Blackest Night #0 Review (Free Comic Book Day)

by Lindsay Young, CMRO Contributing Writer

Blackest Night

Issue #0

Written by Geoff Johns, Art by Ivan Reis

Published: June 2009

Wolverine and is team have been playing the underdogs for a while now, and things really come to a head in this issue, when the school’s financial woes take a serious hit. Logan promptly takes off to deal with it, leaving the campus in a state of disarray as Kitty Pryde, deemed second-in-command, experiences her own setbacks.

I’ve praised the previous issues of Wolverine and the X-Men thus far, and many things that were good about the past four volumes are also good here. The school continues to be the sort of school you always want the X-men school to be: full of chaos, unique technology and tons of bizarre and powerful people, far more interesting than any highschool has the right to be. Wolverine remains a sympathetic character, too, and his efforts to keep the school open (and his burgeoning relationship to Quentin Quire) remain compelling.

Kitty’s subplot, however, I’m less thrilled about. Discovering herself pregnant, she swells up in about two days, only to find that her pregnancy is a mythic one, and that her stomach is full of flesh-eating aliens. It’s a narrative that’s not uncommon to science fiction: the horrific invasion of a woman’s body and the ensuing terror of the forced pregnancy is a plotline that has a lot of uncomfortable connotations, and I’m not sure it was a narrative that the story needed to invoke. Surely, there are other ways to jump start an alien invasion subplot? Was this symbolic violation really necessary? For me, personally, the subplot is a little too heavy, and it doesn’t necessarily jive with the generally lighter tone of the other issues.

The alien subplot that’s built up in this issue isn’t one that has be immediately intrigued, but Wolverine’s efforts to keep the school open is, and despite the misstep I personally feel the issue takes, it’s still worth reading.