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Wednesday Comic Reviews: All The Bloody Green Lantern Comics

Published Wed, 25 May 2011 15:38:14 -0500

Last updated Thu, 26 May 2011 12:19:49 -0500

It used to be an observed comics publishing maxim, that you spread the comics you publish through the month. That certain buyers have a fixed amount they spent each week, regardless of what comes in, and that concentrating too much in one week may see them leave books they'd otherwise buy on the shelf, once they'd reached their weekly limit. Or in a light week, experiment with titles from other publishers that they may suddenly prefer to your own.

Then sometime recently, that all changed. It was Marvel probably, they started concentrating all their Avengers titles, all thir X-Men titles, in one week. And they pushed everything else off the shelf. Oh sure, they may have lost some sales as a result, but they lost their competitors more.

And today, DC publish all three Green Lantern titles in one day, three chapters of the same War Of The Lanterns story, told and drawn by different people. And all with the Green Lantern movie logo across the top of the comic.

So what have we got? Green Lantern #66 by Geoff Johns and Doug Mahnke, Green Lantern Corps #60 by Tony Berdard and Leonard Kirkman, and Green Lantern: Emerald Warriors #10 by Pete Tomasi, Fernando Pasarin, Cam Smith, Keith Champagne, Andy Owens, Sean Parsons, JAck Purcell and Jay Leisten (they really are pushing these books out now…)

But it's the colourists who really need to take a bow. Randy Mayor, Rod Reis & Nei Ruffino and Rob Leigh respectively. Because there's lots of colour to go around and most of it is glowing.

Innit pretty?

But there is plot as well. So in Green Lantern, Guy and Hal get taken over by their rings and Sinestro bursts through the fourth wall literally, ripping through pages. But there's a more dangerous future ahead for Guy and Hal, and presumably all of us, as a result. Corps has John Stewart and Kyle Raynor trying to cure Mojo, the Green Lantern sentient planet. And they succeed.,

But despite all this colour, we also get a death in the family. And the battle turns on it. This is a very clever death, not just a shocking one, or one that affects the reader in a way they may not have been expecting. And I don't mean in a "we must seek revenge" way, it actually drives the story forward, affecting and special effecting all around it.

And then both plots dovetail into Corps, crashing into each other rather literally. And in a shower of light.

Just as Hitch Hikers Guide was more about the cadence of language than sci-fi comedy, and Lord Of The Rings was about inventing and using new language rather than a fantasy epic, so I'm starting to realise that these Green Lantern comics are less about character, dialogue or plot, but about colour, how it appears on the page, mixing together in pretty patterns. And that's enough, hell it's more than enough, It's a pretty spectacle, why can't that be an end in itself, rather than a means to one?

Comics courtesy of Orbital Comics in London. Currently hosting a Paul Duffield exhibition, watch for their Slovenian Comix gallery from the 12th of June and a signing by Klaus Janson on the 15th June.

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