Blackest Night

I've mentioned Blackest Night before, and I even went so far as to highlight the characters that appeared in issue 1 when Hal (Green Lantern) Jordan and Barry (the Flash) Allen were talking. In November, Doom Patrol #4 will be a Blackest Night crossover issue. Evidently #5 will tie-in as well. Read on for more details.

Set to release on November 4, here's the solicitation copy for Doom Patrol #4:

Written by Keith Giffen; Co-feature written by Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis; Art by Justiniano and Livesay; Co-feature art by Kevin Maguire; Cover by Justiniano and Andrew Mangum

When BLACKEST NIGHT falls, skeletons start coming out of the closets — and no one has more skeletons in his closet than Niles Caulder, founder of the Doom Patrol. Caulder has been playing god for years, and the time for a reckoning has come. The Doom Patrol thought they knew darkness. Find out how wrong they were in this BLACKEST NIGHT tie-in issue!

Meanwhile, in the Metal Men co-feature, trendy meets grotesque when the robots battle a group of living mannequins.
DC Universe
40pg.
Color
$3.99 US

So over on the DC message boards (why Giffen stomps around over there and not here is beyond me ;-P ) he mentions that there will be some Black Lanterns making an appearance herein. His post is from August 14 at 9:26 am.

First of all, thanks. Thanks for the feedback and most of all thanks for the support. Even if you hated it, thanks for caring enough to sound off. Now, about this whole Blackest Night thing... We've got four, count 'em, four Black Lanterns showing up. You may guess the first three, but the fourth... Well, you may guess that one too but I'm hoping not. Oh... and Rita's eye color? Yeah, there's a reason her eyes are no longer brown. K-

Only four? I can think of a few more than that. . . Of course in the image Hal projects, there are only three characters shown: Josh Clay, Val Vostok, and Arani Caulder. Those three would give us the "three" Giffen mentions, but who's the fourth? Did Giffen give us a clue above? Anyone else have any guesses?


On a mildly related note, retailers will be getting bags of rings when they order copies of Doom Patrol. Evil yellow Sinestro Corps rings. Retailers order 25 copies of Doom Patrol #4 and they can order a bag of Sinestro rings. Bleeding Cool has so much more to the story.

Continuing on with Blackest Night info, Elisabeth Gehrlein, editor of Doom Patrol gave us a few sneak peeks over at The Source, including this beautifully haunting and hauntingly beautiful cover by Justiniano for issue #5.

Giffen's commentary about this cover is priceless. You should click the link above and check it out. Too lazy to scroll back up? Try this one.

I love Matt Clark's work, but I'm glad they have Justiniano around to spell Matt every now and again so Matt can stay fresh. Next to Doug Mahnke and Ivan Reis, I think Justiniano is best suited to render the undead DC characters. In the timeshare that Gehrlein has employed for DP, it truly the best of both worlds.

Negative Monday 17

So I just got back from a great weekend at the Fan Expo in Toronto. Kind of a long day as far as "jamming things into one day" goes, but it's done. I managed to score 24 issues of Blue Devil, 3 DP Archives (what can I say, I've been delinquent on getting those) and a DCUC Ronnie Raymond Firestorm.

I also got the first two sketches for my Doom Patrol sketchbook - more on those later this week.

For now, I want to share the most recent Doom Patrol-related Source posting. Elisabeth Gehrlein gave us a sneak peek of the third variant cover for Doom Patrol.

Sticking with variant covers for a minute – you’ve seen the Matthew Clark/Kevin Maguire jam variant covers for DOOM PATROL issues #1 and 2 in previous posts. I love these covers very much, so I wanted to show you the final one for issue #3, starring Negative Man and a Metal Men obstacle course. We’ll start with Keith Giffen’s layout, and then there’s Kevin Maguire’s inks, Matthew Clark’s pencils over Kevin’s inks, Matthew’s and Kevin’s inks together at last, and finally the color by Guy Major.

Giffen's rough shown above and the near-final image below.


Gehrlein also shared the cover for the second Blackest Night issue, issue #5 to be exact, but I will also share that at a later time in a post I'm working on covering DP's Blackest Night involvement.

All in all, I'd say this is a well-timed revelation by Gehrlein. She must have known I needed some Negative Monday material.

Elasti-Girl Friday 7

From the same issue as Negative Monday for this week - as a matter of fact from the panel BEFORE Monday (time travel as only made possible when reading or talking about comic books) Giffen offers us a Rita Farr who is not afraid to take charge.

Not content with merely being the cheerleader of the Doom Patrol, Rita decides to dictate some strategy here. I'm hoping Giffen is just giving us a sample of the strong characterization we can hope to expect with his Elasti-Girl in the Liz Gehrlein-edited Doom Patrol coming up this August.

Did y'all catch the subtle mention of another member of the team pumping out DP for you this fall?