Pre-New 52 review: War of The Green Lanterns: Aftermath

Well, this is the exact point at which the creators as well as the editors and executives must have found out that DC Entertainment would be scrapping the DC Universe as it existed prior to Flashpoint and re-jigerring it with the New 52boot; the evidence is all over the comics contained in this collection.

First, Geoff Johns opted out of participating all together; rather than shipping an issue of his Green Lantern in August of 2011, DC shipped two issues of War of the Green Lanterns: Aftermath by writer Tony Bedard. They are collected in this 200-page volume, along with the last three issues of Green Lantern Corps (two of which are also by Bedard, one of which is by Scott Kolins), and the last three issues of Green Lantern: Emerald Warriors, which were written by Peter Tomasi.

On the cover, you'll note Bedard and Tomasi are the two creators credited, and in such a manner that it looks as if Tomasi was the artist of a Bedard-written story. As it turns out, the reason they didn't credit the artists is simply because there are way too goddam many of them.

Here then is Exhibit B in the prosecution's case that these few months worth of Green Latnern comics demonstrates that everyone stopped giving a fuck at this point, and were getting ready to start over with the New 52 versions of these titles: There are 21 different artists credited with working on this book, which breaks down to about one for every ten pages. If they were split evenly into pencilers and inkers, that wouldn't be so bad, as it would be about one creative team per issue (although that is still an awful lot of art teams), but that is not the case...many of the issues herein are split between multiple art teams.

It is, to put it as generously as possible, a complete fucking mess, visually. There are some decent artists involved, I like the work of a lot of some of these guys, and don't mind the work of some of the others, but the whole thing looks hurried, lazy and hacky, and none of the settings or characters are drawn by the same artists long enough to ever establish any sort of implied reality or consistency. It looks like a jam book, drawn by guys without access to character design sheets, prior copies of the book or even the ability to see what their fellow artists are drawing.

How big is Killowog? Four-feet-tall? Fourteen? Fifty? Whatever. What are Green Lantern costumes made out of? Polished jade stones, spandex, paint? Whatever. How big is Salaak's head in relationship to his body? Eh, who cares? I've read a handful of comics featuring the Green Lantern who is a big gray rock guy kinda like The Thing but not, and I still can't tell if he has a chin or if his mouth is embedded in his neck; everyone draws that fucking guy's head different.

Additionally, the chapters pretty baldly contradict one another, something I would charitably put down to the fact that the collection is arranged by series rather by the order in which the books are published, but the fact remains several of them are quite clearly pulled-out-of-the drawer fill-in issues, being published to fill space and kill time before the reboot, not because they have anything at all to do with the Aftermath of the War of the Green Lanterns.

Here, let's take 'em one by one.

Aftermath #1, by Bedard and two art teams, Miguel Sepulveda, inking himself, and Tyler Kikham and Batt: This is a straightforward recap of where every one was left at the end of the "War" story, with a lot of added yelling at each other. Hal's on Earth, ring-less. Mogo's dead, forming a ring of debris around Oa. Sinestro's a Green Lantern. Everyone's pissed about Sinestro wearing a ring. Everyone's pissed at John for killing Mogo. Kyle Rayner and his girlfriend are fighting because...eh, they kinda gloss over that.

Sepulvda's art work, which he either colored or was colored by a different of the five credited colorist than the one who colored the second half of this issue, is super-effects heavy, with his characters having rather posed, photo reference-y looks about them, and strange tetures permeating everything, and photos of shrubbery, police cars and night skies dropped in behind and around the drawn art.

Kirkham and Batt's, by contrast, is very comic book-y, looking flat and drawn the way a superhero comic book's art should and, more importantly, looking more like the rest of the Green Lantern comics than Sepulveda's weird-ass art. If you are drawing, say, a tiny, big-headed blue space man in a robe who floats, you can only go so "realistic" with the depiction before it just looks dumb; Sepulveda draws Ganthet like a regular sized human being kneeling, his robe covering his legs.

