Brain Dump: On the Resurrection of Characters in "Blackest Night"
First, a little background for those of you who don't follow DC Comics at the moment:
You may be familiar with the Green Lanterns, a corp of interstellar policemen whose primary weapon is a power ring. That ring can channel a powerful green energy to do its wielder's bidding, limited only by the Green Lantern's imagination and, more importantly, willpower. A Lantern's ring draws its energy from a main battery on the planet Oa, which is where the Guardians of the Universe reside. There are 7,200 Green Lanterns at any given time, and the most famous of those on Earth is Hal Jordan. When Jordan was originally inducted into the Corps, he was told that the rings were powerless against the color yellow, a weakness attributed to an impurity necessary to make the rings work.
In reality, the cause for the yellow weakness was that there was an entity trapped inside the main battery on Oa - this entity became known as Parallax, which is a sort of avatar of fear. When Hal Jordan was possessed by Parallax, he did unspeakable damage to the universe, but eventually rid himself of it. Still, the Parallax entity lived, and was instrumental in the founding of a new corps, led by the renegade Green Lantern Sinestro. The wielders of the yellow rings wield them by causing fear in others.
With the emergence of a Yellow Corps, the door was opened to the rest of the emotional spectrum. Red, Orange, Blue, Indigo and Violet Corps soon arose, their energies powered by Rage, Avarice, Hope, Compassion and Love, respectively. With them, according to prophecy (because there always has to be a prophecy) came a Black Corps, powered by death. Whereas the other corps choose their members based on how well they're tuned to the proper energies (Batman very nearly became a member of the Sinestro Corps for his ability to cause fear, for example), the Black Corps recruit by a fairly simple method: they resurrect the dead. Rings seek out a dead being, reconstruct the body to working conditions and command it to "Rise."
These risen characters are not mere zombies, however - they retain all of their original memories and personality traits (and, where applicable, their powers), but are driven to kill. For every heart they rip out (in the physical sense, though they do a fine job of doing so in an emotional context as well), the total charge of all Black Corps rings rises .01%, and their victim is usually inducted on the spot.
So what I was thinking was this: If the rings really are resurrecting the dead, how can they so completely change them into killers? Ralph Dibney would never, ever try to beat Hawkman to death, and yet it happens right in Blackest Night #1
Oh yeah, there may be spoilers.
There are so many heroic characters ripped from their graves, their personalities intact and yet driven to murder the ones they used to call friends and family. I asked myself: why should this be, and how do the Black Rings effect this?
One of the things about the DC Universe is that it is a well-established principle that things such as gods (and God) exist, as do souls and spirits. Good and Evil are real things here, and usually easy to tell apart. No one who has read DC Comics would dispute that. So if the Black Rings were indeed restoring the souls of the dead to their bodies, how could they make them so single-minded in their pursuit of death? So far, we have seen no character struggle against their new role as members of the Black Corps. They're all quite willing to murder their friends and family to power the Corps.
So perhaps the rings don't bring back the souls after all, I thought. It would be comforting, after all - we can know that Aquaman really is at peace, and this thing in his place is just wearing his body. But how could the Black Ring - or the energy that powers it - know what Aquaman knows, then? Because it does, that's amply demonstrated. A resurrected member of the Corps has all the memories of the deceased and demonstrates clear personality traits. Ralph Dibney's chilling declaration, "Hey, Sue - I smell a mystery!" before murdering the Hawks is an excellent example, as is Firestorm's "I call dibs on the Flash" in issue #2. If the soul is the possessor of the essential Person, the rings shouldn't be able to do this - Aquaman and all the others should be mindless murder machines.
This is what I came up with, and to explain it, I'd ask you to think of the process by which molded statues, machine parts and tools are made.
If I wanted to make a Superman statue, I would first build a clay model, making it as detailed and perfect as I am able to. I would then use that clay model to create a negative mold, usually in plaster or some other durable material. Once that's finished, I can get rid of the original clay - the empty space it created can now be filled with whatever medium I want my final piece to be in, usually plastic or metal.
In the conundrum presented to us by the Black Corps, I suggest that the brain is the mold, and the soul is the medium.
Without one, the other is useless, and yet they feed back on each other. The mold will determine the shape that the medium takes, and the medium will define what the mold can look like.
Of course, the human brain is far more detailed than any plaster-of-Paris mold can be, since it changes and re-arranges itself over time. The medium, however, doesn't change, and defines the quality of the final product, as it were. A tin statue and a bronze statue, made from the same mold, would be drastically different in nature, despite looking the same. A "noble soul" will always outshine a baser one, regardless of the brain and body it inhabits. For our purposes, the soul is the animating force behind an individual, but it is shaped and defined by the structure of the brain - memories, synaptic pathways that are built over a lifetime of learning and living. Together, they make a Person. Change one or the other and you change the person.
It would be incorrect, however, to say that there is a certain type of soul that is inherently "better" than another, so perhaps the "noble soul" tag would be inappropriate. After all, you wouldn't want to use gold to make a hammer, would you? Of course not. Nor would you use iron to make a child's toy. There is a matter of appropriacy involved as well, and perhaps that is what occasionally drives characters to cross the line between hero and villain, or to abandon their role altogether, on the basis that they were never of the right stuff for it.
