On some particularly strong panels from The Green Lantern Vols. 1-2

I was honestly a little surprised when Grant Morrison and Liam Sharp were announced as the creative team for the new Green Lantern title, in large part because it seemed like a character/franchise that was somewhat beneath the stature and talent of each (Maybe it's just me, but I've traditionally considered Green Lantern a B- to D-List character/comic, depending on who's bearing the ring and when it'be being published), and nothing I knew about either gentleman's past work necessarily suggested a natural affinity for DC's very 1960s space cop character, Hal Jordan (the least interesting of the...seven Earth-born Green Lanterns, in my opinion). That...really just goes to show that, for as much as I like to play armchair DC Comics editor, I'm not terribly qualified to do it real-life (Of course, I do recognize that if Grant Morrison and Liam Sharp want to do anything together, you let them; were I at DC, I would have greenlit a Morrison/Sharp Infinity, Inc, Primal Force or New Guardians revival, if that's what they wanted to do).

It didn't take too many pages of reading their The Green Lantern (a better title for an Alan Scott book than a Hal Jordan one, you ask me) to realize that the character/concept is actually kinda perfect for them, though. By three pages in, we've seen a self-pitying Green Lantern who is also royalty, a microscopic Green Lantern "super-intelligent all-purpose" virus named Floozle Flem (Floozle Flem doesn't catch you... ...You catch Floozle Flem") and a giant alien spider pirate dressed in like a particularly fancy old-timey Earth pirate.

While I can't say that Morrison had all that much to say about Hal Jordan as a character within the 200+ pages of comics collected in these two volumes, a 12-issue run on a title that was then kinda sorta canceled only to be relaunched as The Green Lantern Season Two, he certainly had things to say about the concept, and he certainly seems to have had a great deal of fun mining the character/franchise's history and setting for cool comics material, which he and Sharp deftly organize into a series of comics that generally contain a single, done-in-one story with a beginning, middle and end (and, as often as not, a particular theme, premise, tone or even genre of its own...something that, I hate to say given the history between the writers, reminded me of Alan Moore's run on the Swamp Thing character) that nevertheless tell an ongoing, overarching story line about various beings' plans to instill order in a chaotic universe.

As he did during his rather messy tenure on Batman and, to a lesser extent, his seminal late-'90s JLA run, Morrison draws inspiration from the character's Silver Age adventures, presenting them as straight-faced as possible, with the greater verisimilitude and more sophisticated storytelling that modern, adult readers have come to expect, rather than what, say, Gardner Fox was writing for kids in the 1960s. This...is a pretty good way to tackle Jordan who, for all of Geoff Johns' valiant efforts to make him more relevant, continues to work best as the mid-twentieth century American idea of a leading man. (Tellingly, this Hal Jordan, like Johns', has all but chucked any remnants of his old, original cast and premise. Characters like Tom and Carol, or his old fighter pilot job, appear and are acknowledged as things from his past, but they are not integral parts of him or his story. Similarly, Green Arrow appears in one 20-page story, but Jordan makes an interesting distinction between himself and the superheroes. He's not a hero, he says, he's a space cop who hangs out with superheroes. Sometimes.)

All the attention on space and aliens also means that Morrison has pretty free rein to use all the magic, fantasy and science fiction he cares to; there's really nothing so weird that it can't be included in a DC Comics' Green Lantern comic with no more justification than "It's an alien" or "That's from a different dimension." And so a Green Lantern who is perfectly humanoid, save for the fact that he has an active volcano for his shoulders, his face appearing in the cloud of smoke and ash that lingers above it? Sure, why not?

In Sharp, Morrison has a partner who can not only draw anything, but he can draw it in a great deal of detail, and no amount of detail, no size of crowd or ornate setting seems to be too much for him to handle. I don't know if Sharp had a three-year head-start on this title or what exactly, but he fills his pages with the number of characters and the amount of details that can look quite uncommon outside of a George Perez or Phil Jimenez comic these days.

And that's important, because Morrison's comics all but live and die on the strength of their artists, as his horribly uneven Batman run so vividly attests; there are issues of that massive, years-long Batman story line that are all but unreadable in their shoddiness, and there are others that are among the better comics of Morrison's career.

Morrison and Sharp's The Green Lantern is therefore not only pretty great, but far greater than I would have imagined, given my relative antipathy toward the character, and the amount of time I have spent reading about various Green Lanterns (but mostly Hal Jordan) during the last 15-20 years. But rather than me trying to restate that for a couple hundred more words, or having just crafted a one-sentence post of "Look, just read it," I thought I'd pull out some particularly noteworthy panels from the first two volumes of the series, Intergalactic Lawman and The Day The Stars Fell.

PAGE 13, PANELS 5-8:

This is by far the dirtiest thing I have ever read in a DC comic book.


PAGE 33, PANEL 5:

Hey look, it's Evil Star! I don't have any firsthand experience with Evil Star, but I always liked the goofy costume and name. He's one of those characters—along with Goldface—that I knew was a Silver Age Green Lantern villain that doesn't get seen all that often. When Geoff Johns turned his attention away from Earth and GL's earthbound rogue's gallery pretty quickly into his run on the relaunched Green Lantern title in 2005, I remember being at least partially disappointed we didn't get to see how Johns would Batman-ize the likes of Evil Star, Goldface, and I don't know, The Invisible Destroyer in the same way that he had The Shark and Hector Hammond (and, later, The Black Hand). I suppose it was ultimately all for the best, given the new characters and concepts Johns introduced into the Green Lantern mythos, but I'm glad to see Morrison making use of the likes of Evil Star.

It's worth noting that Sharp's design barely varies at all from Gil Kane's original one. This Evil Star has a bigger, floppier star on his face, and is missing his cape, but that's about it.


PAGE 43, PANEL 4:

The Blackstars who rescued Evil Star from where the GLC had imprisoned him give him some shit about his name, suggesting it's why people judge him and that it's "almost inviting trouble with the law."

I kinda liked his explanation, even if they remain unconvinced.

