Bloodiest Brightest Day #1, by Geoff Johns, Peter Tomasi, Ivan Reis and Patrick Gleason

Page one and these two cops who are basically talking like they live in goddamn Mayberry. Seriously, do real people say things like “darn thing won’t budge” while trying to hump a white lantern out of a big hole? Also if I were a local cop and I lived in a country where they had something like S.T.A.R. Labs and a white lantern just appeared out of nowhere in a crater in my town, I would maybe call the super scientist people, but maybe that’s just me because like 30% of me is a rational person. If I’m going to assume anything from the rest of this book by comparing it to the dead bird first page of Brightest Day #0, then based on this first page right here I’m just going to assume that this issue is going to be pretty tame (OMG SPOILER ALERT IT’S TOTALLY NOT TAME AT ALL HAHAHAHAHA).

So Sinestro and Hal and Carol Ferris roll up and one of the cops freaks out and pulls a gun on Sinestro and then Sinestro rings up a police car and is about to just drop it on that cop and Hal stops it which makes no sense because as far as I can tell seeing a cop get crushed by a squad car is the kind of SUBTLE IRONY that I’m betting we’re going to see a lot of in this series. Now the lanterns are getting all chatty and apparently the white lantern is God because it’s not weird at all for THE CREATOR OF THE UNIVERSE to go all Coleman on us.

The problem is that no one can pick the lantern up not even Hal but he definitely gets a hernia while trying and let me tell you I’ve had two hernias and they’re not very fun I actually got one lifting up a box of comics anyways I guess GOD IS PRETTY HEAVY, HUH? Then Carol says that the White Lantern is like the Sword in the Stone CULTURAL REFERENCE. And while they wonder who the proverbial King Arthur might be, all of a sudden it’s the next page and Deadman is right there and we should definitely not take this as a hint that he’s the guy for the lantern because we all know Johns to be much more subtle than that, right? Well, Liveman is sitting on a boat feeling sorry for himself and using his super-narration powers to wait a minute there’s guys with gun and kids on this boat and oh no oh no one of these gun guys thinks this is the love boat and good god so far Brightest Day is about superheroes with performance anxiety, dead birds and child abuse.

But wait Aquaman and Mera are here to save the day and Mera is all like “FEEL MY RAGE!!!” which is probably not a subtle reference to the fact that she was Red Lantern. Meanwhile Aquaman has gone from being afraid of swimming to impaling dudes on his trident and if that’s not a Viagra commercial I don’t know what is. And then there’s more bad boats and then Aquaman summons a giant dead squid to eat the boat but then there’s this other guy with a harpoon gun and THIS HAPPENS:

So in one panel some chucklehead gets the Arsenal treatment and DC “jumps the zombie shark.” Awesome. Awesome. Someone needs to invent a term for whatever the hell is happening right here oh crap I forgot to get a Mother’s Day card maybe I’ll send her an ecard to let her know that she shouldn’t love me so much. So now Aquaman has the power to control dead sea life and normally I would get into that right here right now but I think I’m gonna write a whole other post exploring the implications of this new situation. I will say one thing, though: this means that Aquaman has the ability to throw cans of tuna at people with his mind.

Now we’re at some fishmarket in Massachusetts and some guy says that Aquaman’s back so the fish guy just takes his fish knife and murders the hell out of everyone am I reading a DC book or am I reading Mesmo Delivery again? I mean calling this book Brightest Day is like saying that Old Yeller was an uplifting movie.

Oh hey it’s Firestorm also known as The New Odd Couple and it looks like they’re bickering because they have to share a body which kinda stinks because Ronnie killed the hell out of Jason’s girlfriend and then they get some bad news when Professor Stein goes all HAL 9000 on them. I’m not even kidding he uses those exact words I mean he says Ronald instead of Dave but still. This COMPLICATED DYNAMIC between Ronnie and Jason is gonna be great because any time Jason disagrees with Ronnie, he’s just gonna bring up the dead girlfriend which is non-stop laughs right there, folks. I hope Firestorm teams up with Arsenal this year. We can call them “The Unfortunates.”

Now it’s time to visit J’onn J’onnz on Mars again where he’s playing God but not the same god that’s in the white lantern I don’t really know how that works oh noes there are no more Oreos on Mars and J’onn is all half Black Lantern and freaking out and he’s seeing things and he’s got Dr. Erdel all up in a stranglehold and well this basically feels like every episode of Flash Forward and does anyone ever wonder if maybe Geoff Johns has some really messed up dreams?

Then there’s a thing with Hawkman and Hawkwoman and there’s guns and stuff but then some guy says “evasive maneuvers” and I pretty much tuned out and turned the page and that crazy slashing guy walks into the water and oh hey it’s Black Manta and I guess this should be a surprise and exciting but to be perfectly honest the only thing that surprises me is that he still has both of his arms, which is increasingly uncommon in the DC Universe.

Dead birds + severed arms + zombie shark attacks (by the way this should be awesome but somehow in this comic it’s not which is pretty unfortunate) + threats of child abuse + giant zombie squids (also should be awesome) eating people + choking fantasies + slashing murders at the fish market = Brightest Day.

I can see how that makes sense.