Posted in: Comics, DC Comics | Tagged: dc comics, green lantern, jonathan hickman

When Green Lantern Looks Like A Jonathan Hickman Comic (Spoilers)

Tomorrow sees the publication of Green Lantern #2 by Jeremy Adams, Phillip Kennedy Johnson, Xermanico and Montos. With familiar insides.

Tomorrow sees the publication of Green Lantern #2 by Jeremy Adams, Phillip Kennedy Johnson, Xermanico and Montos. With this front cover.

And along the way, this United Planets Memorandum, which explains what's been going on. Just before they put it all on pause for three months, anyway.

With all the data, and redacted section, it rather looks like Green Lantern is taking some notes from Jonathan Hickman over on the X-books right now.

Jonathan Hickman has used data pages, symbols and other means of communicating information outside of the standard comic book graphics from The Nightly News on, including the combinations in Pax Romana, the deity distinction in God Is Dead and then The Black Monday Murders which saw Hickman use such data pages to lay out the way the mystical capitalist systems break down. He has doen similar with The Avengers as the universes crashed into each other, his 3W3M Substack worldbuilding and the upcoming Ultimate Invasion too.

But the most famous use is in House Of X and Powers Of X which was then adopted by the rest of the Xbooks and continue to this day. Sometimes serious, sometimes trivial and sometimes silly, they add to rich tapestry of Krakoa and everything that hangs off it.

Hickman stated "The reason why I like it is because it changes the way you read the book, just in terms of how long it takes you to read a page. Even if it's a super wordy page or a dense book, there's a certain amount of time you allocate to each page, and you know how long it'll take to read an average comic. When you start interlacing that stuff with things that take longer to read or things you digest in a different matter from a standard comic page, if you change the mechanics of the way people read the books, you're exerting more finite control on their experience reading a comic. That's super important because people consume so much pop culture nowadays. It's not like it was when I was a kid, where'd you save up your money to buy comics, or spend a whole week waiting for the next episode of Knight Rider. All of that's changed. Everything is hyper-compressed and super dense. In adjusting to that, because we need to maintain a certain velocity in the comic industry, we've become more homogenized in the product that we're producing. So what you have is a book that's 20 pages, and it's produced in the same manner, so you get the same type of cadences throughout the book. You're teaching people 'this is how you read in time, this is how a comic book functions.' Any time you can disrupt the mechanism by which people read the books by engaging a different part of their brains, they have to work harder and it makes the reading experience more effective just by being different. If you can also make it really good and engaging, you're winning not just the battle but the war of, 'Are our books cool?' That's my thinking behind it. It allows me to cheat narratively. I can do a more cinematic book if I'm not robbing the reader of information in the interim pages. I don't want somebody to spend $4 and be done with the book in five minutes."

It also adds pages without the costs of paying artists, so the page count can be longer as well… and after all, Hickman did take a chunk of this from DC Comcis in the first place, telling ComicsXF that's "how the Five Years Later, [Kieth] Giffen-[Tom & Mary] Bierbaum Legion book kind of worked. It had the Omnicom data pages in the back, and I think I remember prose pages in the middle of issue #7 (just checked, yep) when Mordru and Rokk are having dinner, and they were used as a way to change the pace. People talk about the density of that book in relation to the nine-panel grid, which is true — that's a good way to pack a lot in each issue — but the narrative velocity of that thing was carried by the 'data pages.'"

GREEN LANTERN #2
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(W) Jeremy Adams – Phillip Kennedy Johnson (A) Xermanico – Montos (CA) Xermanico
Hal Jordan's homecoming is off to a rocky start! Carol Ferris is this close to firing him from the job he's only just begged his way into, his power ring isn't exactly working right, and off in the shadows, Sinestro, the architect of Hal's current crisis, is waiting for the perfect moment to strike. Plus, the hard-hitting John Stewart: War Journal backup series from writer Phillip Kennedy Johnson and artist Montos heats up as the Guardian John Stewart and his team, the Watchtower, fall under siege from a mysterious new threat!In Shops: Jun 13, 2023 SRP: $4.99

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