In any case, perhaps the souls of the resurrected Black Corps are indeed at peace - the Martian Manhunter that Flash and Green Lantern fought in Gotham may look like him and sound like him, but it is not him. The essential J'onn J'onzz is gone, replaced by a new, far more malevolent animating force.
The primary villain (as far as we know right now) is a dark entity known as Nekron, a truly powerful lord of the dead who seems to be making a play for power with the opportunities made available by the rise of new Corps. I would suggest that it is his will, in this case, that is the medium animating all these resurrected characters.
When a ring finds a target, it rebuilds the brain and body through means not entirely clear, and the whole thing is animated by the will of Nekron. Because of the previously existing brain architecture, the reborn person appears to have the same personality and memories as he or she did when alive. But the essential core of that being is black and corrupt, fueled by Nekron's dark spirit, which grows in power with each death.
Ralph and Sue Dibney, Earth 2 Superman and Lois, Terra and Omen and Hawk and Firestorm - the souls of all the heroes as we knew them are safe, wherever it is that souls go in the DC Universe until it's time for them to come back. The growing armies of the undead in Blackest Night are not those people. Once Nekron is defeated - as he must, in the end, be - those animated bodies will return to their corpse status as the will that animated them is removed.
What'll be interesting is if any of these zombie heroes do survive the end of the series. Will the Black Corps remain, greatly reduced and still seeking to bring death to the universe? Or will the original soul be drawn back to re-animate its body once Nekron's influence is withdrawn? And if that happens, how will they cope with the things that were done in their name?
Geoff Johns, the writer of this series, has said that it's not about the dead - it's about the living and how they deal with the horrors they're witnessing and the ones they have to perpetrate in order to protect those who live, and so the zombie heroes being the actual people we knew is not necessary for the story. Assuming that a "person" is a combination of a set of physical restrictions powered and characterized by a spiritual element, the unnerving behavior of the resurrected heroes of Blackest Night can be explained.
The best part is that there's no reason why we can't apply this same metaphysics to our world, other than its essentially deterministic nature, which is somewhat out of vogue in the 21st century. We are fortunate, perhaps, that there is no way we can know - there is no Nekron to animate the dead to do his bidding, and I think I can live with that.
Any questions? I'm sure there are holes in this - I put most of it together while out walking the dog with The Boyfriend, so I probably missed something. But I think it adequately explains the paradoxical behavior we're seeing in Blackest Night.
You may be familiar with the Green Lanterns, a corp of interstellar policemen whose primary weapon is a power ring. That ring can channel a powerful green energy to do its wielder's bidding, limited only by the Green Lantern's imagination and, more importantly, willpower. A Lantern's ring draws its energy from a main battery on the planet Oa, which is where the Guardians of the Universe reside. There are 7,200 Green Lanterns at any given time, and the most famous of those on Earth is Hal Jordan. When Jordan was originally inducted into the Corps, he was told that the rings were powerless against the color yellow, a weakness attributed to an impurity necessary to make the rings work.
In reality, the cause for the yellow weakness was that there was an entity trapped inside the main battery on Oa - this entity became known as Parallax, which is a sort of avatar of fear. When Hal Jordan was possessed by Parallax, he did unspeakable damage to the universe, but eventually rid himself of it. Still, the Parallax entity lived, and was instrumental in the founding of a new corps, led by the renegade Green Lantern Sinestro. The wielders of the yellow rings wield them by causing fear in others.
With the emergence of a Yellow Corps, the door was opened to the rest of the emotional spectrum. Red, Orange, Blue, Indigo and Violet Corps soon arose, their energies powered by Rage, Avarice, Hope, Compassion and Love, respectively. With them, according to prophecy (because there always has to be a prophecy) came a Black Corps, powered by death. Whereas the other corps choose their members based on how well they're tuned to the proper energies (Batman very nearly became a member of the Sinestro Corps for his ability to cause fear, for example), the Black Corps recruit by a fairly simple method: they resurrect the dead. Rings seek out a dead being, reconstruct the body to working conditions and command it to "Rise."
These risen characters are not mere zombies, however - they retain all of their original memories and personality traits (and, where applicable, their powers), but are driven to kill. For every heart they rip out (in the physical sense, though they do a fine job of doing so in an emotional context as well), the total charge of all Black Corps rings rises .01%, and their victim is usually inducted on the spot.
So what I was thinking was this: If the rings really are resurrecting the dead, how can they so completely change them into killers? Ralph Dibney would never, ever try to beat Hawkman to death, and yet it happens right in Blackest Night #1
Oh yeah, there may be spoilers.
There are so many heroic characters ripped from their graves, their personalities intact and yet driven to murder the ones they used to call friends and family. I asked myself: why should this be, and how do the Black Rings effect this?
