If you walked out of your comic shop with “Green Lantern” #21 in hand, because you forgot to stop pulling it before the end of Geoff Johns’ run, you might want to hold off for a couple months. Robert Venditti does a couple of things to earn your attention here.
Written by Robert Venditti
Illustrated by Billy TanHal Jordan becomes the leader of the most feared and hated group in the universe: The Green Lantern Corps! New faces, new threats and a new beginning for the GREEN LANTERN monthlies!
Over the past decade, Johns has basically defined Hal Jordan as a character, beefed up his rogues gallery (most notably his greatest rival, Sinestro), and added a literal cornucopia of fiction to the “Green Lantern” brand. Venditti would probably forgive you for pointing to the giant shadow he’s standing in right now, but he’s also going to steer you away a little bit from what Johns was doing for a while. For better or worse, Johns reset the table for this very reason. Venditti has nearly nothing to tie up and can take the world in a new direction.
Though there were plenty of character bits, especially early in his run, Johns’ “Green Lantern” eventually became almost expressly about the redemption of Hal Jordan the “Green Lantern”, rather than Hall Jordan the person. Venditti basically begins with Hal Jordan having reached the peak of his duty to the corps. It will be interesting to see whether he develops Hal as a leader, but it’s quite clear that Venditti means to address the dangling romantic turmoil that has forever embodied the Hal Jordan/Carol Ferris relationship. Consequently, the cyclical nature of comics causes the Hal-Carol scenes to feel like well-tread ground. There are no revelations about who “Highball” Hal Jordan is or just how much the opposite he is from being “husband material.” One supposes that Venditti must start at the bottom to build Hal the Lover up again, but these scenes feel a bit like “Hal Jordan for Dummies” for longtime readers.
Thankfully, duty calls and we’re back to Oa, where the heroes are digging through the rubble and trying to rebuild a corps that has suffered far too many casualties. The space opera that is the “Green Lantern” franchise has always benefitted from interludes in between massive conflicts. “Green Lantern Corps” at its best took an issue to breathe once in a while, giving us insight into the day-to-days around Oa. Venditti begins setting the table for how the corps will heal itself over the course of his run. There are messes to clean up and a re-organization of the Corps is needed. New recruits will be necessary. Killowog stands front and center, entertaining as always as Hal proceeds to confound him almost immediately. We even get to hang with Kyle and Hal in the same room for a bit – a luxury that had been afforded to readers too infrequently, despite all of the massive crossovers that were going on.
Billy Tan capably handles the art, actually maintaining more continuity with the look of Aaron Kuder’s “Green Lantern: New Guardians” rather than the tone set by Doug Mahnke for all those years of the Johns run. If Venditti’s run is going to make the Corps more of a character that happens to have Hal Jordan at the center of it, rather than the lone rogue that Hal has been acting as for a while, then Tan looks to be a good fit. Mahnke’s specialties were the subtle emotions and visual character amid sprawling space battles. If the first issue is any indication, Tan will be juggling many disparate characters and settings and his terrific design work is already proving to be an asset in that way. Tan’s abilities in getting emotion across and selling some of the more serious dialogue moments isn’t as subtle or as strong as the bar set by Mahnke. Again, the Hal-Carol scenes just come off awkwardly in all aspects. The Oa scenes are handled with a spectacle and variety that is the very stuff that Green Lantern stories are made of. Readers will want more of that next issue, certainly.
With mostly positive results, Venditti and Tan have crafted a first issue that acts as an “Idiots Guide to Green Lantern.” They don’t take a whole lot of chances, but do promise you that their run will not try to walk in the same steps that Johns did – with the possible exception of a preview page for the upcoming year of “Green Lantern”, which was hardly exclusive to Johns, but just the type of thing he relished doing. This creative team may not take Hal Jordan and run him through the ultimate ringer like Geoff Johns did, but they’ve done enough here to warrant a probationary period.
Final Verdict: 7.0 – It’s weird to see a different name in the “writer” column, but give it at least a one issue buy-n-try.