Aftermath #2, by Bedard, pencil artists Ransom Getty and Andy Smith, and, good God, eight different inkers: Everyone is still mad at everyone! In this issue, some of the tough guy Green Lanterns decide to get Sinestro's daughter Soranik Natu to help them storm the Guardians' citadel and slot Sinestro. Her boyfriend, Kyle Rayner, decides to stop them by beating them all up, and she and him fight each other for a little bit before the Guardians call a big meeting in which they tell the various Lanterns to stop being a bunch of jerks and go back to work. Kyle is sent back to Earth, but before he goes, he an da few others haul Mogo's remains off and throw them into the sun that orbits Oa.

GLC #61, by Bedard and the art team of Daniel HDR and Keith Champagne: This reads a bit like a fill-in issue, although it was obviously written after the events of "War" were decided. It's a stand-alone story in which one of the GLs recruited at random by the mind-controlled Mogo (Er, none of this makes any sense at all if you didn't read the comics, does it?), decides she want to keep her ring, and reaches out to John Stewart, who everyone else is shunning, on account of his having killed Mogo. They go on an adventure together, broker piece between a race of capitalist insect people and socialist plant people, and she learns a very valuable lesson. Stewart flies past the remains of Mogo at the climax and looks sad; the remains that were just removed and disposed of in the previous chapter.

GLC #62, by Bedard, HDR and Champagne: This is another stand-alone, done-in-one, featuring Kyle and Soranik. The Star Sapphire Miri hatches a dumb plot in order to bring them back together—she attacks an innocent planet in the hopes that their fighting alongside one another to defeat her will rekindle their love—they manage to work together, but then Kyle blurts out that when he looked into a magic love gem that was supposed to reveal to them the loves of their lives, he lied and told Sora he saw her face in it, when he had actually seen his dead girlfriend Jade (who has since been resurrected). They are totally broken up now!

GLC #63, by writer Scot Kolins, and four different art teams, each of whom draw a different "chapter" of this chapter, focusing on a different character. Robot Alpha Lantern Boodika is having a five-page crisis of faith, two funny-looking Lanterns who are supposed to work as prison guards abandon their post to go visit their even funnier-looking fellow Lantern, who is suffering from PTSD. Kyle Rayner, who was ordered to return to Earth about 100 pages ago, is trying to eat a hamburger in the cafeteria and gets in a big fight with some racist aliens. Then the Guardians are like, "Hey, quit having emotional problems and go back to work everyone!" and they all fly away in a two-page spread. That's the end of GLC, until it was rebooted the following month with a new #1, and the new creative team of Tomasi and Pasarin.

The remainder of the book contains three stand-alone Guy Gardner stories taken from the last three issues of Emerald Warriors: Nothing have much of anything to do with "War," or one another and, in fact, they seem to contradict one another. In the first, Guy is on his way back to Earth for "some R and R" and negotiates extending it after completing his mission before taking it on, but he's there for two more issues. All three read like fill-in issues, and as to why they appear here at all, I imagine it's simply because there was nowhere else to put them. The first Emerald Warriors arc filled a single trade, the next few issues were every third chapter of "War," and that left only three issues to collect...not enough to fill their own trade.

So here's what's left...

Green Lantern: Emerald Warriors #11, by Tomasi and the great Bernard Chang: Guy intervenes to save an interstellar diplomat, is betrayed and loses his ring, but beats up the bad guy in gets his ring back.

GL:EW #12, by Tomasi, Chris Batista and John Dell: A giant space monster is attacking Green Lantern precinct houses and eating Green Lanterns, so the Guardians ask Guy to recruit a bunch of badass Green Lanterns to go kill it. They do. It's a cool monster design, and some of the Green Lanterns were kinda cool; one looks a lot like one of the Dinosaucers.

GL: EW #13, by Tomasi, Ron Frenz, Dell and Marc Deering: This is a Batman team-up, powered by nostalgia for the Giffen/DeMatteis era of Justice League comics. There's a murder on a high-tech space station, and Batman and Guy converge there to solve the mystery. They do.

And that's the end of this book, and of the Pre-New 52 Green Lantern franchise.

Pre-New 52 review: Green Lantern: War of the Green Lanterns

This hefty, 240-page hardcover collects the early 2011 storyline that ran through all three of the DC's Green Lantern titles at the time, and which, in retrospect, ended up being the climax of writer and franchise-runner Geoff Johns' six-year run on the character and concept prior to "The New 52" reboot/relaunch (A few more issues of the secondary Green Lantern titles would be published, and collected in another trade I'll discuss tomorrow, but they were merely exercises in schedule-filling; the "story" ends with a bang here...although Johns would actually keep telling his part of the story after the relaunch, having apparently earned some sort of reboot-proof pass).

