DOUGLAS: No getting around that. There are also a lot of cooks in this kitchen: the collection’s credits list 27 artists. That might be okay if Johns and Tomasi gave this series a voice of its own (or let their voices compete, the way it worked in 52), but instead they’re both writing more cautiously and blandly than either one of them has before–it’s like watching two people play the mirror game, trying not to make any sudden motions that will throw the other one off. There’s no depth to Brightest Day, no feeling of play or exploration, no sense that it’s about anything other than its specific story beats–if the pitch was “what would you do if you got a second chance?,” answering that question with “fight flying humanoid tigers” is unsatisfactory.
GRAEME: Spoken like a man who’s never fought a flying tiger in his life. It’s VERY invigorating, don’t you know.
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The problem I had (and, interestingly enough, don’t really have with what follows the issues in here) is that this series isn’t really asking “What would you do if you got a second chance?” but, worryingly transparently, “How do we keep the buzz from Blackest Night going?” I find the callbacks to that series the dullest points of the story here: Aquaman can only mentally control ZOMBIE sealife! Firestorm keeps thinking of his Black Lantern version! Uh… okay? I don’t really care; that series is over, and I find myself wishing that the characters contained in Brightest Day were actually ALLOWED a second chance, without finding themselves forced into this extension of a story that doesn’t need one, if that makes sense?
DOUGLAS: On the other hand: zombie giant squid. I’m fine with that.
GRAEME: As to there being less of a voice to this series than 52 – You’re right, I think, and the problem may be that the core characters here are Big Guns in the DCU; this is pretty much a Justice League of the 1970s book, and it’s possible that that makes Johns and Tomasi feel more respectful and less able to play with the characters than Johns, Rucka, Waid and Morrison did in the earlier series.
DOUGLAS: Also, the cliffhangers are really poorly done. Given that the cliffhanger at the end of #1 was that Black Manta was back, for instance, maybe he could have turned up again sometime before a flashback in the middle of #6. Likewise, at the end of #6, J’onn discovers Miss Martian, apparently brutally murdered. When we see them next, J’onn gets two pages of a white-ring-induced vision, at the end of which Miss Martian is just fine. What?
GRAEME: Well, that last one does get explained later, kind of (You can also pretty much draw the answer out of what you’ve already seen in the book itself – the White Light healed her, as it did with the bird Deadman found in the first chapter). The pacing only gets weirder as the series goes forwards, however. Be warned.
Despite all this griping, I should say: I like Brightest Day. Admittedly, I like it much better in single issues, as a serial where the regular momentum fits the cliffhangers better, but even in this book, I think it’s fine enough, fun if you don’t think too hard about it, even if it’s clearly less of a series and story in its own right than 27 issues of the readers watching a very slow reboot of all of the characters involved so that they can get their own series afterwards. But I have a fondness for the characters involved, so I may be biased.
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DOUGLAS: See, that’s exactly what bugs me about it. There’s going to be a new Aquaman series and it’ll be dead in a year. Ditto the Hawks. We see this over and over: character gets given a prominent supporting role in something as setup for a “Because You Demanded It!” series of his/her own–but there wasn’t actually demand, and nobody ends up caring. (See also: Azrael, the Red Circle titles, Hawkeye and Mockingbird…)
EVAN: Yeah, my biggest gripe with Brightest Day is structure. DC editorial’s trying to meld its crossover strategies into one beast here. Either they have a big event that spins out into a miniseries or they have a miniseries leading into it. Here, the miniseries itself is supposed to be the event, but everything feels so cramped. It leaves me wondering if I’m not liking it because of the plot ideas themeslves or because they don’t have room to breathe.
And I really wanted to like Brightest Day. The promise of more well-adjusted, less grim DCU was appealing but all the plot beats in the various storylines are so grim. For a bunch of resurrected characters, nobody seems happy to be alive.