Blackest Night: Flash #2 spoilers
Let me start out by saying that my husband's months-ago prediction of zombie Glider pantyshots is unfortunately true O_o Even worse, said panties are all ragged. My mind may never recover from the trauma.
So as we see in the preview, the Rogues bust into Iron Heights and go hunting for the zombies. They find carnage everywhere, with dead and wounded guards, but I'll mention up front that we don't see any recognizable prisoners...no Piper, or Alchemy, or any of the guys we've speculated might be there (they may show up in #3, of course, and perhaps they'll help defeat the BLs).
Zombie Scudder and Digger appear and start beating on them, and then we see the entire crew together as Lisa slashes Len with her skate. I like how zombie JJ has a water gun which is apprently shooting the black goo that the Black Lanterns are made of.
Then we have a lengthy interlude with Barry and others. Turns out I was wrong in my prediction that we wouldn't see Blue Lantern Barry or Black Lantern Bart here -- however, this means either the timing of the series is off compared to some of the other tie-ins, or quite a bit of unseen time elapses in this series (I'm leaning towards the latter). Barry becomes a Blue Lantern and goes around spreading blue light and hoping a lot. Firestorm does stuff for a while, and since I don't give a damn about him, it annoys me that he appears for so long. Barry tries to save Bart from the black ring, which is killing him, but naturally Bart tries to fight against him and taunts him about death. When zombie Professor Zoom shows up, Bart cheers him on and joins forces with him, and then BL Solovar appears too, so it's just a big BL hoedown against Barry, Wally, and Saint Walker.
Back with the Rogues, the zombies are trolling the living just as they always do. Lisa puts on the saddest face ever as she guilt-trips her brother about not keeping her safe...and holy smokes, I know everyone loves the Cold solo issue, but I wish Johns and Kolins would give those exact same flashback scenes a rest. This is the THIRD time we've seen some of these panels. Len manifests 'LOVE' for her, but although zombie Lisa is trying to get more emotion out of him purely for cruelty (since the BLs no longer need to rip out emotionally-charged hearts to fuel Nekron, she's clearly just being nasty), he finally loses it, snaps her ankle, freezes and shatters her. While she's not shown re-forming and the implication is that she's been destroyed, she hasn't been, so don't worry. This isn't enough to destroy a BL, and we don't see the 'CONNECTION SEVERED' message which indicates an actual zombie destruction.
Meanwhile, zombie JJ chases a terrified Axel (okay, I thought that was funny -- "Where are you running off to, Walker? I've got a TRICK to show you") through the air, and Scudder yanks McCulloch into a mirror. Scudder claims "I was like you. Hatin' who Sam Scudder was. Puttin' on a mask to escape it", which is new. And zombie Roy claims he can finally see colours as he goes after Mick for no readily apparent reason. The biggest ZOMG revelation of the issue comes from zombie Roscoe taunting Mark "Do they know, Mardon? Do they know how we planned to take out Snart and control the Rogues before I died?" Oh, Mark. Everyone expects that behaviour from Roscoe, but shame on you. Now of course I'm devilishly curious about when exactly this took place, because Roscoe's had so many deaths he could be talking about :>
BUT. Just as BL Roscoe and Digger are about to rip out Mark's heart, Len insults Digger about what a disappointment he was at the end of his life, and is about to shoot him. Then Owen zips in between them, claims he knows how to bring Digger back, and runs off with him. The blurb for the next issue is "Next: The horrible deeds of Captain Boomerang".
(If zombie Roscoe had any smarts, he'd rip out Mark's heart during the confusion, but it's probably a safe bet that he doesn't do this)
Kolins draws the zombies as rather more ugly and gruesome than the snippets we saw of them in the main Blackest Night series...well, Digger looks mostly the same. And I have no idea why this would be the case, but for some reason Roscoe's feet are backwards. Or maybe it's his head that's on backwards, but based on the direction of his arms in some panels, it appears to be his feet/legs. Or maybe Kolins is just drawing his spinning in a really sloppy way. Any artists have an opinion on this?
My only real quibble with the issue is that I wanted to see more of BL Roy, JJ, and Roscoe. They only appear in a few panels each and hardly do or say anything. There could have been a lot less Barry and co, but I guess the issue is called 'BN: Flash' rather than 'BN: Rogues' :P Still, to hell with Firestorm, who got more dialogue than those three did.
So! Feelings on this issue, predictions for the next? My guess is that Owen plans to bring back Digger through time-travel or something, just as Barry mentions Prof Zoom's time-related resurrection elsewhere in the issue. Thanks to Digger's history of time-travel, there's no reason he can't do it like the Prof can. And since Johns said ages ago that we'd see something about Digger's and Owen's past in this series, presumably we'll get some info on that too.