Speaking of the Blackstars, there's an explanation for why their leader Controller Mu changed the name from "Darkstars," having to do with the more absolute of "black" vs. "dark," but it's probably also worth noting that it also makes them sound closer to Blackwater, maybe the best-known of the sorts of private security contractors that the team echoes in its earliest appearances in the title.


PAGE 50, PANEL 1:

Controller Mu meets with a trio of Dhorians lead by a Volgar Zo. If the Dhorians look familiar, that's because one member of their species was a pretty early Justice League villain, Kanjar Ro, who first appeared in Gardner Fox and Mike Sekowsky's Justice League of America #3, way back in 1961.

Though Ro's appearance has varied a bit over the decades as he's been reinvented and redesigned in various comics and other media, his pink skin, pointy nose and segmented, insect-like eyes are constants. Here Sharp's designs for Ro's fellow Dhorians are both faithful to Sekowsky's original design for the character, while also bizarrely alien, an effect achieved mostly by exaggerating a feature here or there, putting the leg joints in the "wrong" places, having the eyelids close horizontally instead of vertically, and so on.

Hell, they're even wearing outfits similar to Kanjar Ro's get-up!

Here Sharp proves to be perfectly aligned with Morrison in terms of a basic approach that has served Morrison extremely well both in this title and during his fairly lengthy run on the Batman character—that is, again, taking things pretty much straight from the Silver Age and Bronze Age of DC Comics, the weirder the better, and presenting them matter-of-factly, with just enough of realism to suit the tone of modern, more sophisticated comics storytelling in an age when they are made for adults, rather than children.

So while Morrison has extended the particulars of Kanjar Ro to the people of his planet, including their occupation of slave-trading, and even "The Gamma Gong" and a spaceship resembling a many-oared slave ship, Sharp gives what was a somewhat silly alien design from the 1960s a realistic veneer that makes it viscerally repellent; their six-fingered hands and goat-like gait are truly creepy on the page. We'll see rather a lot of them in the fourth issue of the series.


PAGE 54, PANEL 3:

Look! Look at them all!

The Dhorians have stolen planet Earth, shrunken it to a manageable size, and are now preparing to sell it to the highest bidder. The above image shows some of those attending the auction. It is a single panel on a five-panel page, and yet Sharp has not merely filled it with distinct, individual, wicked-looking alien villains, but he has filled it with name ones: There The Overmaster (from the six-part 1994 Justice League line crossover "Judgement Day"), Mongal (Mongul's daughter, first introduced in an issue of Showcase '95 by Peter Tomasi and Scott Eaton, and seemingly killed off during Geoff Johns' Green Lantern tenure), Steppenwolf (Jack Kirby's Fourth World villain, in his updated New 52 look), a female White Martian (in the look Howard Porter gave their race in the initial story arc of Morrison's own 1997-launched JLA), Grayven (the son of Darkseid introduced in 1996 by Ron Marz and Daryl Banks in their run on Green Lantern), Agamemno (from the Mark Waid-masterminded 2000 event The Silver Age), The Queen Bee (in the design she first appeared in during the 1999 "World War III" arc of Morrison's JLA), what appear to be a trio of aliens conquered by Starro and...11 other characters so distinct-looking that I would not be at all surprised to find out that they too are all pulled from past DC comics, even if I can't place them.

(UPDATE: I asked for help identifying the others on Twitter, and Patrick Carrington responded by pointing me to this post from Jesse Russell's blog, The Shared Universe, which was obviously extremely helpful. He seems to have gotten them all, although I still think the three guys with stars on their faces are Starro conquerees rather than Starlings, based on the fact that they only have one eye apiece. Russell's blog will prove useful later on too, when Morrison and Sharp start throwing alternate Green Lanterns at the reader. I...probably wouldn't have bothered with this post had I known how thoroughly Russell dissected the so much of the series).

This is the sort of panel that makes me love shared-setting comics, though, and DC Comics in particular. A whole huge swathe of DC Comics history is packed into that one single panel, a panel that rewards lingering on, and seems to have been specifically created for no reason other than to impress the hell out of the reader and, perhaps, remind them of all sorts of other cool characters and comics from the publisher's history (Honestly, I bet that if we can figure out who all of these characters are and when and where they first appeared, we could compile a pretty good reading list out of it).

Most of them, I should note, don't actually say or do anything in the pages that follow. Steppenwolf gets a few lines, threatening a trio of Dominators (first introduced in 1989 crossover event Invasion!) not to attempt to out-bid him. They ignore him.

Anyway, this is a glorious panel, and whether Morrison's script mentioned each of those characters by name and asked that Sharp somehow find a way to squeeze them all in, or if Sharp took it upon himself to do so, it demonstrates a mainstream comic artist who not only gives a shit, as one would hope and wish all artists would, but actually, genuinely cares about the comic he's drawing. 

The panel immediately preceding this one, by the way, is less-detailed and filled with cameos, but it  has even more characters in it, showing as it does the crowd of assorted auction-goers from further away. They're much harder to make out, but I suppose one with a magnifying glass could do so; Sharp drew about 100 distinct figures into that practically-impossible-to-see crowd, including Death's Head II and what appears to be a Skrull.


PAGE 70, PANELS 4-6:

A representative of the United States "and everybody else" tells Hal that they are perfectly okay with the Earth being completely destroyed in a thousand years, so long as they get to live the rest of their lives on a stable planet...and that they all get super-powers, to boot!

The basic premise of this issue, the series' fourth, is that this being called "The Shepherd" has bought planet Earth from the Dhorian slavers for "then thousand jilli-stellars," hangs it in his gigantic ship among many other planets, and is ready to take off for his space sanctuary where his planets "may roam free and grow fat in paradise." Hal and the Green Lantern Corps intervene, and Hal gets in a heated argument with The Shepherd, who looks and talks like a stereotypical image of the Christian God, but is actually a monstrous-looking "Terravore," who will eat the Earth when it's ready.

I'm not sure why Hal's so surprised that Earthlings are ready to sacrifice the lives of their descendants for short-term gain; I mean, that's basically exactly how we got into our current, existential crisis with the climate, and we did that without the promise of 1,000-years of paradise and superpowers in the plus column.

Hell, too many people today would sacrifice their grandchildren and children—let alone great-grandchildren and descendants—for short term convenience.

