by: Peter J. Tomasi (story), Patrick Gleason (art), Rebecca Buchman, Tom Nguyen, Keith Champagne & Mark Irwin (inkers)
The Story: Goodbye Darkness: The title says it all. This is the denouement of Blackest Night, the replanting of the trees in the Shire after the fall of Sauron. A lot of friends got hurt. A lot of friends are gone. Old relationships of trust were broken and new ones were made. Blackest Night was the near death experience for the Corps and this issue is about survivors.
What’s Good: If you’ve been following the Green Lantern corner of the DCU for a while, you care a lot about Guy, Kyle, Kilowog, Arisia, Salaak, and all the other heroes that filled the ranks of the Corps. After Blackest Night, I think the readers need a bit of a breather too – a time to miss characters lost. Tomasi takes that feeling, the need for a rest, the exhausted satisfaction at the end of a marathon, and he puts it into a book. He packs the emotional power of that near death experience with overt mourning (a mass funeral, picking up broken mementos) and the denial and stress and emotions of hidden mourning (changing jobs, living for today). And although I can’t say much about an interesting theme that Tomasi threads through this book without spoiling, at times I saw the Corps as a metaphor for the military and at times as a metaphor for the Catholic priesthood. Pretty cool stuff. Tomasi has written a great issue to give us the moment we need to catch our breath before we plunge headlong into Brightest Day.
Gleason and his entourage of inkers bring Oa to life as they bring the Corps back to life. The scenes of destruction as well as the scenes of renewal leap out of panoramic landscapes with depth and texture (check out the rings flying out of Mogo). Gleason and his team also excel at the lurid, dark scenes, like the visit to the Guardians, and in the expert penciling of aliens like Salaak and Kilowog. Their ridged, wrinkled skin is brilliant.
What’s Not So Good: While the art team delivered some great scenes and aliens, the faces and the expressions of regular folk (humans and humanoids) never came together for me. In a book about recovering from a near-death experience, you need to get the faces right. Vath’s face and hands, when he woke up from surgery, looked plastic and artificial. The proportions and angles on Arisia’s face and body never seemed to match and even Kyle’s face, during his passionate argument (about passion – lol) seemed wooden. This brought down some of the issue for me.
Conclusion: If you followed Blackest Night and the GLC and you need closure, you’ll enjoy this.
Grade: C
-DS Arsenault
Filed under: DC Comics, Other Tagged: | Alpha Lanterns, Blackest Night, Brightest Day, Comic Book Reviews, comic books, comic reviews, Comics, DC Comics, DS Arsenault, GLC #47, GLC #47 review, Green Lantern, Green Lantern Corps, Green Lantern Corps #47, Green Lantern Corps #47 review, Guy Gardner, Keith Champagne, Kilowog, Kyle Rayner, Mark Irwin, Patrick Gleason, Peter J. Tomasi, Rebecca Buchman, Reviews, Salaak, Tom Nguyen, WCBR, Weekly Comic Book Review, weeklycomicbookreview.com
