Brandon Thomas' DC All In Black Lightning: The Standard made me realize how much I miss the Black Lightning TV show. If hampered in the way all CW shows were hampered, Black Lighting distinguished itself as a family drama and for its grappling with racial issues. Thomas channels Cress Williams in his story (also Christine Adams), and it makes Thomas' Jefferson Pierce someone we want to follow throughout. The use of an obscure Superman antagonist also gives Thomas' miniseries points in my book.

It was enough, for me, to make up for Thomas' bland use of Pierce daughters Anissa (“Thunder”) and Jennifer (“Lightning”). Thomas assumes we know the basics of those characters — here’s where the TV show might be a detriment — and so he never explains their status quo prior to the events of Absolute Power. That makes it difficult to feel for Anissa, especially, throughout her arc in the book. Thomas' character is so different from the one that Nafessa Williams played, and yet given so little background of her own, that I often felt more tentative than I did engaged.

[Review contains spoilers]

I didn’t go back to read Outsiders comics from almost 20 years ago (that hardly seems a reasonable expectation) so I had no idea if, based on my TV show recollection, Anissa was a medical professional or not. Within the first issue, we’re told that, after being injured and having her powers affected in Absolute Power, Anissa has moved to New Orleans, she reports that her “work is weird,” and that something happened between she and girlfriend Grace Choi. In the second issue, Anissa tells a counselor, “I had my job. I had Grace. I had … power,” but still again, no one says what that job is. Writer Cheryl Lynn Eaton refers to “heal[ing] patients” in her DC Power 2024 story included at the end, but there's plenty else in that story that makes it seem apocryphal, not definite (also, at the end of the book, too little, too late).

Perhaps Thomas elides it because Anissa’s work setting doesn’t play a prominent role in the story. At the same time, Anissa displays a lot of uncontrolled anger, resistance to therapy, and so on, and I didn’t know if I should understand that through the lens of someone who was also a doctor or not — and I wasn’t confident Thomas knew, either.

We lack a lot of that kind of context. Dr Lynn Stewart, Jefferson’s ex-wife, works at Steelworks, but otherwise I’m not sure what everyone does — is Jefferson still in education? Does Jennifer go to school? There’s an “extremely superheroic” vibe to the story in which superheroing is just what everyone does. Again, maybe too much TV, but it seems an odd fit for the Black Lightning family or, at least, that Thomas doesn’t do any work to bridge what he might expect the audience knows and whatever might be canon. Another of the shorts included at the end, this one from DC’s Saved by the Belle Reve and written by Thomas himself, confusingly suggests Black Lightning’s secret identity is public knowledge, when elsewhere in “The Standard” proper, he chides Blue Beetle for being too loose with their real names.

A few other odd moments to note: Jefferson sends Anissa to get help for her powers at the Justice League Watchtower, including the aforementioned therapy. At first I thought her therapist was Dr. Claire Foster from back in the Superman: Our Worlds at War era, but in the next scene, as Anissa storms out of therapy, the therapist is revealed to be a League robot (though Anissa later calls her Ms. Wallace) who throws Anissa into a cell and violently zaps her.

It doesn’t reflect well on Jefferson’s choices or the Justice League as an organization, and I’m unsure Thomas thought through the implications of all of this. As well, there’s a trite scene where the League’s Big Three are being very calm but Jefferson gets increasingly agitated until he takes a swing at Superman, where too I’m not sure Thomas really considered the optics of it.

But by and large Thomas' Black Lightning is likable, a dedicated and concerned father. His seemingly easy partnership with daughter Jennifer is a departure from the CW show, and one that suggests a happy ending for the two, at that. Despite a lot of talk about Jefferson casting a long and judgmental shadow on his kids, we don’t really see anything like that page to page. And Thomas had me hooked anyway by the second issue with his use of Councilman Jay Harriman, who “used to be in some … milita” — namely that he was a member of the Sons of Liberty (and seemingly died) in a couple 1990s Superman stories (check your Triangle Era Omnibuses!). I’ll overlook a lot with those kinds of deep cuts.

There is quite the ’90s, overdramatic vibe to Fico Ossio’s art in this volume, which might not always be to my tastes but didn’t bother me in the beginning; the over-muscled Black Lightning lends himself to it, and it’s quite right for scenes like Natasha Irons' Steel suite flying on to her, Iron Man-esque. But things started to fall apart a bit (or maybe my patience wore thin) after Jefferson fights with Superman; in a separate fight, where Jefferson’s ostensibly lost his powers, Ossio depicts his fists flying as if he were the Flash, and later villain Volcana has a weird rictus face after or in expectance of being punched.

I’m pleased that Jefferson Pierce’s story doesn’t end with Black Lightning: The Standard but rather continues into a few different Power Company specials, though I’d like even more to hear the Power Company’s adventures are continuing; Brandon Thomas sticks around for some but not all of that. Notably, it doesn’t immediately look like Thunder and Lightning join Black Lightning in his further adventures, and maybe that’s the better thing. Insofar as Black Lightning is associated with “family” now, there’s a lot of room for error in writers depicting his daughters' foibles, and perhaps Jefferson is just easier to write solo.

[Includes original and variant covers]