Anyway, this whole issue is fucking brilliant.


PAGE 99, PANEL 3:

Countess Belzebeth, the daughter of cosmic vampire Starbreaker, a Justice League villain introduced in 1972 by Mike Friedrich and Dick Dillin, takes Hal to Vorr, "Planet of vampires." It is apparently a have for all sorts of vampires, including Marvel's Morbius, The Living Vampire, Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt from Interview With The Vampire, and plenty of other cameos.

PAGE 34, PANELS 1-3:

Hal Jordan returns to Earth to crash with his old pal Green Arrow, who encourages him to spend some time with his feet on the ground, hanging out with normal people. It...doesn't go as planned.

After breaking up a weird drug deal involving the selling of souls, they find a warehouse with a giant green arrow stuck in it, a huge, green Robin Hood hat laying outside it, and then, well, what you see above.

The first and only time I encountered a "Xeen Arrow" (and remembered doing so) was in Tom Scioli's incomparably good (and tragically short) Super Powers back-up in the pages of Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye. In presenting Green Arrow's new origin in just 16 panels, Scioli had Queen wearing clothing made of foliage and using a bow and arrow to survive on a "Starfish Island," which was secretly alive (and resembled Starro). In the last few panels of the page, a blue-skinned, purple-garbed alien appeared to Ollie and announced himself as "Xeen Arrow of Dimension Xero," telling him to heed his words:

String your bow to the vibration of the universe. Fight greed in all its forms. Use trick arrows.

Ollie naturally takes Xeen Arrow's advice, and even takes his name and he starts out on his new, super-heroic mission, but his new superhero name gets muddled by the papers, who call him Green Arrow instead.

Googling it later, I see that Xeen Arrow is actually far older than Scioli's use of the name, and the character actually hails from a 1958 issue of Adventure Comics, from back when Green Arrow was basically a Batman clone (In the sequence above, note that Ollie says, "Speedy and me ran into this cat one time! Weird period in both our lives"). That particular issue, it turns out, was collected in the 2001 collection Green Arrow By Jack Kirby (perhaps explaining Scioli's familiarity), which I had read, but just the once, and I apparently forgot about the giant Green Arrow from Dimension Zero. (I should really try to dig that book out of my comics midden though, as I see it also includes "The Green Arrows of The World," which was basically GA's answer to Batman's Club of Heroes, which Morrison reinvented into Batman, Inc. Maybe I'll give it a read and write those and other notable stories from it up in a future post)

At any rate, props to Morrison and Sharp for reintroducing Xeen Arrow...alongside a Xeen Lantern.

This particular issue, entitled "Space Junkies," also emphasizes just how much Morrison and Scioli have in common, in the way they glom on to odd bits of superhero continuity and remix and reinvent it in cool, sometimes crazy ways.


PAGE 46, PANEL 5:

A smiling Sinestro sips tea...? His costume looks off here, too, with the colors reversed. This is the character's first appearance in the series, and we'll find out much later that this is actually "Thal Sinestro of the Anti-Universe," where everything is opposite of our universe. "Good Guy Sinestro," Jordan says when he hears that, to which this particularly charming version of Hal's archenemy replies, "I don't know iv I'd go that far, dear boy. Lovable rogue at best!"

I actually do kinda love this Sinestro, although the last few Sinestros I've encountered have been pretty dull and one-note, including the resurrected version from J.M. DeMattei's run on The Spectre (read during my weeks of quarantine) and the one that has been part of the Luthor's small, five-person Legion of Doom throughout Scott Snyder's Justice League run.


PAGE 68:

After an issue fighting against Abin Sur, the devilish-looking Green Lantern from Morrison's own Multiversity, Hal is greeted by a trio of other multi-dimensional GLs: Flashlight (also of Multiversity), Magic Lantern (from Morrison's Animal Man run) and a Batman-who-is-also a Green Lantern (also also of Multiversity).

At first I suspected the last of these was the Green Lantern of Mike Barr and Jerry Bingham's 1994 Elseworlds book, Batman: In Darkest Knight (the one in which Bruce Wayne becomes Earth's Green Lantern, rather than Hal Jordan), but then I recalled that Barr and Bingham's Batman-as-Green Lantern didn't have ears on his cowl.

Apparently this Bat-Lantern is literally named Bat-Lantern and hails from Earth-32, a world in the Multiverse in which DC characters are amalgamated with one another (It was listed in the Multiversity Guidebook).


PAGE 71, PANELS 1-3:

The other reason I thought that Bat-Lantern might have been Barr and Bingham's character was that Darkest Knight featured a rather clumsy (in the opinion of teenage Caleb) amalgamation of The Joker and Sinestro, which seemed like it went a bit too far in terms of smooshing Batman and Green Lantern together. And here, of course, we see another amalgamation of a Batman and Green Lantern villain, and the mention of yet another.

The Shark is apparently just a humanoid shark dressed like the Penguin, sans umbrella, top-hat and cigarette holder. It's a good look. Like, most anyone looks like pretty cool villain when dressed in a tuxedo with tails and a monocle. As great a visual as that is, I must confess a great deal of curiosity about this "Masked Hand" that the Shark mentions, an combination of Black Mask and Black Hand. I am assuming that The Masked Hand is a villain who wears a tiny little mask, perhaps one that resembles the one Black Mask originally wore, over his hand, which he holds as a sideways fist all the time, and makes it talk by moving the thumb up and down.


PAGE 103, PANEL 4:

This flaming giant appears a few times, battling a powerful team of superheroes, before this page, in which a character refers to him as "Some immense Anti-Matter Titan!"

This appears to be another reinvention of an old Fox/Seksowsky character from Justice League of America, although it's not a connection I made until I read that description of the character. If so, then here's yet another example of a Morrison and Sharp giving a somewhat goofy-looking old character the same treatment they gave the slavers of Kanjar Ro's planet.


PAGE 110, PANEL 5:

I really like this particular Green Lantern, who isn't too terribly green. I don't know who she is, what Earth she hails from or what previous comic or story she appeared in (if, indeed, she did, and isn't original to this comic). You can get another, better look at her on the cover of The Green Lantern #10).