Although each successive chapter of the ten-part storyline (plus a prologue!) appears in a different issue of one of the three Green Lantern books—Green Lantern, Green Lantern Corps and Green Lantern: Emerald Warriors—and each chapter's creative team depends on which book it falls in (Geoff Johns and Doug Mahnke, Tony Bedard and Tyler Kirkham and Peter Tomasi and Fernando Pasarin are the three writer/penciler pairings on the three books), it's all one, long story.

I had previously read five of the eleven chapters of this story, as I read Green Lantern but not the other two titles, as it was serially published; I was able to follow it remarkably well like that, thanks, in part, to the fact that each book focused on their primary star or stars up until the end of the storyline, in which all of the heroes unite together. It also helped, I imagine, that the story is so simple.

Provided, of course, you know the basics of modern Green Lantern lore, which Johns has made pretty sure most DC readers were familiar with over the course of spearheading the Blackest Night storyline/event.

Krona, a blue alien who rebelled against his fellow blue alien Guardians of the Galaxy one billion years ago, has been traveling the universe and collecting "The Entities," the god-like avatar/mascots of the seven colored emotions of "The Emotional Spectrum" that each of the variously colored Corps use as their power source. These are all monsters that look vagueley like H.R. Giger-designed Pokemon, with names that sound like refjected '90s X-Men: There's Ion, the green whale thing of willpower; Parallax, the yellow bug-dragon of fear, Ophidian, the orange snake of Avarice, and so on.

Krona sticks six of the seven monsters into the Guardians of the Universe, turning them into his possessed servants, and he sticks Parallax into the Green Lanterns' central power battery on Oa, which gives all of the Green Lantern costumes yellow highlights, and turn them into Krona's slaves.

The only ones spared are the four Earth Green Lanterns—Hal Jordan, Guy Gardner, John Stewart and Kyle Rayner—who are immune to Parallax-infection due to prior exposure. But they can't use their rings, so they choose differently-colored rings from the different Corps, and must take on the remaining 7,196 Green Lanterns, plus Krona and the Entity-possessed Guardians, as Sinestro Corpsman Hal Jordan, Red Lantern Guy Gardner, Indigo Tribesman John Stewart and Blue Lantern Kyle Rayner.

And poor John Stewart has to look like an idiot doing it.

I've made fun of Stewart's appearance in this storyline before; but oh man, it's even worse when you read the whole story.

Putting aside the aesthetic nightmare of his costume, putting aside the fact that the one black guy is the Lantern who has to join the Indigo Tribe, even putting aside the fact that no one uses the pink, love-powered Star Sapphire ring because they don't want to wear the skimpy costumes that comes with it,

the fact remains that he's a compassion-powered superhero who wears an army guy uniform and carries a compassion sniper rifle.

I'm afraid that's one element that is well on the "stupid" side of the awesome/stupid balancing act that is Geoff Johns' Green Lantern comics.

Okay, that probably took too many paragraphs to convince you that it's a very simple story. Let me try again. It boils down to this: Villain attacks Green Lanterns, all of the Green Lanterns fight, our heroes come to their sense and get new costumes and powers, they beat the bad guy. It's got all the complexity of a Power Rangers episode, although there's plenty of nuance and texture for those primed to enjoy it.

Me, I like seeing the new costume designs (even if John Stewarts' hurt my eyes and stomach), the possessed-Guardians designs, and all those colors on every page.

It was also a great pleasure seeing the four human Lanterns working together as a team. Despite the fact that they're all members of GL Corps, we only very, very rarely see the four of them interacting; Green Lantern: Rebirth and "The Sinestro Corps War" being the only examples I can think of. Generally Johns has Hal Jordan working solo, and various pairings of the remaining three show up in GLC.

I missed a few things by reading roughly every third chapter the first time I encountered this story. One was the not-too-subtle image of...well, of this, which Tucker Stone pointed out when it was first released.

Stone was right. There is exactly zero context for that panel. In the panel preceding it, we see Guy Gardner lighting a signal fire in the shape of the Green Lantern symbol with his ring. In the panel after it, we see Guy Gardner in the middle-distance, complaining about the weather and regarding a trio of alien animals that look like koala-headed rhinos with polar bear fur.

