Ok, it’s time to start digging in to DC’s summer event Infinite Frontier, written by Joshua Williamson with art by Xermanico. I’m going to be focusing mainly on the Lantern stuff, and anything that clearly feeds into the themes of the story. There are plot lines and characters introduced in issue one that I won’t be talking about yet because they literally didn’t do anything but just show up, so I’ll address them as the story progresses and there’s actually something to say about them. So if you’re watching this video and you haven’t read the issue yet, there will be spoilers, but there’ll still be plenty of moments and plot lines for you to discover for yourself.
So first, how’d we get here? The short version is that the end of Dark Nights: Death Metal brought back everything that was ever taken away by a Crisis event. Every alternate universe, every piece of history…everything that ever was cannon counts again, and the characters remember all of it. And different factions across the Multiverse are trying to use that knowledge to make sure reality never gets rewritten by a Crisis-level event again. Barry Allen has gone off to work with a Multiversal Justice League called Justice Incarnate, made up of members from all different universes, and is helping them to inspect and map the newly returned and revamped Multiverse. On Earth 0, the main DC Earth, a group of heroes and villains have formed a team called the Totality, dedicated to stopping threats to reality before they have a chance to do any damage. The villain they’re fighting here is named Extant, and that thing he’s holding is the Worlogog, which is a complete map of the entire space-time continuum that gives the holder mastery over time and space. The last time Extant had the Worlogog, he was one of the main antagonists of the Zero Hour event, so this one page shows us the effectiveness of the Totality, in that their group just stopped a new Crisis event before it could get started.
This is where we find Green Lantern Alan Scott, who’s helping to make quick work of Extant by hitting him with a big green train, which…we need to talk about this for a second, because this seems to be Alan’s go-to move now. There was an issue of Hawkman last year where the Hawks go back in time to the 1940s and team up with the JSA, and Alan takes down a wizard by hitting him with a big green train. And it makes sense, a train is something old and powerful that ties back to Alan’s origin story, so it seems like the perfect construct for him to use…except now we know that the first person he ever fell in love with died horrifically in a train crash, making it really uncomfortable to see Alan save the day by crashing a train into somebody. Maybe he learned it from Hal Jordan, who routinely makes a copy of his father’s jet and crashes it into his enemies. These people are so messed up.
Anyway, this issue lets us know very early that we’re heading for the return of the Justice Society. The heroes involved in this fight are Alan Scott, Hawkgirl, and Mister Terrific, and all three of them were on the JSA together for years. And one of the first villains their team had to deal with was Extant. And where does Alan go to meet up with his kids, Jade and Obsidian, right after winning the fight? The old JSA headquarters in Gotham City, a location that’s worth it just for that one panel of Obsidian fighting Mr Freeze.
As soon as Alan and Obsidian arrive, the building explodes with green fire, and Jade is gone, they can’t find any sign of her. Now Jade and Obsidian had a story in the Infinite Frontier Secret Files, where she said something about her powers didn’t feel right…the Starheart felt different somehow, and it was causing her to doubt how much she could actually rely on it. If you don’t know, Jade draws power from the Starheart, which is the living embodiment of like half the magic in the universe. It makes her extremely powerful, but it’s also a force of pure chaos that’s constantly trying to destroy her family and wreak havoc everywhere. The last two times the Starheart tried to make a move, it was able to subdue both Alan and Obsidian pretty easily, but both times Jade was able to beat it. So maybe the Starheart is moving again, and decided to target her first since she’s the biggest threat. Or maybe the Starheart is the target and Jade is the means to access it. We already know based on the anthology-style Infinite Frontier #0 that Darkseid is going to play a role in this story, and it wouldn’t be the first time that someone’s tried to capture Jade and use her as a power source.
The other character we need to check in on is Roy Harper, formerly known as Speedy, Arsenal, and Red Arrow…he’s been a sidekick and a Titan and a father, and he lost all of it the day a super villain attack killed his five year old daughter Lian. Roy’s story in the Secret Files shows us that he’s become self-destructive, not willing to do anything to protect himself from harm, but still willing to protect other people. They haven’t outright said it yet, but I think it comes from the knowledge that he got to come back to life, but his daughter didn’t.
Anyway, Roy gets ambushed by some 90s Marvel character named X-Tract, and is saved when a Black Lantern ring suddenly appears on his finger. If there’s one thing this issue is great at, it’s hitting us with page turn reveals that we’d never have guessed were coming, and this is a big one to end on.
Giving Roy a Black Lantern ring at this stage is a very interesting choice, because everything he’s ever loved has been destroyed by premature death, and now death is literally empowering him. So Roy’s now set up to have the exact kind of conflict that gets the most out of the concept of a Lantern ring: the thing he hates the most is now his source of power, and is going to force him to deal with everything he’s holding back within himself, as it all comes leaking out in the form of constructs that show him his deepest regrets and desires. And I can not wait for the moment when he realizes that Lian Harper is actually alive. She’s been a character in the Catwoman book for a little while now, but we only recently found out who she really is, thanks to her bio in the DC Festival of Heroes: Asian Superhero Celebration. Lian doesn’t have any memory of her childhood, or her death, or coming back to life. She’s clearly older than five, so she must’ve come back some time ago, but everything surrounding that is still a mystery…one that Roy is now well equip to solve, since he has a ring that gives him a direct line to what’s going on with death.
I’m still not clear on why Black Lantern rings aren’t following the same rules they had during Blackest Night. It used to be that a ring would reanimate a dead body, and then use that dead person’s memories as the basis for an A.I. program that would just mimic the dead person. Black Lantern Aquaman wasn’t actually Aquaman, it was a Black Lantern ring pretending to be Aquaman. Roy seems to be very much alive, and before getting attacked we’re shown several clear shots of both his hands, so we know he was not wearing a ring. The last Black Lantern ring we saw before this was the one worn by Batman during Dark Night: Death Metal…we did eventually learn that Batman was dead for that entire story, he died in battle against Perpetua before Death Metal started, so it at least makes sense why a Black Lantern ring would go to him, but it doesn’t explain why he was still in control of himself. Batman even talks about managing how much he uses the ring, to keep it from taking over, which shouldn’t even be a thing. And for that matter, I don’t know how these rings even exist in the first place. But maybe there’s a simple answer. Since both Dark Nights: Death Metal and Infinite Frontier both make such heavy use of the Multiverse, maybe these are Black Lantern rings from some other universe where the rules are different. Who knows, maybe Roy’s ring is foreshadowing a second Blackest Night, this time on a Multiversal scale instead of a universal one like last time. Probably not, but it’s fun to think about.
I think it says something that this new era defined by infinite possibility is starting out by focusing so intensely on loss, specifically the loss of children. Roy’s life is defined by the death of Lian, and Jade just disappeared right in front of her father. It makes me wonder how metatextual they want this story to be, since a superhero story about keeping the parents around while losing the children makes me think of the problems mainstream comics have always had with growing a new generation of readers. I’m probably way off base, but I don’t think it’s impossible, since there’s a scene in a diner that clearly shows this series intends to talk about things outside of itself. The general public of the DC Universe knows about the Multiverse now, and in a moment that perfectly mirrors fan discourse, two people are geeking out about it until a third person shows up ranting about how tired he is of all this Multiverse nonsense. Although this could also be commentary on the different responses to COVID, since different people in that diner find themselves unable to agree on what is and isn’t real, which feels way too close to the actual world we’ve been living in for the past year and a half.
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