PAGE 112, PANEL 2:

As Hal's adventures with the various Green Lanterns from across the Multiverse comes to a close, we see him flying alongside Bat-Lantern, Magic Lantern, Flashlight, the Tangent Green Lantern, Abin Sur, that cool lady Lantern, an alternate universe Star Sapphire and a whole bunch of other Green Lanterns. I recognize the Green Lanterns from Earth-2, Just Imagine Stan Lee With Dave Gibbons Creating Green Lantern, Batman Beyond, Kingdom Come (I think and...that's all I got for sure. That leaves a Kyle Rayner and two John Stewarts I'm blanking on, and what looks like a caricature of Chinese immigrant from the 19th Century with upsettingly yellow skin, but I hoping that's just the result of the green aura blending in with the flesh-colored coloring of his skin, or even my eyesight starting to go now that I'm in my fourth decade, because otherwise YEESH. He does appear in another cameo earlier in the story, and doesn't look anywhere nearly as yellow, so that's good.


PAGE 123, PANELS 1-4:

I just really like the word "Scorpedoes".

Actually, they're both kinda jerks, aren't they?

Simon Baz's mom tries to sort out the various Green Lanterns in Green Lanterns #7, written by Sam Humphries and drawn by Ronan Cliquet.

Hal Jordan isn't a very good superhero in any universe, apparently.

In this week's Injustice: Gods Among Us: Year Five #13, it's Batman vs. the entire Justice League–Er, "The Regime," I guess they're calling themselves now. If you're unfamiliar with the comic book series, it is a prequel to the fighting video game Injustice: Gods Among Us, and it has somehow been going on for five years now.

The premise is that Superman and many of his fellow supereheroes are insane fascist monsters, and only Batman and some like-minded heroes can stand against them. Think Kingdom Come, if Kingdom Come went on forever, wasn't really about anything and instead of being painted it was drawn by the first two-to-four artist who responded to DC's emails and who didn't have anything better going on at the moment.

So here Nightwing Damian Wayne, a longtime ally of The Regime, confronts his father Batman over whether or not it's cool to kill serial killer Mr. Zsasz, who has apparently recently killed Alfred Pennyworth (Few supporting characters live long or die peacefully in this series). Batman came down on the "definitely not cool" side. When Batman's archenemy Superman arrives, he downs a green pill that gives normal people the ability to trade punches with Superman, and then Batman goes to work on Superman, Nightwing and their allies.

I was most intrigued by the part in which he fights Hal Jordan, who has traded his Green Lantern ring in for a Sinestro Corps ring (that's why he's yellow). Check out the Injustice-iverse's Batman vs. Hal Jordan fight:

Okay, first, Batman was able to take out a guy wearing what I assume is the second most powerful weapon in the universe, a literal magic wishing ring, by throwing a dumpster over him. And secondly, it took Hal forever to figure out a way to get out of that dumpster.

Yes, Jordan is the one who eventually knocks out Batman, but as you can see in the panels above, he does so only by shooting him in the back after Wonder Woman uppercuts him a foot into the air. After he figured out  a way to get out of an overturned dumpster.

So, in conclusion, Hal Jordan is the worst...in every universe!

(The above panels, like the rest of the issue, were written by Brian Buccellato, drawn by Mike S. Miller and colored by J. Nanjan, by the way.)

Green Lantern #50 and The New 52 paradox

Writer Robert Venditti had an appropriately big moment for the 50th issue of the Green Lantern title, which he inherited from Geoff Johns after the latter left the title and the franchise in 2013. With the New 52 universe set to end, or at least be "reborn" in just two more issues as part of a still somewhat mysterious branding initiative the publisher has dubbed "Rebirth," this over-sized anniversary issue also functions as the beginning of the book's climax and conclusion.

That big moment? The pre-Flashpoint, pre-New 52 version of Parallax Hal Jordan, plucked from the time-stream in the midst of Zero Hour by Brainiac for eventual usage in Convergence, coming face-to-face with post-Flashpoint, New 52 Green Lantern Hal Jordan. That sentence, you'll have noticed, includes references to three inter-company crossovers and a branding initiative, spanning some 21 years.

Rebirth-style Parallax, in Green Lantern #50

It is therefore demonstrative of the core problem of The New 52 reboot, a built-in tension, a set of cross-purposes that makes the current DC Universe not only unstable, but often infuriating to read. The publisher schizophrenically wanted to streamline their decades-long, confusing and perhaps alienating continuity in order to start fresh, telling brand-new stories featuring new versions of their characters...while continuing to reference old characters and old plotlines, lazily resting drama on completely un-earned allusions to that continuity they were supposedly excising.

The result? Comics that kinda sorta look like they started over, but read like even more confusing (and perhaps even more alienating) than the set of stories they were meant to replace. These were comics primed to annoy, frustrate and alienate long-time readers, while doing the same to any new readers brought in by the prospects of brand-new #1 issues, which promised a fresh start but were actuality just a continuation of a serial story being told month in and month out since 1986 or so.

Convergence #8

The plot of this issue is that the Zero Hour-era Parallax, who was one of a handful of characters–including The Flash Barry Allen, post-Crisis Superman and Lois Lane and Supergirl–to return to the events of Crisis On Infinite Earths (1985-1986) at the end of Convergence (2015) and somehow alter the outcome of COIE so as to reboot the current, 52-Earth DC Multiverse and end up in the post-Flashpoint combined Earth-0, has finally returned to Earth. He makes for Coast City, the annihilation of which drove him mad enough to kill off the Green Lantern Corps, Sinestro and The Guardians and to absorb the energy of the Central Power Battery, making him unfathomably powerful (During Geoff Johns' retcon of these events in 2005's Green Lantern: Rebirth, this was because Jordan's despair and fear made him susceptible to possession by the alien avatar of fear, Parallax).

Seeing Coast City whole again, he is ecstatic...until he's confronted by The New 52 Hal Jordan, who is currently wearing a long, green trench coat (for reasons) and fighting not with a Green Lantern ring, but with an experimental power gauntlet with the power of a dozen GL rings (again, for reasons).