The other is a pretty big plot point, I guess: John Stewart kills Mogo.

Mogo is, of course, the Green Lantern who is also a planet created by Watchmen creators Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons for a short, one-off sci-fi twist story entitled "Mogo Doesn't Socialize" in 198-fucking-five. (One of the many, many, many things that makes me want to scream about this whole DC/Moore/Before Watchmen thing is the way the publisher has been continually, constantly exploiting every little bread crumb Moore gifted them with decades ago. Mogo is a joke character, yet at this point he's had more appearances than dozens of characters created to anchor their own books, and even appeared in the last Batman cartoon series).

After Geoff Johns' rejuvenation of the fallow Green Lantern Corps concept, Mogo was given a big role in the new structure, as an entity that is responsible for guiding the semi-sentient Green Lantern rings throughout the universe; sending them along their way to wroth recruits.

In this story, which of course features the required stupid fucking joke about whether or not Mogo socializes, Krona is using Mogo to send rings out like crazy, swelling the ranks of his mind-controlled army. John Stewart, the guy with the compassion powers, decides the only way to stop Krona is to put a compassion-bullet in Oa's planet brain, killing/destroying him, over the objections of Kyle.

This is weird, because...

1). John Stewart once destroyed a whole inhabited planet, in Cosmic Odyssey. How many planets are you allowed to destroy before they kick you out of the Green Lanterns...? (Actually, there probably isn't a limit; Hal destroyed all of existence in Zero Hour, and they let him back in the Corps).

2.) It quite obviously wasn't the only way to stop Mogo and Krona, since Krona was mind-controlling Mogo and, a few pages later, Hal and Guy are able to break Krona's mental control over all of the Lanterns. Of course, by that point, Mogo was already dead.

3.) I hate when superheroes find themselves in these "I have to do something shitty for the greater good" stories, because a good superhero should be able to find the third of two options—seeing only two options is a pretty limited way of looking at anything, really—and it's always an artificial reason. Stewart was only faced with that decision because the writers wanted to put him in that situation, and he couldn't come up with a non-dumb solution because either the writers couldn't come up with a non-dumb solution themselves, or because they wanted him to kill Mogo in order to follow up in a later storyline.

Anyway, Ugh.

That aside, it's a pretty good read, and the three writers' voices all mesh very well. The artwork could be more consistent in style—there are large gaps between the styles of Mahnke, Kirkham and Pasarin, plus that of prologue artist Ed Benes—but each of them do a pretty decent job (Mahnke's chapters are by far the prettiest looking, though).

At the conclusion, there are a few pretty big cliffhangers, including Hal Jordan being kicked off the team for killing Krona and Sinestro becoming a Green Lantern, which I know Johns has followed up on in the re-booted Green Lantern, and that made me somewhat curious about the other Green Lantern titles in the post-reboot DCU (Is Mogo still dead? Is everyone still pissed at John Stewart for totally killing him?)

And as with what Johns was doing in Brightest Day, it was clear that he was continuing to build towards future stories, rather than wrapping up the old DCU in order to make a brand-new one (this seems to be wear talk of a post-Green Lantern, "Third Army" to serve the Guardians first comes up).

One thing haunts me, though. At one point, Krona decides that since the Guardians of the Universe suck so bad at their jobs, because they try to run the universe without opening themselves to any emotions, he should make the four emotion-feeling Earth-born GLs the new Guardians, and he even captures Hal and Guy, dresses them in Guardian red robes and covers them with "ancient evolving bandages" that apparently turns people into giant-headed, tiny-bodied Guardians.

It really sucks that Mahnke didn't get to draw Hal, Guy, John and Kyle with giant, wized heads and tiny little floating bodies in robes. For a cover, if for nothing else.

Oh well, maybe I'll win the lottery and can commission Mahnke to draw that for me someday...

Anyway! This is a pretty good Green Lantern story arc, and I for one would like to see all four Green Lanterns get together more often than every few years.

Come back tomorrow night, when I'll waste a chunk of my Fourth of July holiday discussing War of the Green Lanterns: Aftermath, which is so horrible it makes War of the Green Lanterns seem like the complete works of Shakespeare, as illustrated by Michelangelo, on the ceiling of the Vatican.

