Dirk Daring #8

I scored two free tickets to Tuesday’s Rockets’ game. It was a very close edge of your seat kind of game.

The game ended up being a good chance for Kris and I to sit and talk about comics as watching nine foot tall goliaths running back and forth in a small space will make you think of other titans in uniform. Basically at this point, we don’t think a lot of the Blackest Night Twelve are going to survive Brightest Day. Zoom will definitely survive because he’s needed for Flashpoint. Since Aquaman is featured so heavily in Flashpoint, there’s a good chance that he’ll survive as well. We think Captain Boomerang is going to survive mainly because Johns loves the character and hasn’t really used him yet in either Flash or in Brightest Day proper. To us, that indicates that there’s big plans coming and so he’ll be sticking around.

Deadman will definitely die as the character is much more interesting dead than alive. Once the White Lantern Avatar is found, he won’t have the White Lantern ring anymore and will just be a boring old human acrobat. We know from the solicitations that Isis returns, so Osiris technically completes his mission and gets to live. At the same time, Isis has always been an advocate for life, so we doubt that she’s going to be pleased with the way that Osiris had to go about freeing her from statue form. Either she’s going to go nuts on Osiris and kill him or (more likely) Osiris is going to make some noble sacrifice trying to appease her. This will mean that Osiris dies and his powers return to their source, Black Adam, breaking Adam from his statue. Black Adam will be understandable pissed and go ballistic, with only Freddie Freeman around to stop him. Freddie is going to get his butt pounded into the ground making the wizard Shazam realize that the world needs Captain Marvel back and will restore Billy Batson’s powers (which means Mary gets her powers back too). At least, if we had any control over what Eric Wallace writes, that’s what we’d have happen in Titans. The world needs more Marvel.

Unless something changes in this week’s issue of Generation Lost, I honestly don’t see any way that Max Lord will not be dead by the end of that story. Depending on how things shake out with Blue Beetle, I’m betting strongly that Booster Gold is going to be the one to kill him. If not, then it’s going to be Wonder Woman who does him in. Jade will also survive. We think that James Robinson wanted a Green Lantern for his JLA, but Editorial wasn’t willing to give him another character to screw up, so they gave him Jade. That way he has a Green Lantern to play with without affecting the greater Green Lantern universe.

We have the feeling that Hawk will die as he’s never really fit into life once he got it back. What we’re not sure of is what will happen to Dove when that happens. Can there be a Dove without a Hawk? It seems rather silly to introduce some other person to be Hawk, but at the same time we really don’t want Dove to just disappear. It would be really cool if Dawn Granger receives the powers of both Hawk and Dove (Hawk-Dove? Dove-Hawk?) and then has to figure out how to balance both extremes fighting for supremacy. We could go either way with Ronnie Raymond. It would be cool if he survived and he and Jason continued to be Firestorm together. It would be equally interesting if he died and Jason continued on in Ronnie’s memory, becoming more awesome. Martian Manhunter is going to die too. His return hasn’t had a big impact on anybody and honestly I’m not sure if his re-death will either.

That leaves Hawkman and Hawkgirl. We’re really not sure about them. On the one hand, we really want them to stick around because it’s freakin’ Hawkman and Hawkgirl and they’re awesome. On the other hand, now that they’ve defeated their curse what exactly is there reason for fighting? Sure they can keep going and being awesome just to be awesome, but if they do stick around why keep fighting instead of quietly retiring and living their lives together in peace? If they die again (and we’re not sure if their being turned to dust by the White Lantern was actually a death or not), then they can go down as the forever curse star-crossed lovers.