Jordan doesn't seem to recognize Parallax at first, and, being Hal Jordan, starts throwing punches. Naturally, both being Hals, they fight senselessly for a while.

Only after the two, who both profess to want to protect Coast City and its inhabitants, including their loved ones, endanger the city and their loved ones by fighting for 17 pages, does the New 52 Hal try talking to post-Crisis Hal.

The Hal Jordans talk continuity.

New 52 Hal, who threw the first punch (well, it was a light construct of a sledgehammer, actually) tells post-Crisis Hal that he knows exactly what he went through, because he went through it to–His Coast City was destroyed while he was away, he was infected with a sickness that nearly drove him insane forever too.

But...did it...?

One of the many (many, many) particularly irritating thing about the half-measure of a reboot of The New 52 was the editors'–and sometimes the writers', and the characters'–insistence that this particular story still happened, or that particular story still happened, but because of all of the other evident changes, readers know that those stories couldn't have happened, or, if they did in ways that were radically different than the previously published versions we've read (thus creating a "secret" continuity unknown to anyone).

Post-Crisis, pre-Flashpoint Hal Jordan flashes back to the events of "Reign of The Supermen"

Unfortunately for Green Lantern readers, this particular issue is built on stories that have supposedly un-happened. The destruction of Coast City happened during "The Reign of The Supermen" storyline in the Superman books(1993), following the death of Superman in the early 1990s. That story apparently still "happened," but, in The New 52, it would have had to happen without Supergirl (The Matrix Version), without Superboy (the Cadmus clone), Steel, The Cyborg Superman, Lex Luthor II (actually Lex Luthor I in a clone body, impersonating his own son) and it would have likely had to happen to with a different form of Doomsday, and with a Lois Lane who wasn't married to Superman/Clark Kent. That's...pretty much the entire story, really.

It's possible the events that followed in Green Lantern could have happened more-or-less the same, but what about when we get to Zero Hour? And Parallax was revealed to be an avatar of cosmic fear in Green Lantern: Rebirth, rather than just a goofy name the crazy Hal Jordan chose for himself when he became a cosmic supervillain, and Rebirth was chockfull of elements bounced out of canon, from the relatively minor (Guy Gardner being a Vuldarian) to the integral (Hal Jordan being The Spectre).

And Hal Jordan became The Spectre in Day of Judgment (1999), the main antagonists of which were Neron and Asmodel, introduced in Underworld Unleashed (1995) and JLA (1997), two more books that the New 52 would erased from continuity. And the Spectre Force being unmoored from its traditional host was kind of a big element of Day of Judgmemt, which happened at the end of The Spectre (1992-1998)...and Jordan only bonded with him because Jordan was, at the time, dead, having died in the pages of Parallax: Emeral Night (1996), a tie-in to the Final Night crossover/event series. Of course, this version of Parallax Hal Jordan never died, as he was pulled out of the timeline before the events of Final Night, but New 52 Jordan would have still had to have been The Spectre in order to have stopped being Parallax, right?

That is a lot of comics to ask readers to rewrite in their heads during the course of a 40-page comic, almost half of which is a fight scene. And even if a reader has to rewrite only portions of it–say we assume that, in The New 52's secret continuity, Final Night never happened, meaning that Day of Vengeance never had to happen, meaning that Rebirth happened differently, and so all a reader has to rewrite is "Reign of The Supermen," "Emerald Twilight" and Rebirth, well, that's still three storylines from as far back as almost 25 years, just to get to this climax.

And if a story is premised on at least a passing familiarity with stories that are almost 25 years old, well, what was the point of The New 52's continuity brush-clearing reboot again...?

Justice League: The Darkseid War: Green Lantern #1

Previously, in "The Darkseid War"...

•Justice League #41 ("The Darkseid War" Pt. 1)

•Justice League #42 ("The Darkseid War" Pt. 2)

•Justice League #43 ("The Darkseid War" Pt. 3)

•Justice League #44 ("The Darkseid War" Pt. 4)

•Justice League #45 ("The Darkseid War" Pt. 5)

•Justice League: The Darkseid War: Batman #1

•Justice League: Darkseid War: Superman #1

•Justice League: The Darkseid War: The Flash#1


The fourth of the character-specific one-shots to spin-out of Geoff John's 530-part "Darkseid War" story arc in Justice League, focusing on Green Lantern Hal Jordan, is probably the best of the seven (we've still got Shazam and Lex Luthor to go, before he return to the pages of Justice League for the next chapter of "Act II" of the storyline).

This is due in no small part to the superior creative team, consisting of writer Tom King and artist Doc Shaner (here colored by Chris Sotomyaor). The events of the book take place directly after a scene in Justice League #45, wherein Batmetron, the new God of Knowledge, tells Hal to get his ass back to Oa, as the legions of Darkseid's Parademons will be swarming the central power battery, seeking a power to serve now that Darkseid is dead (Darkseid's dead, remember. If you don't, there are all those links above to click through).

This one-shot is therefore a side-quest of Hal's, one that he embarks on after that scene in #45, before returning to the title. Despite its connectivity to a long-running story arc and a suite of tie-ins, it's worth nothing that this book stands on its own as a pretty neat exploration of who Hal Jordan is and how he faces tragedy and what he would do if he had the power of God to fix everything he perceives as wrong in the universe (There's a very intentional contrast here between what this Hal would do given that temptation, versus what the Hal Jordan who became Parallax in the pre-Flashpoint DCU did in the same position...ironically, that Hal recently showed up in the pages of Green Lantern, thanks to Convergence related continuity shenanigans).

This entry into our series will be shorter than the others, I assume, because there isn't much to make fun of in this issue.

THE COVER

Another homerun by Francis Manapul, in which the artist draws one of the Leaguers in their upgraded, New New God mode, with a bit of Kirby-esque design elements as filigree. If Jordan's costume looks familiar here, it should. It is a mash-up of his regular Green Lantern get-up with that of the original New God Lightray, conceived and created by Jack Kirby:

Don't worry; Shaner will offer a better look at the new costume on the inside.