Pre-New 52 review: Green Lantern Corps: Revolt of the Alpha-Lanterns

The title story in this collection is pulled from Green Lantern Corps #48-52, and it seems to be a companion story to the first story arc from the short-lived tertiary Green Lantern title, Green Lantern: Emerald Warriors (reviewed here).

As was the case in that storyline, a group of Green Lanterns are thrown into conflict with a major villain from their past, and, as the story reaches its climax, we find that the villain was being manipulated by the villain from the "War of the Green Lanterns" crossover story. So "Revolt of the Alpha-Lanterns," like Emerald Warriors, is something of a prelude to "War of the Green Lanterns," or simply an exercise in killing time until that storyline could arrive to commandeer the scheduling of all three books, depending on how generous you want to be.

The villain here is The Cyborg-Superman, who has become a sort of de facto Green Lantern villain due to the events of "The Reign of the Supermen" story, in which he and Mongul destroyed Green Lantern Hal Jordan's hometown of Coast City, driving Hal bonkers. (Geoff Johns made use of the Cyborg-Superman in his "Sinestro Corps War" story.)

His plan is a little loopy. He has the power to control all machinery, and he's used it to usurp the programming on the Alpha-Lanterns—which, if you don't read Green Lantern, are a group of Green Lanterns that the Guardians turned into robot super-Lanterns and tasked with serving as Green Lantern Corps Internal Affairs; that is, they're the police who police the space police. Holding them mind-controlled hostage, he wants to force a Guardian (Ganthet who, at this point, has demoted himself to a regular old Green Lantern) to turn them back into organic beings and, once he's demonstrated he can do this, he can turn the Cyborg-Superman back into a normal human being. And then he can commit suicide, as all he wants to do is die, but his existence as a sort of electronic ghost that possesses robots and stuff prevents it.

Green Lanterns Kyle Rayner and John Stewart, plus Ganthet and Sora and The Big Rock Guy, must brave a planet full of robots and Alpha-Lanterns all controlled by the Cyborg-Superman in order to save the day.

While the Cyborg-Superman is essentially the star of the storyline, some attention is given to Alpha-Lantern Boodika, who goes through something a transformation in the story, proving that even though she now looks like a robot, she's still the same person underneath it all (Following this story, the trade includes GLC #21-22, a Boodika-focused fill-in story by writer Sterling Gates and artists Nelson, Derek Fridolfs and Rob Hunter; it's awfully generic, although Boodika fans who want to know more about her life before she was a robot might find it of greater interst than I).

The artwork is from pencil artist Ardian Syaf and inker Vicente Cifuenetes, and while it's passable, it's also probably the worst I've seen on this title, which was previously drawn by the great Patrick Gleason and would later be drawn by Tyler Kirkham. Kirkham's art is, like Syaf's, rather rough, even ragged around the edges, but Kirkham's compensates with a lot of movement and energy.

Syaf's looks, at first glance, as overly futzed-with Dan Jurgens art (that is, with Jurgens-like layouts and figure works, but a lot of not-always-necessary lines in them), and the settings seem like fairly generic sci-fi ones. Backgrounds tend to disappear for long stretches, and the anatomy can be...lacking:

This probably isn't his fault, but he does draw John Stewart with a ring-generated army guy costume and rifle in several panels, so that John Stewart looks like an idiot:


I know there's a "story" reason for why Stewart makes rifles out of his ring energy (because he was retconned to be a marine sniper, and holding a sniper gun apparently helps him concentrate), but is the cosplay really necessary? The ring does generate a forcefield, and will automatically protect him from harm, so I'm not sure what the glowing green army helmet does, beyond make him look silly (And maybe it calms his nerves in-story, but I don't know, it's not very heroic; that would be like me using a power ring to generate a glowing green version of the blanky I used to carry around as a toddler whenever I had to infiltrate an enemy robot stronghold).

The robot centaur I spotted on a cover for an upcoming issue appears in this.

That's pretty cool, that this guy a) exists and b) is an Alpha-Lantern, as it means at some point in the past there was a Green Lantern centaur, and that the Guardians took their Green Lantern centaur and turned him into a Green Lantern robot centaur.

Finally, props to the art team for their depiction of blood-vomitting Red Lantern Atrocitus:

I like the way they draws his blood-vomit as something of an aura or face halo; instead of simply running down his face like drool and occasionally being fired at foes like a projectile, it hangs around his face like a cloud.

