The penultimate issue of DC’s year long series, Brightest Day, arrived in stores today preceded by a monster spoiler for the issue hitting the Internet last night. There’s no way to discuss this issue in any meaningful way without discussing that spoiler so be warned. We were kind of down on the series after seeing it cut from 26 to 24 issues with no satisfying resolution in sight. Issue #23 may have changed all that as it finally brought everything happening throughout the series together and unleashed some huge surprises. There’s plenty to talk about, but the question remains: after what amounted to a shaky flight, can Geoff Johns and crew stick the landing?

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DC Comic’s Brightest Day series is down to it’s final issues and the last individual story of the resurrected heroes from Blackest Night wraps up in issue #22. Firestorm confronts his Black Lantern analog, Deathstorm, and the cosmic Anti-Monitor with everything in Ronnie Raymond and Jason Rusch’s lives on the line. This was probably the second most interesting storyline of the series for us behind Deadman’s saga. Read on to see how it holds up compared to the recently concluded stories of Aquaman, the Hawkpeople, and the Martian Manhunter.

Spoilers ahead.

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DC Comics’ Brightest Day returned with a strong issue two weeks ago and we can only hope that it’s a sign of things to come for the series. In many ways the book returned to the way it began by shifting the focus around the major players that were resurrected during Blackest Night, namely Deadman, Firestorm, Hawkman and Hawkgirl. After what we felt was a marked decline, things are looking up.

PTB: It Feels like it’s been a while since we did one of these. Did the book ship late or is that us?

KevinMLD: Pretty sure that’s just us being slow.

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Brightest Day keeps rolling along and the latest installment starts to stray (slightly) from the recent trend of telling a single story about one of the resurrected heroes in each issue. It’s mostly about Aquaman and the new Aqualad, but there’s a little Firestorm in there too. The shift to focusing on a single story in each issue has the downside of not being terribly interesting when it’s not a character you’re invested in. It’s been mentioned here before that “no one” reads Aquaman and the fact that this story has little to do with the central plot of the series doesn’t help. As a result, we end up talking about Batman.

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Welcome back again for our semi-bi-weekly discussion of DC Comics‘ Brightest Day series. Issue 11 focuses on Aquaman and Firestorm with a few pages dedicated to the Martian Manhunter. We also manage to bring DC’s Earth One graphic novel series, a Doctor Who episode from 1975 and Death herself into the mix.

Spoilers will follow…

PTB: I guess the cover lets us know that the Black Lantern Firestorm isn’t unique to the story. While we’re talking about him, what do you think of his new name “Deathstorm”?

KevinMLD: I’m not a fan yet. It just reminds me of this terrible Dick Grayson-from-the-future storyline that ran in Titans in the ’90s. I don’t know what all the details ended up being, but basically this guy who claimed to be the future Nightwing was evil and called himself Deathwing. It was horrendous. Here’s a picture of his extreme costume courtesy of the seriously amazing TitansTower.com website. If you’re at all curious about the Titans, you can spend hours there.

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