There’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while now, that yesterday’s issue of Blackest Night reminded me of, and intensified my curiosity about.
If you’ve been reading DC’s superhero line for long, you know that the company has been actively promoting their Blackest Night miniseries and the surrounding story event for well over a year now.
If you’ve been reading Geoff Johns’ Green Lantern work, you know that he’s been writing his way toward this story for a very long time, perhaps as long as he’s been writing Hal Jordan stories.
As the event grew closer, it became apparent that some of the high profile characters the company was killing off were being killed off precisely so that they could return as undead Black Lantern.
Certainly Martian Manhunter and Aquaman were killed for this purpose, but how far back has DC been killing their characters with the expectation that they’d come back as zombie Lanterns in Blackest Night and then, perhaps, stay back once Hal Jordan is able to harness “white light of creation”…?
But what about The Question and Ralph Dibny, killed during the course of 52? Or the Freedom Fighters, Pantha and all the Infinite Crisis casualties? Or Max Lord, Sue Dibny and Blue Beetle II?
There are two relatively minor characters, both villains, that I was kinda shocked DC actually killed off, and I’ve been wondering and worrying about ever since Blackest Night started returning the dead.
That would be Monsieur Mallah, the intelligent gorilla who wears a beret and bandoliers and speaks with a French accent, and The Brain, who is just an evil brain that lives in an evil-looking gumball machine-esque support system.
They were two of the casualties of 2007-2008 miniseries Salvation Run. When I read the scene in which Gorilla Grodd beats Mallah to death with The Brain in #4, I couldn’t understand why it even existed. Not only was it a completely random scene in a completely unimportant miniseries that is unlikely to ever be mentioned again in other DC universe books, but the characters constituted about half of the Doom Patrol’s rogue’s gallery and have been around about 40 years.
Now I wonder if maybe they weren’t killed just so they could be brought back as Black Lanterns. And here’s the thing that’s been specifically bugging me.
Okay, Mallah would make a neat Black Lantern—he can have a little Black Hand symbol on the brim of his beret, and wear a ring on one of his toes. But how can The Brain become a Black Lantern, since he doesn’t have a single finger!
There are plenty of funny-shaped aliens in the Green Lantern Corps and the newer, differently colored versions of the GLC, and those without fingers or toes have rings on their tentacles, psuedopods, tails, flagella, antennae or whatever random, thin parts project form them. Some rings look more like bracelets, to be worn around big paws or flippers. I think there are some that are floating masses of liquid or gas that just have the rings floating inside them.
But what about The Brain? How would a Black Lantern ring get on him? He’s got nothing remotely able to hold a ring on his body, a body that is, remember, just a brain. Even his little metal support system is pretty much just a metal cylinder, with no appendages for rings.
Does this mean there can’t be a Black Lantern Brain?
Neither he nor Mallah showed up in this week’s Blackest Night #4, which featured a two-page spread full of undead Justice League villains, although their old pal Madam Rouge seemed to be one of them (I don’t know about you guys, but I’d prefer a character key in the back of these issues instead of that goofy Black Hand’s diary entry that’s accompanied each issue yet).
Next Wednesday Doom Patrol #4, a Blackest Night tie-in, is set to ship, so if there is going to be a Black Lantern Brain, I suppose that’s where he’ll ultimately show up. And if he does, I guess that means it will be up to Keith Giffen and Justiniano to answer the question of whether a brain can wear a ring or not and, if so, where.
October 29th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
It could be implanted into the metal base of his “jar”.
Gotta love it: A gorilla/disembodied human brain gay relationship.
October 29th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
The ring would go around his brain stem, and the case would be a black light construct.
Boom.
October 29th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
Yeah, it could just be floating in the (unwisely) glass jar that covers his brain. Or it could be a big ring wrapped around his metal torso. But I think it should just be wrapped around his naked brain and he could make a body out of Black Lantern energy.
And I think DC’s been planning this for a good long time. At least since GL: Rebirth. They might not have had it pegged when Ted Kord bought it, but they knew what was coming when all the frivolous killing started with Infinite Crisis.
My question is: shouldn’t Superboy’s body be a Black Lantern? Remember it took his body ’til the 31st century to regenerate, then he came back in time. Remember? Who remembers?
October 29th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
i missed out on salvation run. bought a couple few early issues, didn’t even read them all. so I missed out on the incident you show here — and so glad I did. yuuck. just so typical of the queasy violence/gore middling DC offerings just dive into nowadays — I don’t mind “head-punch-offing” or “arm-yank-offing” on principle, I like it when tied decently into a story — but so much of this stuff is just… there… queasy DC violence: it’s to the late ’00s what pouches and straps were to early Image… *le sigh*
October 29th, 2009 at 7:09 pm
Psh, that’s easy: Black Lantern Tiara. Or possibly Black Lantern Headband. Ooh! Ooh! Black Lantern Trucker Hat!
October 29th, 2009 at 10:15 pm
When is Mallah going to do the honorable thing and make The Brain an honest organ? Many might ask: Are we, as a society, ready to accept the same-sex union of a talking, hyper-intelligent French gorilla with a floating, self-aware brain? To them I say: Yes. It’s a new era, baby.
Deco – You’re right. Call it “the era of Meltzer”… it’s where comic book creators feel the need to take inherently absurd and quite funny concepts and render them thoroughly humorless and repulsive by demanding that they be saddled with faux-realistic gore and depravity. Hooray!
Maddy – I vote for a sombrero. I would PAY to see this.
October 30th, 2009 at 2:00 am
“Gotta love it: A gorilla/disembodied human brain gay relationship.”
Dude, you have it so wrong! There is nothing gay going on here – just a classic villain “bromance” between an ape and his brain. “It’s not gay love, it’s guy love!” sing it with me!!
Cheers
October 30th, 2009 at 8:40 am
“I missed out on salvation run.”
No.
No you didn’t.
Like so so much that happened in the year of Countdown, it was an idea that could have been interesting if it hadn’t been happening at the same time as so many other things. Plus, like everything else that happened during the year of countdown, it had absolutely nothing to do with the event for which it was alledgedly providing a prologue, Final Crisis. It has not been mentioned since, and had as much affect on the DCU as The War That Time Forgot.
In the words of Dr. Lao…and for all the good or evil, creation or destruction, its publishing might have accomplished, it might just as well never have been written at all.
October 30th, 2009 at 11:11 am
How do we know he was really brain dead?
October 30th, 2009 at 11:13 am
@Robert – He read, and liked, the last four years of Teen Titans and Titans.
October 31st, 2009 at 3:20 pm
D Peace wrote
[Deco - You’re right. Call it “the era of Meltzer”… it’s where comic book creators feel the need to take inherently absurd and quite funny concepts and render them thoroughly humorless and repulsive by demanding that they be saddled with faux-realistic gore and depravity. Hooray!]
And the idea of an ape getting it one with a disembodied brain isn’t depraved?