But my single favorite image in this collection is definitely the variant cover by Patrick Gleason, which shows Ganthet forging his own Green Lantern ring and lantern:

The scene in the story is kind of cool in the awesome/stupid way that the Geoff Johns era of Green Latern comics is, as there are apparently willpower mines on Oa (?), and the willpower ore is, like, smelted, and then poured into a mold, and then the Guardian has to recite the oath so hard that he sweats and leads blood out of his face (?!).

I mainly just love how huge Gleason draws Ganthet's head though, and how spindly—but still muscular—his bare arms are.

While reading, I discovered that this storyline explains where The Weaponer from the later story arc (reviewed here) got his magic white light net (the explanation is dumb, but at least it's an explanation), and also how the Cyborg-Superman got inside an Alpha-Lantern in order to appear in that "Return of Doomsday" storyline (reviewed here).

Say...

...shouldn't this be a candidate for collection, perhaps in a a couple volumes of those DC Comics Presents 100-pagers, if not a fancy-schmancy trade collection? It's only 18 issues long. I never read it, but it's my understanding that it is fondly remembered by lots of smart people with decent taste in comic books. And pretty much everything Green Lantern of even modest quality seems like it's being collected nowadays, right?

I'd probably get a trade if they made one. I'd definitely get DC Comics Presents: Green Lantern: Mosaic, even if it did have too many colons for comfort in the title.

Why's the black man have to wear the ugliest costume?

Okay, I'm sure there's a perfectly logical in-story reason for why each of the four Green Lanterns above gets what colored ring, and I'm sure race had nothing to do with it, but man, Indigo Lantern John Stewart's get-up is certainly grotesque compared to his fellow Lanterns' new costumes.Purple on purple glowing camo? Uggh. I can barely stand to look at him.

The others look like they basically have costumes that blend their regular Green Lantern costumes with those of the other Lantern Corps, but instead of putting Stewart in a purple version of his costume or an Indigo Tribe costume (which, as generic space native clothing, perhaps might have been decided against to avoid the appearance of a racist or at least stereotypical choice of who wears what), they put him in a costume that recalls his retconned career as a Marine sniper (Of course, Hal Jordan's not wearing a yellow bomber jacket, Guy's not wearing a red football uniform and Kyle's not wearing a blue Nine Inch Nails t shirt).

I'm not a fan of the Stewart-as-Marine portrayal, although I understand it's in keeping with the version of the character that appeared on the Justice League cartoon and is now the predominant one. I guess I've just read too many Batman comics over the years, but guns reveal a lack of imagination to me (plus, they're a coward's weapon, as Batman always says), particularly when they're ring-generated guns made out of space-alien wish-power capable of creating anything at all. Giving artists a reason to give him that costume seen above is another strike against it.

Anyway—John Stewart, what are you wearing, man? I think you might even look better in Carol Ferris' Star Sapphire costume than all-purple camo.

JOHN STEWART

can eat ice cream without even using his hands.

The Justice League is a suprisingly touchy-feely organization

In Tom Peyer and Freddie Williams II's The Flash #239, the Justice League discuss whether or not they should talk to the Flash about the problems he's currently having with the media:


To drive his last point home, Green Lantern John Stewart lays his hand on Roy "Red Arrow" Harper's chest.

I may just be extremely non-physical, but I don't think I've ever laid my hand on another man's chest during a conversation before. Nor has a man ever laid his hand on my chest during a conversation before. And I'm 100% positive that's never occurred in my life with a co-worker, which is essentially what Stewart and Harper are.

And unlike Superman and Batman (or Iron Man and Captain America), who have been working together for decades (and fighting to keep their deep love for one another to themselves), Stewart and Harper have only been working together for, like, 20 minutes (Harper just joined the JLA for the first time during "The Tornado's Path," and Stewart wasn't on the League then; he just rejoined it during the JLoA Wedding Special).

Fatherly hand on the shoulder? Okay, that's one thing. But open palm on the chest? Hmm, I don't know.

Even cooler than the bizarre demonstration of physical intimacy between these guys who are having, like, their fifth conversation ever is the the expression Williams gives Stewart. Behold the bedroom eyes of John Stewart: