So, Infinite Frontier. Where to start…technically I already did start, I did a video all about issue #1 a few months ago, back when I thought this was going to be DC’s big summer event. It isn’t, by the way…if anything, it’s setting up something else that’ll probably happen next year. And my original plan was to do a whole video series on this, covering it one or two issues at a time, because I was sure it was going to flesh out a hand full of lesser used Green Lantern characters while advancing the whole DC Universe forward in the process. And while that kind of happened, it came in the form of a mini series that did nothing all that meaningful for the majority of its run, and then became a convoluted mess at the very last minute.
…so I’m going to split this into two sections, the Lantern stuff and the story. Yes, I can talk about all the Green Lantern stuff in this mini series without including anything about the story, and yes that’s a bad sign. I’ll get into the overall story last, since once I start talking about it I’m probably just going to rant until the video is over, and I don’t want to overshadow the fact that this mini series had way more Lantern characters than I expected, and some of them were used really well, while others make me really interested in what may be coming in the future. So let’s get into it and talk about the Lantern stuff.
Giving Roy Harper a Black Lantern ring makes sense as a way to play with the idea of him trying to make the best of things even though life keeps drowning him in darkness and despair. His first instinct upon getting the ring is to try his best to be like Hal, even though this ring’s power threatens to flair up and turn him into an undead monster…but even then, those same surges of power show him that his daughter Lian is alive, giving him something to hang onto and live for. Roy’s relationship with darkness is interesting when it can be represented literally like this, and I really appreciate the fact that when things do get to be too much for Roy to handle on his own, Obsidian is there to be his anchor, and keep him from sinking too deep into darkness.
That’s one big surprise I wasn’t expecting…out of all his family, Obsidian ended up coming out of this mini series looking the best. This story was bookended with Todd using his own relationship with darkness to help guide people who’re hitting low points in their lives, and he’s really good at it, because he went through it himself, and he’s been where they are. You wouldn’t expect someone with power over shadows to be able to lead people back into the light, but he does it well. Way to go, Todd, you outshined your sister.
I find it really surprising that Jade’s part in this story was so small, considering she’s the one who just became part of a currently-airing CW show. Being added to Stargirl is likely why Jade is finally being folded into the JSA, like so many Infinity Inc members before her, which is something that’s been long overdue, so I’m happy to use the show as an excuse. Although that show is probably the reason Jade suddenly has a Green Lantern ring in the middle of this story, despite clearly not having one in the Secret Files that preceded it. This story made sure to bring up the Starheart by name a lot, despite not having anything at all to do with the Starheart, which is both surprising and disappointing after Jade’s Secret Files story was all about her loss of confidence due in part to her connection to the Starheart seeming to change in some unknown way. Even if this mini series wasn’t the place to resolve that idea, I wish it at least got talked about, especially since Jade could just confide in her dad, who’s also powered by the Starheart.
I’m incredibly surprised by how little Alan Scott had to do in this story. He was basically just tagging along with Obsidian, and that’s it. There was one cool panel where Alan was fighting a Yellow Lantern Joker, and Alan made a big green Batman while Joker made a big yellow Grundy, it was cool. Oh yeah, there was a version of the Joker who was in the Sinestro Corps. We don’t know what Universe he’s from, or anything else about him for that matter. He just exists, and is here for a few panels.
Speaking of showing up for exactly one panel, there’s a page near the end of this mini series that shows all the high level villains taking notice of what’s going on, implying that they’re all going to be making a bid for the same power that Darkseid is after…and one of them is Nekron, standing right in front of the Black Central Battery. Now it’s worth mentioning that, since this is a story that very heavily relies on the Multiverse, we don’t know what Universe this Nekron is from. It’s also possible that Roy’s Black Lantern ring has nothing to do with Nekron, but more on that in a bit. Either way, even if it doesn’t come up in whatever the next phase of the overall story of the DC Universe is, the fact remains that a version of Nekron is on the board again, meaning so are the Black Lanterns, and it makes me wonder about all those deaths that’ve been happening over in Green Lantern lately. Blackest Night 2, anyone? Probably not, but we’ll see where this goes.
One Green Lantern villain I was even more surprised to see was Hector Hammond, without his usual gigantic head. All we know is that when the Multiverse was restored, his body was reset to normal, so presumably his telepathic powers are gone. He’s currently an agent of the D.E.O., the government organization that usually specializes in handling aliens, but now are trying to figure out the best way to protect the Universe from the rest of the Multiverse. I’m not sure where to expect to see Hector pop up again after this, but I hope we get to see him explore his new lease on life before inevitably going back to his classic version.
Now with all that said, let’s try to sort out what even happened in this mini series. Trying to walk through and explain these events linearly is pointless because this story absolutely hates the idea of giving context to anything. It’ll give you all these cool moments of characters unexpectedly showing up, usually in the form of a page-turn reveal that adds impact to their sudden appearance, but then it’ll take forever to tell you why that character is even here, if it tells you at all. Opening issue #1 with what looked like a retelling of Superman’s origin, only for the ship to open up and reveal Flashpoint Batman was a great moment…except that Flashpoint Batman then spent the next five issues wandering around, not knowing why he’s even in the story, and we as readers don’t know why we should care about him being there, or what it has to do with the overall story being told, or what the overall story even is.
So let’s break this down. Full spoilers, though I’m not going to mention every character and every detail, this is just a high-level view of the story to make it make sense.
Dark Knight Death Metal restored the Multiverse, while also establishing that the DC Multiverse is just one Multiverse that exists in a much greater Omniverse…so a bunch of Universes make a Multiverse, and a bunch of Multiverses make an Omniverse. Make sure you remember that, because those three terms get used interchangeably by a lot of people.