One of the things about the DC Universe is that it is a well-established principle that things such as gods (and God) exist, as do souls and spirits. Good and Evil are real things here, and usually easy to tell apart. No one who has read DC Comics would dispute that. So if the Black Rings were indeed restoring the souls of the dead to their bodies, how could they make them so single-minded in their pursuit of death? So far, we have seen no character struggle against their new role as members of the Black Corps. They're all quite willing to murder their friends and family to power the Corps.
So perhaps the rings don't bring back the souls after all, I thought. It would be comforting, after all - we can know that Aquaman really is at peace, and this thing in his place is just wearing his body. But how could the Black Ring - or the energy that powers it - know what Aquaman knows, then? Because it does, that's amply demonstrated. A resurrected member of the Corps has all the memories of the deceased and demonstrates clear personality traits. Ralph Dibney's chilling declaration, "Hey, Sue - I smell a mystery!" before murdering the Hawks is an excellent example, as is Firestorm's "I call dibs on the Flash" in issue #2. If the soul is the possessor of the essential Person, the rings shouldn't be able to do this - Aquaman and all the others should be mindless murder machines.
This is what I came up with, and to explain it, I'd ask you to think of the process by which molded statues, machine parts and tools are made.
If I wanted to make a Superman statue, I would first build a clay model, making it as detailed and perfect as I am able to. I would then use that clay model to create a negative mold, usually in plaster or some other durable material. Once that's finished, I can get rid of the original clay - the empty space it created can now be filled with whatever medium I want my final piece to be in, usually plastic or metal.
In the conundrum presented to us by the Black Corps, I suggest that the brain is the mold, and the soul is the medium.
Without one, the other is useless, and yet they feed back on each other. The mold will determine the shape that the medium takes, and the medium will define what the mold can look like.
Of course, the human brain is far more detailed than any plaster-of-Paris mold can be, since it changes and re-arranges itself over time. The medium, however, doesn't change, and defines the quality of the final product, as it were. A tin statue and a bronze statue, made from the same mold, would be drastically different in nature, despite looking the same. A "noble soul" will always outshine a baser one, regardless of the brain and body it inhabits. For our purposes, the soul is the animating force behind an individual, but it is shaped and defined by the structure of the brain - memories, synaptic pathways that are built over a lifetime of learning and living. Together, they make a Person. Change one or the other and you change the person.
It would be incorrect, however, to say that there is a certain type of soul that is inherently "better" than another, so perhaps the "noble soul" tag would be inappropriate. After all, you wouldn't want to use gold to make a hammer, would you? Of course not. Nor would you use iron to make a child's toy. There is a matter of appropriacy involved as well, and perhaps that is what occasionally drives characters to cross the line between hero and villain, or to abandon their role altogether, on the basis that they were never of the right stuff for it.
In any case, perhaps the souls of the resurrected Black Corps are indeed at peace - the Martian Manhunter that Flash and Green Lantern fought in Gotham may look like him and sound like him, but it is not him. The essential J'onn J'onzz is gone, replaced by a new, far more malevolent animating force.
The primary villain (as far as we know right now) is a dark entity known as Nekron, a truly powerful lord of the dead who seems to be making a play for power with the opportunities made available by the rise of new Corps. I would suggest that it is his will, in this case, that is the medium animating all these resurrected characters.
When a ring finds a target, it rebuilds the brain and body through means not entirely clear, and the whole thing is animated by the will of Nekron. Because of the previously existing brain architecture, the reborn person appears to have the same personality and memories as he or she did when alive. But the essential core of that being is black and corrupt, fueled by Nekron's dark spirit, which grows in power with each death.
Ralph and Sue Dibney, Earth 2 Superman and Lois, Terra and Omen and Hawk and Firestorm - the souls of all the heroes as we knew them are safe, wherever it is that souls go in the DC Universe until it's time for them to come back. The growing armies of the undead in Blackest Night are not those people. Once Nekron is defeated - as he must, in the end, be - those animated bodies will return to their corpse status as the will that animated them is removed.
What'll be interesting is if any of these zombie heroes do survive the end of the series. Will the Black Corps remain, greatly reduced and still seeking to bring death to the universe? Or will the original soul be drawn back to re-animate its body once Nekron's influence is withdrawn? And if that happens, how will they cope with the things that were done in their name?
Geoff Johns, the writer of this series, has said that it's not about the dead - it's about the living and how they deal with the horrors they're witnessing and the ones they have to perpetrate in order to protect those who live, and so the zombie heroes being the actual people we knew is not necessary for the story. Assuming that a "person" is a combination of a set of physical restrictions powered and characterized by a spiritual element, the unnerving behavior of the resurrected heroes of Blackest Night can be explained.
The best part is that there's no reason why we can't apply this same metaphysics to our world, other than its essentially deterministic nature, which is somewhat out of vogue in the 21st century. We are fortunate, perhaps, that there is no way we can know - there is no Nekron to animate the dead to do his bidding, and I think I can live with that.
Any questions? I'm sure there are holes in this - I put most of it together while out walking the dog with The Boyfriend, so I probably missed something. But I think it adequately explains the paradoxical behavior we're seeing in Blackest Night.