Book of the Month: January, 2026
Green Lantern: Blackest Night
by Geoff Johns (Author), Doug Mahnke (Illustrator), Ed Benes (Illustrator), Marcos Marz (Illustrator), Christian Alamy (Illustrator)
Gotham Gazette, May 2, 2009 - Special Edition
By Vicki Vale Investigative Photojournalist at Gotham Gazette
The Night Death Claimed Gotham
GOTHAM CITY — Gotham has always been a city that lives with its dead. This week, they walked.
In an act that chilled even this reporter, death itself had come to claim Gotham as ground zero. The figure known as Black Hand desecrated the grave of Bruce Wayne, removing the skull believed to belong to Gotham’s most prominent fallen son and using it to power a device later identified as a Black Lantern battery.
What followed was not merely an attack, but a revelation. Across the universe, black rings, alien constructs fueled by death, descended upon graves, crypts, and memorials. Heroes long mourned rose again, twisted into something hollow and predatory. On Oa, the home world of the Green Lantern Corps, even the honored dead of the Lanterns returned as enemies, overwhelming their former comrades. The Guardians of the Universe, long considered untouchable, were themselves silenced and imprisoned by one of their own, a corrupted entity known as Scar.
In Gotham, Green Lantern Hal Jordan and the Flash, who himself recently returned from death, were confronted by familiar faces animated by something profoundly wrong. Martian Manhunter. Firestorm. Friends turned weapons.
Elsewhere, the fallen came for their loved ones to rise as part of the growing Black Lantern Corps. The message was brutal and personal: grief was the enemy’s sharpest blade.
Amid the chaos, a terrible truth emerged. These were not resurrections. The beings wearing familiar faces were not the souls of the departed. They were masks, animated by an ancient force known as Nekron, the embodiment of death itself.
The crisis escalated when Coast City, already a symbol of loss, became the epicenter of a larger horror. Nekron manifested fully with only a desperate alliance of the Green Lanterns joined by rival Corps representing rage, fear, hope, love, compassion, and greed stood in his way. For the first time, enemies fought side by side.
Blackest Night is over. But Gotham knows better than most cities: when death itself has been breached, the consequences don’t end when the lights come back on.
They linger.