Over at Dixonverse, they’re discussing a topic I’ve been thinking about for a while:  Geoff Johns seeming to go overboard with the material from a number of Alan Moore stories.  While I like much of what has been happening…indeed, Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps are the ONLY DC Comic books I still buy… this does bug me somewhat.

Mogo, and the F-Sharp Bell, and Qull of the Five Inversions: they’re from short stories.  Moore managed to tell very intriguing stories in far less than 22 pages (let alone multi-issue story arcs taking half a year)  and they were one-off throwaway bits not intended to be the launching point for epic sagas.  “Tales of the Green Lantern Corps” was an uneven back-up series that would occasionally produce a gem such as “Quarzz Terranh Knows Joy” (or whatever it was called) and sometimes introduce a Corps member interesting enough to revisit later (such as Ch’p, Stel and the Green Man).  The point was to take the Green Lantern mythos and do something you couldn’t just do with Hal Jordan, such as ending with the GL’s death (or a credible possibility of death on the last page, which isn’t the case with Hal) or showing an alien approach to using the ring.

“Mogo Doesn’t Socialize” is a wonderful story that loses most of its ending’s power if you’re going to use Mogo again and again in other comics.  It’s like having Rosebud the Sled, Verbal Kint and Tyler Durden as a recurring superteam in the DCU.

The bounty hunter from that same story showed up in GL Corps.  Know what bugged me?  I guess I always thought that story was ancient history, not a current event.  The Book of Oa contains tales of things that happened to Green Lanterns throughout history… and we’re talking an organization with 3600 members that has been active for a BILLION years!

Qull of the Five Inversions?  I was pretty sure he was just a liar.  After all, not long after that story was published, the entire GL Corps was destroyed after their execution of Sinestro caused the Great Battery to lose power.  (Remember, how only Hal, John, Guy, G’nort and a few others had rings, and it was a while before the Corps was restored?)  Then in 1994, Hal Jordan causes the deaths of all the Guardians…so Qull’s prediction of drums with blue skin couldn’t be true.  The whole point of the story is that Qull manages to produce fear in Abin Sur, and he dies because of the starship he is flying in instead of using his ring.

By the by, Johns’ interpretation of that story is very literal: there are aliens called the Inversions, and there are five of them.  Huh.  I always thought that was just Qull’s name, that there were five things “inverted” about him.  If there are only five creatures on that whole cordoned off planet, that’s way less scary.

As has been pointed out about the Black Mercy, it’s taking one cool story element (a McGuffin excuse for telling some cool imaginary stories) and running it into the ground.  The Black Mercy shouldn’t be packaged with the Mongul action figure as though it’s his primary weapon.  It was a plot device, pure and simple, and next time Mongul appears he will resort to something else.

All of these little elements that Alan Moore rattled off as throwaways… Ranx the Sentient City, the Children of the White Lobe, Sodam Yat, etc. … they were cute references to a mythology we haven’t heard yet.  That was neat-o.  Spending several years setting all of them up as canon seems like it’s missing the point.

If I wrote a story where Batman encounters Rip Hunter and Rip says, “Last time I met you was fighting alongside your daughter during the Atlantis/Paradise Island/Gorilla City war… oh wait, that hasn’t happened yet!”, do I need to worry that some kid who loves that issue will, fifteen years down the line, spend three years building up to a Atlantis/Paradise Island/Gorilla City War mega-event as a glorious in-joke where that disposable humorous line comes true?

Look, Blackest Night seems like a great storyline and I’m looking forward to reading it.  And I like Johns a lot, really!  But Johns should be a writer who tells his own stories instead of “What happened to those characters at the end of Crisis on Infinite Earths?”or “Let’s start integrating as much Kingdom Come future into the DCU as possible!” or “What if Blackest Night really did happen?”  He should be creating the characters and telling the stories that cause future fanboy-cum-writers to want to revisit HIS work.  And hopefully, they’ll have editors that tell them to just do their own damn stories.