Located in the newly re-created Multiverse is a world called Earth Omega, only it’s not actually a world, it’s a piece of something called The Great Darkness. Darkseid implies that other pieces of The Great Darkness exist in other Multiverses, so if he wants to control The Great Darkness, he needs access to the Omniverse. So he kidnaps the Flash, who can travel between universes, and puts him on a big treadmill so he can try to run fast enough to break through the Multiversal barrier and reach the rest of the Omniverse. Darkseid also arranged the kidnaping of a bunch of people who’re displaced from their original Universes…most of the JSA, for example, come from the original version of Earth 2, which hasn’t existed since before Crisis on Infinite Earths, plus most of them were retconned out of continuity and then brought back, and all of that means their bodies have some residual Multiverse energy that Darkseid can extract and use. I don’t really know what he needs it for, maybe it powers Barry’s treadmill.
Anyway, so Darkseid doesn’t just need a way to reach all the pieces of The Great Darkness, he also needs a way to control it. From what I can tell, because they keep it vague, Roy’s Black Lantern ring isn’t actually a Black Lantern ring, it’s a tiny piece of The Great Darkness in disguise, which sought out Roy because his life is full of darkness. The idea is that by linking Roy to The Great Darkness, Darkseid can control The Great Darkness through Roy. It doesn’t sound like the best plan, and there must be better candidates than Roy Harper, but whatever. I also have no idea at all why it had to be disguised as a Black Lantern ring. We see a shot of Nekron later, so maybe the ring came from him, and Darkseid just stole Black Lantern Roy to use in his own plan while derailing Nekron’s plan? No idea, the story doesn’t tell us.
Darkseid also feels the need to recruit a team of super beings to protect his whole operation, so he finds powerful people throughout the Multiverse who hate the idea of the Multiverse and think other Universes are too dangerous, and promises to protect their Universes if they do him a favor and fight off any heroes who get in his way. As an actual functional part of the story, this seems especially useless, since we find out later that Darkseid is now made of all his past versions combined, so he’s more powerful than he’s ever been, and literally nobody is a threat to him. He even killed the Quintessence like it was nothing…which, now that I think about it, that means Ganthet is dead.
Anyway, there’s nothing really to say about the climax. A bunch of heroes rush in, Flash’s treadmill breaks and everybody gets teleported home, because this was all for the sake of setting the stage for later.
There’s an epilogue with the Flash that implies the story ahead of us will be about isolationism in the face of a much larger global community, which this mini series does start to bring up, but it never goes past a surface level, and ultimately didn’t say anything about the topic. And it’s a good topic, one that’s served very well by using the concept of the DC Multiverse as an allegory for international borders, and what we think of our relationships with other countries around the world. By making the existence of the Multiverse public knowledge, the regular people of the DCU can voice their feelings and concerns about what it means for their way of life…we start to see a generational divide on the subject, even some rejecting it as “fake news”. And taking that idea a step further, the heroes of this story are a team with members from all different Universes who chose to come together to accomplish great things…and the team that opposes them is a group of people, most of whom would also identify themselves as heroes, who only agreed to work together to keep their Universes separate. To them, working with other Universes is a necessary evil to ensure nobody from elsewhere in the Multiverse will ever cause harm to their home Universes ever again. There’s so much potential there, to explore these viewpoints by literalizing them, and this mini series is content to just introduce these ideas and move on. I can only hope that whatever comes next does a better job, though I’m not convinced it will, since they essentially wasted six issues that could’ve been spent doing just that. And I have a hard time feeling satisfied with what little we did get because so much time was spent just meandering around in a six issue story that doesn’t tell us anything important until the end of issue four. And then issue #6 gives us one more page-turn reveal that’s clearly supposed to be a big surprise, the reveal of The Great Darkness, but they don’t give it any context, so the only way to get anything out of that moment is if you happened to have read that one Legion of Superheroes story from 1982. It’s a great story, and I’m sure that most readers my age and older will recognize it instantly, but even the most popular story arc in Legion history isn’t on a level where you can just name-drop it and expect everyone reading your big attention-grabbing crossover to get the reference. Context is the magic word for this whole mini series. It needed a lot, but provided as little as possible.
So that’s where the Infinite Frontier mini series left us. And as underwhelming as it was, it did set up some things that I’m really enjoying and looking forward to. In my last Green Lantern Roundup video, I talked about how The Flash is a Wally West book again, and that’s because Barry Allen has been busy with all of this, and issue #6 ends in a way that’s going to keep Barry off the board until the real story kicks in (again, probably sometime next year), and that leaves room for Wally to just be The Flash again. We’re also getting a book spinning out of this starring Justice Incarnate, the Multiversal Justice League made of members from all different Universes. It’s a great concept that I love, and they’ve never had their own series before, so I’m glad one could spin out of Infinite Frontier as they go on a mission to find Barry and stop Darkseid. And of course we’re still creeping closer and closer to getting that JSA book, inch by painful inch. I don’t know when it’s coming, but they’ve been building up to it for so long now that I wish they’d just do it already…the modern approach to the Justice Society as the oldest generation of heroes training the youngest generation is one of the best ideas in the entire DC Universe, and it fully embraces the concept of legacy that defines DC. And on top of that, it’s the book where we’re most likely to get more focus on Alan Scott, Jade, and Obsidian, so the sooner they get around to actually putting this book out the better. I’m tired of looking forward to it, I just want to enjoy it.
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