series felt a lot like that, a kind of regressive, perpetually tripping-on-itself story that always was just on the lead up to the excitement curve but once it started to climb it trembled and fell back away from actual payoff.

The entire two-part story borrowed a lot of creative energy from much of the work that Alan Moore dropped off on DC’s front-steps when he wrote some stories for the Green Lantern series of comic books. The Blackest Night prophesies were the start and at the end of Brightest Day you discover that the major player is “The Green” which is another batch of Alan Moore-inspired material that was injected into DC. I know a lot of professionals regard Alan Moore as a fundamental power in comicdom and I’m sure they would be upset if anyone, let alone little old me, were to tread on any of his hallowed works. In light of that, I can only PRAY TO GOD that we are done with the Alan Moore-inspired stories and we can move on to really creative new stories yet to be told. No more Blackest Night bits, no more Brightest Day “The Green” / “Parliament of Trees” material and get to something, anything else.

Then there is the biggest gyp of the entire series, which comes at the end of Brightest Day. They trot out Swamp Thing, then Alec Holland. There’s some retcon tomfoolery under the covers and a surprising failure of potency in the power of The White. All of a sudden we have to accept Swamp Thing and all the odd “It came from left field” oddity that lays at the core of how this story ended. I never read Swamp Thing, I have no emotional connection to Swamp Thing and the last time I spent any time thinking about that character was after I watched the Swamp Thing B-Movie/80’s rendition of it on VHS tape. I had a dim recollection of Swamp Thing and couldn’t really get into the ending of Brightest Day because all the “momentous” revelations at the end meant very little if anything to me. I still don’t really get what The Green is all about and frankly I don’t care enough to look it up. The crowning moment to Brightest Day was at the very end, they drew a character smoking a cigarette with only one thing to say: “Bollocks”. I had no idea who this character was. As it turns out, Scott knew and let me in on it. It was Constantine, AKA Hellblazer. I didn’t even know that Constantine was even connected with DC, let alone big enough to be the crowning climax of Brightest Day. So this guy is back and he smokes and he swears in an adorable british way. The only thing I have in my memory about Constantine is a rather awful portrayal of the character hacked off by Keanu Reeves. I don’t remember anything about the movie other than he was alive, or dead, or something – that he smoked and had something clever to do with housecats.

So here I sit. I’ve spent a lot of time congratulating Geoff Johns, who was the writer for both of these comic book events and here I sit feeling the opposite of how I did for Blackest Night for Brightest Day. I feel like much of the Brightest Day story was telephoned-in half-heartedly and I fear that Geoff was given too many projects and too much to do and that Brightest Day suffered for it. I don’t want my money back, DC can keep it. I don’t know if I’m going to follow DC anymore with the Flashpoint event. I’m a little leery that we’ll be back to the same feeling of ‘we’re just revving the engines, it’s gonna be cool! just wait for it!” feeling that marked the beginning of Brightest Day. I’m pretty much sitting right on the fence between writing Flashpoint off completely or following it. I suppose I will defer that decision until I read The Flash #11. I have to admit that the way DC has treated their one Flash character, Wally West isn’t helping retain me as a reader. The cagey no-information/why-did-I-sit-through-this feeling I got during C2E2 has me thinking that I could save a lot of time and money pulling away from DC Comics. I don’t really feel a lot of interest for any of Marvel’s projects since I got burned so badly with all the inane Deadpool titles and fell off the event wagon back in Civil War. My weekly take for comic books is right around five bucks and perhaps walking away from them is the best for me. Seeing Geoff Johns’s name as lead writer used to excite me, now I’m filled with wariness and trepidation.