Back From the Con...

Back from North Carolina, and happily carting in loads of stuff that I bought at HeroesCon 2009 I've been to a lot of cons, both larger and smaller than this one, and I've attended HeroesCon nearly every year since 1992, but I have to gush about how amazing it was this year because of Blackest Night.

The big question for me on Saturday morning (I skipped Friday and visited friends instead) was: which of my geeky comic t-shirts should I wear? In the end, I decided that I was feeling greedy and wore my Orange Lantern shirt, and I'm glad I did. HeroesCon was like one giant War of Light! I've never seen so many Lantern shirts in one place before. Every time I looked, there was someone else: Green Lanterns, Red Lanterns, Blue Lanterns, Black Lanterns! The place was just bursting with GL pride! All weekend long, I was hearing "Hey, nice shirt!" and saying the same to other folks. Some people really got into it, too: more than once, someone with an Orange Lantern shirt grabbed something I was looking at and said "MINE!", then we'd both laugh and go our separate ways. I saw two different people actually wearing a full Green Lantern costume, and when two guys in Blue Lantern shirts walked up to one of them, he looked at his ring and said "Power levels 200 percent! Thanks!". Probably half a dozen people stopped me to ask me what the hell was up with all these rainbow t-shirts, and then of course I had to explain it to them. I'm almost positive that the single vendor who was smart enough to stock these shirts at the con probably sold a ton of them to people who didn't even know what they were for and just wanted to get in on the weirdness. (For my part, I already had Orange, Indigo, and both the Sinestro Corps shirts, and I finally picked up the Blue and Red shirts here, but they sold out of Black and Star Sapphire on Friday! Curses!) It was a Lantern-fan's paradise, and I can only imagine how awesome SDCC will be for those who get to go.

I also attended the DC Nation panel on Saturday, which Ethan Van Sciver happened to be a part of. Obviously they couldn't tell us much about Blackest Night, but Ethan did tease us with the knowledge that he's supposed to be designing a very important Black Lantern character for the cover of Blackest Night #4. The entire panel seemed very excited about the event, and we also got to see (from a distance) the first issue of Wednesday Comics, which seems very cool. It actually folds out to resemble a newspaper! The possibility of an Aquaman: Rebirth was discussed (Martian Manhunter and Firestorm Rebirth ideas were also bandied about), but Ethan was very clear about the fact that right now he and Geoff are concerned solely with GL and Flash, and there weren't any plans for anything else yet. Someone asked what was going to happen to Bart Allen, and the answer was "Flash: Rebirth is going to make you very happy."

My favorite moment, though, was when a guy sitting a few rows back from me asked if there might be a possibility of another ongoing Guy Gardner series. They wouldn't answer us with a yea or nay, but Ethan said (I'm paraphrasing from memory here, hope I don't totally misquote him) that everyone knows that Green Lantern is red-hot right now, and it's still going to be huge coming out of Blackest Night, and "two Green Lantern books aren't enough".

Now of course I'd buy a Guy solo book in a heartbeat, but it doesn't really make much sense to give him one considering that he (sort-of) stars in GLC. So even if that doesn't pan out, I'm still stoked about the idea that Ethan, at least, seems to think that a third GL book of some sort would be a good idea. I'd love an ongoing Quarterly like they used to have, or perhaps even a monthly tales of the GLC in the same vein.

Heck, at this point I'd read an ongoing title featuring the other Corps (or whatever is left of the characters at the end of Blackest Night even if the other Corps end up collapsing).