PAGES 1-3

In a very welcome departure from many superhero comics these days–you know, when DC can ask you to fork over $3.99 for just 22-pages of comics–this book does not open with a splash page. In fact, there are only two splashes in this book altogether, and one of them is very, very busy with art, with little scenes embedded in the background almost forming "implied" panels.

Rather, King and Shaner's story begins with three pages, each with five-panels apiece! These are all "wide-screen" panels, long, horizontal rectangles stacked atop one another, of mostly equal size.

There is a floating Mother Box that asks Green Lantern John Stewart if he will be its god (the title of this story is actually "Will You Be My God?"), and Stewart refuses, while getting teh crap kicked out of him by re-animated dead Green Lanterns. Stewart records and sends a last message to Hal, telling him what's going on, while Hal soars through space to get there. There images Shaner draws in this sequence are all pretty great, particularly that of Jordan flying straight at the reader, and then gradually away, while cuctting back and forth to the terrible things happening on Oa.

Apparently, Darkseid's Parademons, now without their god to serve, flew to Oa, merged a Mother Box with the Central Power Battery, and took the fallen Lanterns, one by one, before it, asking if they will accept the mantle of godhood. They all refused, of course (Let's forget for a moment how the hell a bunch of Parademons were capable of taking out a planet full of Green Lanterns and Guardians, shall we...?)

Oh, and if this sequence is at all confusing to you, since John and the rest of the Corps are supposed to be lost in a different dimension as per miniseries Green Lantern: The Lost Army and Green Lantern: Edge of Oblivion, do remember that "Darkseid War" is set long, long before the launch of all the "DC You" books and the new status quos of last June. That's why Superman still has his cape and full powers, and Batman is still Bruce Wayne and Hal Jordan doesn't have long hair and a green trench coat.

PAGES 4-5

In a church on Earth, little boy Hal Jordan has come to light a candle for his late father, a non-practicing Catholic (Hey, did you know Jordan's mom was Jewish? I didn't know that). There's one other person in the church with young Jordan, a brown-haired guy in a bomber jacket whose face is never really shown. Who could that be?

Whoever he is, he knows Jordan and knew his father, and they get to talking. Hal is a bit bitter about the fact that his dad died in a flaming plane crash, and, if there is a God, God didn't move to save his father.

PAGES 6-8

Hal talks to his ring about what's been going down on Oa, while he's being attacked by the likes of Kilowog, Arissa and B'dg. THey have all been turned into Parademons by the other Parademons, but that basically just means they've been given a few bits of gold armor. They look more like they've changed clothes, rather than been completely transformed, as the people who made the other Parademons apparently were.

For example, here's the Parademonized version of that one Green Lantern who looks like Tomar-Re, but isn't, because Tomar-Re is dead:

PAGES 9-10

Back in church, Hal gets his candle lit, but is full of anger about God just watching his Dad die rather than intervening to save him.

PAGES 11-13

On Oa, it's Hal Jordan versus a planet full of attacking Parademons. His ring helpfully counts down his opponents as he defeats them: At the start of the battle, it's 1,102, 436 to 1; by the time Hal gets overwhelmed, it's not a whole heck of a lot better. This is, by the way, where the first splash page falls. The spread between pages 12 and 13 is great; with the light gradually being overtaken by blacks as Hal is gradually overtaken; in the splash page, we see the black of the backs of three Parademons, but the page is mostly filled with color. And that ration changes drastically in the four panels on the facing page, so that the last panel is nothing but blackness with sound effects.

PAGES 14-15

The guy in the bomber jacket comforts the young Hal, explaining the main difference between God and humanity, as he sees it. It's actually a pretty daring reading, at least in its climax–"Bet you think we go into church to worship God....Well, the truth of it is, God comes to church to worship us". This is all tied into the Green Lantern concept by addressing the concept of free will. God doesn't have it, but his created humans do, so while he has to watch tragedies, because everything he does is necessary, humanity is free to act and create.

PAGES 16-18

Finally defeated just like all the other Lanterns and even the Guardians were, Hal is dragged before the Mother Box, and asked if he will be its god. Hal, ever the arrogant Lantern who refused to follow orders, doesn't decline like everyone else, but instead accepts, and, in a two-page sequence, the Mother Box and his power ring transform into "Mother Ring," het gets a half-Lantern, half-Lightray costume, and, in the issue's second and final splash page, he becomes "The God of Light."

As you can see, the coloring of Hal's "God of Light" costume is slightly different on the inside versus on the cover; here the white portions are simply a paler green. I think I like the coloring choices on the cover slightly better, but it hardly matters; Hal won't be wearing that costume for very long.

PAGES 19-21

Using his newfound powers, Hal is able to re-set everything to how it was before this book began: The Corps and Guardians alive and well and un-Parademonized, the planet restored, the Parademons all sent to Apokolips. As he contemplates his infinite power, his ability to set the universe right again, he...pulls on his bomber jacket, and then we're back in the church, as we here adult Hal Jordan tell child Hal Jordan the differences between God and human, and Hal chooses free will over infinite power.

That there is a choice seems to imply that, even as a god, Hal still has free will, so this is maybe more a symbolic choice than a literal one, but whatever the case, he asks the Mother Box to destroy itself and send him home...as plain old mortal Green Lantern Hal Jordan, not New New God Green Lightray.

In that respect, this story is something of a narrative cul-de-sac, and probably not really relevant to "The Darkseid War," as it basically has Hal leave "The Darkseid War" to appear in a one-shot, assume New Godhood for a few pages, and then decide against it.

PAGE 22

Hal flies back to Earth, discussing his choice with his ring while foreshadowing something bad about to happen with Batman who, unlike Hal, chose to keep the infinite power in order to change the world for a better place. Maybe not necessary, but a nice character study nonetheless. And the construction of the comic, from King's scripting to Shaner's perfect artwork, is all so good that it's really a comic to be admired.

Both creators deserve a better assignment than this, but I'll be damned if this issue, this character, and this piece of a big event is lucky to have them.

Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti understand the defining element of Hal Jordan's character.

