Blackest Night/Headscratchers

• Exactly how did Barry Allen fall under the "came back from the dead" category? The impression this troper got was that the two Flashes picked Barry up from somewhere along his final run way back in Crisis on Infinite Earths. If that's the case, he never technically died; he just happened to drop back into the normal timestream.
  • Simple: that isn't the case. He wasn't plucked from his death run, he was plucked from the Speed Force after he died and was lost to it; Thawne says as much in The Flash: Rebirth #4
    • Thanks for clearing that up.
• Gonzo had fur, Carol, not feathers. I know it's insignificant, but it bugs me every time I read that line.
  • He was a muppet, the fur probably represented short small feathers. He is avian, after all.
  • Actually, he's an alien.
    • Yes, but he's an avian alien.
• I've heard it said that Blackest Night was a commentary on the role of death in comics. I'm not sure what the commentary is though. Nekron is reintroduced as a unified theory of DCU resurrection (though his plot apparently begins with Superman who's resurrection left the door to the afterlife ajar), Hal rejects the notion that this means Nekron somehow owns him, and at the end of the series, in spite of a new wave of resurrections, and the emergence of the white lantern, Hal says they think that death means death from now on (though how would they know?). I guess just the mere fact that Johns is calling attention to it and trying to explain why it happens so much means they plan on taking death more seriously from now on and, "oh, would you just let us have one last round of resurrections and then we promise death will be meaningful from now on." Help me out here.
• So the entities that rose from the grave. Were they the actual bodies and brainwashed souls of former friends? Or just black light constructs. I can't figure this out and it bugs me.
  • The Black Lanterns are just the former bodies of the heroes being used as puppets by the Black Lantern rings. The souls of the heroes themselves are long gone and are not affected by the use of their body in any way. The rings themselves are like computer programs designed to induce the living into extreme emotional states and then kill them, but are not really sentient. Hope that answers your question.
  • Atom really put it best when he said that the dead weren't wearing the rings, the rings were wearing the dead.
• Did Batman's parents come back? Or the Flying Graysons?
  • The Graysons and the Drakes did come back (but not the Waynes, seeing how Bruce was dead too at the time).