Category: Green Lantern

 

By Geoff Johns, Ethan Van Scriver & Prentis Rollins (DC Comics)
ISBN 1845762134

The only certainties in life are Profits and Taxes if you’re a comic fan. If you take your drama seriously – as either reader or creator – there’s never going to be a moment when you can think “Wow, they killed…”, just a time to reset your alarm clock for the return of whichever heroic “Corpse du Jour” is in the crosshairs.

It must be worse for the writer who has to constantly explain not “why” but “how” the latest resurrection occurred. All over the comic universes there must be little cliques of supporting characters, alternatively worshipping these returnees or waiting for the super-zombies to starting eating the brains of the – putatively – living.

Alive again, and no longer merged with the Spectre, a ghostly force charged with gruesomely punishing – some – of The Guilty, Green Lantern must destroy the immortal entity that was secretly responsible for turning him evil and ultimately responsible for his death in the first place. Can he do it? What do you think?

Whining aside, and accepting that what publishers want, publishers get, the return to life of the Hal Jordan Green Lantern and the incipient reformation of the galactic police force he represented is big, bold, brassy and stuffed full of those clever authorial afterthoughts that old fan-boys love. The little voice inside me advising that it’s pointless trying to recreate the past is sure to be drowned out in the welter of glitzy artwork and spectacular cosmic action. This is a very readable book, if you don’t over-think it.

And if it all flops, you can just kill everybody, count to ten and simply start all over again.

© 2004, 2005 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

 

By Ron Marz & Brad Parker

(DC Comics)  ISBN 1-56389-310-X

Comics has a rich history of successful character redesigns, and probably none more so than Green Lantern, whose backstory has now become the very fabric of the DC Universe. Therefore an epic tale featuring three generations of Emerald Crusader would seem like a fan’s dream come true.

At the beginning of World War II a team of Nazi occultists break in to a Washington DC museum and release a C’thulu-like monster. After a rampage where it defeats the mighty Justice Society by afflicting them with their deepest fears, only Alan Scott, the original Green Lantern, can throw off its attack and ‘destroy’ it.

During the height of the Cold War, test pilot and Green Lantern Hal Jordan thwarts a KGB attempt to retrieve the monster’s remains and inadvertently reactivates it himself. Although aided by the Justice League of America, it ultimately falls to Jordan himself to defeat the beast.

Kyle Rayner is (at this time at least) the last Green Lantern. A freelance artist and a more introspective type of hero, it’s up to him to find a final solution when the fear-monster returns for a last assault upon humanity.

This is not a particularly unique story, but the decision to use a computer-illustrator for the artwork did make it note-worthy at the time. To what degree that was a good decision is largely a matter of personal taste, but I suspect that this is a book that will only appeal to die-hard fans.

© 1999 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.