Sure, the writers of Harley Quinn's Little Black Book may have played rather fast and loose with the "rules" of the variously-colored power rings in the second issue of their bi-monthly team-up series (drawn this time by John Timms and Mauricet), just as they ignored the timeline of the New 52 in their first issue (I guess we can chalk the title's continuity-lite status up to it having an unreliable–meaning "insane"–narrator), but in the above panel they demonstrate that they know exactly what it is that makes Hal Jordan who he is.

Hal Jordan is a guy who gets hit in the head a lot.

There are also a few gags about Harley touching Jordan's butt (which at least one of you will likely appreciate), and the more standard line of making fun of the character: His complete lack of imagination when it comes to power ring constructs, the defaults being a handful of the types of sports equipment that might have been found in your father or grandfather's childhood toy box.

Green Lantern franchise's "Godhead" arc seems to be off to a good start.

I've frankly been rather surprised by the state of DC's Green Lantern line since the departure of Geoff Johns in 2013, which of course came after about eight years of Johns helming a franchise that grew up around the success of his Green Lantern: Rebirth and his run on the subsequent Green Lantern monthly.

When Johns left the then four-book franchise, so too did all the other creators, and DC had some of it's then-expected PR pratfalling regarding some of the new creators (Remember Joshua Fialkov being announced as the writer for both Green Lantern Corps and Red Lanterns and, within a matter of weeks, leaving over creative differences?). I haven't followed the line that closely since—I used to read Green Lantern monthly, and Peter Tomasi and Patrick Gleason's Green Lantern Corps in trade—but I generally check out the beginnings of each crossover story, and, creatively at least, the franchise seems pretty healthy.

There aren't any writers of Johns' star status in the stable, nor any artists I personally like as much as pencil artists Doug Mahnke and Gleason, but the books never look that bad and, surprisingly, the writers have been quite emulative of the types of stories that Johns and the previous crew of writers used to tell: Big, sweeping, cosmic space stories involving the variously-colored Lantern corps that occasionally (alright, usually) take over all the books to serve in chapters of one big mega-story.

Fans of the characters or concepts who didn't care for the way Johns and company handled the book were probably dismayed that their style of Green Lantern story persisted even after they left, but the franchise did not go in any particularly new directions. It's still set almost entirely in space—in fact, Green Lantern's Green Lantern Hal Jordan is now based in space, and isn't even in the Justice League any more*—big crazy changes are a constant (Kyle Rayner is believed dead! Guy Gardner's mustache is insane!) and all the colors of the rainbow are always involved.

You'd have to ask a Green Lantern fan how exactly this stay-the-course course has been received. Sales have been slipping, but the franchise is still the same size. When it was announced that Larfleeze (the book starring the "Orange Lantern") was to be canceled, a new Sinestro book was put on the schedule immediately, and, for a month or two, the franchise swelled to six books as the last few issues of Larfleeze shipped.**

As for "Godhead"—which, yes, does indeed have a pretty dumb name—there's a pretty good chance that this is a storyline that could interest regular DC readers and DCU watchers who don't normally read any Lantern titles. It features the universe's many Lantern characters coming into conflict with the New 52 version of the New Gods, but that in and of itself isn't much of a selling point (Me, I thought that was a weird move, as no one writer seems to be in control of the New Gods in the current, rebooted universe; they pop up almost at random in many unconnected titles).

Rather, it seems like it will have more than a little to do with...whatever DC's up to with its Multiverse now (See the last few pages of Forever Evil, the last page of Superman: Doomed #2, Booster Gold: Futures End #52, and, Futures End and Earth 2: Worlds End for more). The plot involves Highfather and The New Gods, who see themselves as a vast army protecting the Multiverse from the forces of Darkseid, seeking an ultimate weapon with which they will be able to defeat the evil god should he ever find the Anti-Life Equation (So, an Anti-Anti-Life Equation, I guess).

Metron and Highfather think they've found it in the main DCU Universe of the New 52 version of the Multiverse (What Earth are we on now? I've just been calling it Earth-New 52; is it Earth-1 or Earth-O or New Earth or what?), a notable universe because this is where seven individuals repelled Darkseid five or six years ago in the first arc of Justice League (and they did so much, much more violently in that animated direct-to-DVD movie, Justice League: War. Did you see that? Holy shit man, there was swearing! And Barry Allen took a crowbar to pry out one of Darkseid's eyeballs!).

Also, the Source Wall has appeared in previous Green Lantern crossover epic "Lights Out" (and, more recently, in Futures End: Green Lantern #1).

The ultimate weapon the New Gods have their eyes on? The White Light of Creation/Life that comes from unifying the whole rainbow of rings, currently held by White Lantern Kyle Rayner, who was able to travel to the other side of the Source Wall and back.

So, to put it as simply as possible, it's The New Gods vs. The Lanterns, for ring-power.

The story kicks off in Green Lanterns/New Gods: Godhead #1, a 38-page, $4.99*** special written and drawn by just about every one. Look how Hal Jordan recoils in horror at the list of credits he's faced with!

Don't worry, Hal! Most of those are writers; it looks like all the Lantern writers collaborated on the story, while Van Jensen and Justin Jordan wrote the script for this issue. There are only ("only"...?) five artists involved in drawing the damned thing, and none of them have a remarkable enough style that there's any visual whiplash involved. I'd actually have trouble pointing out who drew what, although I think I'm pretty certain which pages are Ethan Van Sciver's and which are Pete Woods' pages.

By the way, the text-heavy cover featuring a pull-quote from the book's dialogue is apparently the cover design for the whole she-bang, based on the fact that the second part—labeled on the cover as "Act I, Part 2," is similar in design. I can't say I like the design, but it is distinctive, and thus I imagine it will pop off the comics racks, differentiating the books from their neighbors. It's also funny; the "Act I, Part 2" is Green Lantern #35, and it also features a character reacting in horror to the credits:

As for Godhead #1, it begins with a recap of the New 52 New Gods, who are an awful lot like Jack Kirby's original conception in a lot of ways, but quite different in design (Also, the good guys are total assholes, too).

If you've read Wonder Woman, you've already met Orion and Highfather and visited New Genesis, here a floating city orbiting a ruined planet destroyed in the war between the gods. If you've read Justice League, you've already met Darkseid and his new, weird football player design. I always thought he was scarier in a mini-dress than in shoulder pads, but what do I know?

