Blackest Night Video Interview

Geoff Johns: The cool thing about Green Lantern is that it’s an intergalactic police force and you follow the guys that have become a part of it. You need all these alien roles and different alien adventures, and it expands to a great epic battle that no other character in comic books where it can match. I think Green Lantern has the potential to be one of the most popular and loved characters in any media. It’s just waiting for people to discover it and I think they’ve discovered it through comics.

Blackest Night is a storyline about life and death in this universe. It’s a storyline that’s been a combination of things that we’ve building here for long time and actually it’s based about the dead rising to take back the universe.

One of the things I really love about Blackest Night and the interactions of the rest of this universe because it really is a DC Universe story where Green Lantern is front centered.

Nearly every character has somebody important to them that has died or a hero has died or a family member or a villain even. And so, the impact is very emotional throughout the story and then the story of course leads to other things and developments and characters like—Blackest Night in DC Universe.

You’re not going to really know what Black Lantern is and what they do and what they’re like until you read the first. It’s pretty clear what they’re like but not exactly what they used to do.

So that part, it was like Star Wars, a big epic space opera. Lord of the Rings, a lot of good stuff and with Blackest Night, it is a big open epic, Star Wars, Star Trek, crazy space adventure but it’s horror film too. There are a lot of horror elements in it. Exploring the black rings of Black Lanterns and all that and what they want and what they have to accomplish. It’s literally the blackest night. So, what I wanted to do is make sure that Blackest Night was incredibly difficult for the heroes and the villains are incredibly organized. We’ll see who makes it and who doesn’t.

Throughout Blackest night, you can expect just about every character that’s died during the Black Lantern core. You kind of see where they’re all going, if they’ll make it. It’s the War of Light. It’s Sinestro versus Star Sapphire. It’s the Black Lanterns coming in as a big wrench to everything and it starts with again that like “Let there be light and there was light.” And then the light splintered.

So, the Green Lantern issues and the Green Lantern core issues explore and expand upon things and that begin in Blackest Night that their -- their own stories as well. We’re conscious of the fact that some people will only pick up Blackest Night and so, we worked hard to make sure Blackest Night was as standalone as it can be.