As much as I love comics, I despise and typically avoid comic book super hero events from DC and Marvel. I find them cumbersome and rarely feel they live up to the lofty promises and expectations. That being said, I'm surprised to say that I am enjoying both DC's and Marvel's current events Blackest Night and Seige for very different reasons. In the simplest of terms, Geoff Johns and Ivan Reis Blackest Night is an event that feels developed from the Inside-Out. Brian Bendis and Olivier Coipel's Seige feels manufactured from the Outside-In. And I've found them both enjoyable.

Blackest Night is an epic extension of what writer Geoff Johns has been building towards since he began writing the Green Lantern comics roughly 4-5 years ago with Green Lantern: Rebirth. During that time Johns has brilliantly taken the decent concept of the Green Lantern (a intergalactic space cop with a luminescent ring of power) and built a rich philosophy around it based on the distinct powers of emotion. In the Blackest Night, a great power of Blackness is manifesting itself on planet Earth and threatens to destroy the power of not just the Green Lanterns but all other intergalactic Corps. from the emotional and color spectrum. Both the superheroes of Earth and the many intergalactic ring corps. must band together to stop this dark power from destroying the universe. It's a great concept that's being explored cleverly by Geoff Johns in his Blackest Night mini-series and the Green Lantern comics. Johns is also using this 'event' as an excellent way to play with some of the lesser known DC characters like the Atom and Mera in front of a larger audience. As I don't know many of the DC characters and interpersonal histories, I feel like I'm missing some of the dynamics between characters but I'm enjoying the way the event is growing and love the underlying philosophical context enough to see how it all plays out.

Blackest Night has also inspired me to read a lot of the earlier Geoff Johns Green Lantern comics like 'Green Lantern: Secret Origin' and Green Lantern: The Sinestro Corps War' and its amazing to discover that the seeds to the Blackest Night event are clearly planted in every Green Lantern story Geoff Johns has written.

As with most Marvel events, Seige is the latest attempt to change the 'status quo' in the Marvel Universe. Anybody that's been reading Marvel Comics in the last year knows that Norman Osborn (the Green Goblin) has become a public hero, despite his shadowy mad-villain actions, post-Secret Invasion. Seige is apparently the series where the goods guys win and the Marvel Universe returns to its old ways. Now, I think it's a bit strange that Marvel has been marketing their 'Heroic Age' (the Marvel Universe post-Seige) prior to the completion of the Event. We all know Norman Osborn is going to lose, we're just waiting to see how it happens. Despite that, I've been happily buying the mini-series for the beautiful combination of Bendis dialogue and Olivier Coipel artwork. Coipel's art on Seige is divine. Almost all of Marvel's characters in Seige look their best. There are some wonky bits of panel-to-panel storytelling... but it's easy to forgive when it all looks so great. Unlike, Blackest Night... you can feel a weird rift in the concept of Seige. It's a weird amalgam of what Bendis is doing in his many Avengers books and what's been happening in Thor... but as Bendis is the guy writing the book it feels like he uses as little as he needs from the Thor comics to create a backdrop for the eventual battle between Norman Osborn's Avengers and Captain America's Avengers.

Both Events are about 2/3 complete, so my final verdict on both are to be determined, but I'm having fun reading how they both play out.