There's a four-panel DCU creation story (still involving the giant hand), a two-page summary of New God history/mythology and then a fancy four-page fold out of The Source Wall, before which stand Highfather and Metron (well, stand and sit, respectively).

Highfather, like Commissioner Gordon, looks much younger and more virile in The New 52 than in the...old, pre-New 52 comics. He still has an Amish or Lincoln style beard, but it's now dark and clipped short. Rather than a robe, he wears military-style armor that looks a lot like Imperiex's, and instead of the cane/staff he used to carry, he now wields a megarod-esque mace, more suitable for hitting.

Metron looks pretty much like he always has, but he's got some circuit boards or something in his face...?

They chitchat about the rings and Darkseid and The Multiverse and such before deciding to make a super-weapon out of the rings, with Highfather dispatching various New Gods to take a ring from each Corps, a feat they accomplish quite quickly. In general, it takes about a page to steal a ring from, say, a Star Sapphire or Larfleeze, while the Sinestro Corps and Green Lantern Corps put up a bit more fight.

Here's a panel of Hal Jordan getting his stupid ring construct smashed by Orion:

Hal's shaft has no hold over Orion.

Highfather stuffs all the rings into a new mega-mace that his super-blacksmith makes for him, and then visits a planet in the hopes of hyper-evolving everyone that lives there into gods. Instead, it turns all the space goat-people that live there into monsters, and Highfather sighs and is like, "Well, we'll have to destroy this planet and everyone on it."

It's decided that they miscalculated, and can't make their own white light, but need the white ring that Kyle Rayner is posing with on the last page, apparently recreating the creation story scene from the second panel.

Coincidence?

And if you found that intriguing, or just happen to read Green Lantern, it's on to part 2 of Act I of "Godhead," by writer Robert Venditti, pencil artist Billy Tan and three inkers.

These are the opening panels:

Just in case you weren't sure if you were reading a DC Comic or not. And don't worry, dismemberment fans! That scene of a ripped-off arm floating through space, tumbling away from its former owner is set "Soon;" the story will then jump back in time so you get to see the arm getting torn off as well!

Hal Jordan and his Green Lantern bros are on Mogo, the Alan Moore-created sentient planet GL that DC has gotten a ridiculous amount of mileage out of, who is slowly dying or losing sentience or whatever, because the GL ring Orion took was Mogo's ring (Oh, and the GL Corps are based on Mogo now. Did you know that? Well, they are). They are staring intently at computer screens and freaking out a little when they hear that the New Gods got the whole ring collection super-fast and made a weapon out of them and then destroyed a palent with 84.6 billion people on it.

That's right. The New Gods of New Genesis, the good guys in the New Genesis/Apokolips conflict, killed 84.6 billion people testing a weapon. So it will be kind of hard to root for Highfather, Orion and Lightray in the future, then.

The Green Lantern Corps confront the New Gods at the Source Wall, and Hal Jordan gets punched in the face:

And that's really all I want from a Green Lantern comic.

And then Highfather's stormtroopers chop up the Lanterns' ring constructs with their magic spear things, and Green Lantern The Wolfman gets his arm chopped off while a bunch of other Lanterns are likewise stabbed, cut and dismembered.

Metron tracks the White Lantern Ring and then Boom Tubes to New Genesis, and the decimated Lanterns decide to "rendezvous" on the last place anyone would look for them, Sinestro's planet...although the next issue—Part 3 of Act I, I guess—is actually Green Lantern Corps #35 rather than an issue of Sinestro.

So years after Johns left, DC is still producing Green Lantern epics, just the way Johns and company wrote them, and just the way you (likely) like them (if you liked the Johns ones).

How closely does the new class of Green Lantern writers follow the Johns template? Close enough that the good guys are still mostly a bunch of unlikeable assholes, and arms can be expected to regularly be removed.

Huzzah...?



*DC really needs to put one of their many Earthling GLs on the League roster, preferably John Stewart at this point, but Simon Baz works fine too. I suppose whichever Lantern they end up using in the eventual Justice League movie—John or Hal—will eventually re-join the Justice League. In the meantime, Johns seems to have replaced the team's need for a character with a green power ring by adding a new Power Ring to the ranks.

**I'm actually curious to see if and when the Green Lantern line takes a note from the Batman line and cancels its lower-selling books in order to launch a Batman Eternal-style weekly series. As has been the case with their many crossovers, the Green Lantern line is pretty much written as a weekly-ish book many months anyway, so it would hardly effect the storytelling. But I don't know, perhaps there are readers who read Red Lanterns every month and stubbornly refuse to follow the rest of the line, even if every couple of issues the book is subsumed into a crossover.

***Still a dollar less than DC is considering charging for Batman, by far its best-selling title, and maybe the only title posting such huge numbers based solely on the quality of the work of the creative team, rather than gimmicks and market massaging. I guess they're thinking if they sell over 100,000 copies of the book a month, and they raise the price from $3.99 (which I thought was a ridiculously inflated price as is) to $4.99, they can make an extra $100,0000 every month? If that logic is sound, maybe they should charge $51.99 for each issue of Batman and make each issue 1,040 pages, with the rest of the DCU line being back-up stories to the Batman cover feature....?

Happy Halentine's Day, everyone!

I am not a scientist.

But laser beams wouldn't really work like they do in this panel from Green Lantern #23 by Robert Venditti, Billy Tan and Rob Hunter, would they...?

Wednesday Comics vs. New 52: Green Lantern

Cocky, life-of-the-party test pilot Hal Jordan faces a former rival for the U.S. space program-turned-alien monster, and learns his friend's possession is actually the first part of an alien invasion of Earth—good thing Jordan's also a super-powered space cop charged with protecting the planet! By Kurt Busiek and Joe Quinones.

Demoted, renegade Green Lantern Hal Jordan is recruited by his replacement (and former archenemy) Sinestro to fight by his side and unravel a great threat to the universe that their mutual friend foresaw, by Geoff Johns, Doug Mahnke and seemingly every freelance inker whose contact info DC has.