By: Too many to list—check out the review.
The Story: Dim the Lanterns, folks; it’s closing time.
The Review: All good things must come to an end, and nowhere does that cliché have more truth than in fiction. With comics, where writers infrequently last on a title for longer than a year or so at a time, for one to carry a title over nine years is an impressive feat. But Geoff Johns really did more than that; he revitalized a long-stagnant franchise which in turn shocked the entire DCU back into wakefulness, the first step on its long road to being competitive once more.
So it’s entirely appropriate for DC to honor Johns by giving him as much space as he needs for his final issue on the series which made his name. And it’s entirely appropriate for Johns to use that space to play with every single character and concept he’s ever revived or created during the series’ run. As you can imagine, it gets pretty insane, what with every single colored corps leaping into the fray, along with—spoiler alert—a league of Black Lanterns, a Parallax-possessed Sinestro, and a newly freed Nekron.
With all this craziness as an end product, Volthoom justifies his existence somewhat, although he remains, as he ever was, a truly flat sort of villain. Delusions of godhood are a very weak kind of motivation, and couple that with a complete absence of anything resembling a backstory prior to his becoming the First Lantern, and Volthoom is just an object of power in Johns’ story. He represents much of what this arc has been, what much of Johns’ entire Green Lantern run has been: an amazing amount of spectacle, with little true depth within.
It seems Johns had too many ideas for how this story should end, and he attempted to execute them all at once. But even with an oversized issue, the pace is frantic and confused, with entire scenes feeling like they were simply mushed into the plot. The glaring example is—spoiler alert—Volthoom summoning Hal Jordan as a child and finding in him “an echo of the very first spark of existence. The light of creation!” Somehow this leads to a brief, almost emotionless encounter between Hal and his dad in the Dead Zone, and a strange, metaphysical moment where Hal takes the place of his dad to embrace his younger self. It should be touching—it’s clearly intended to be, at any rate—but it just comes across as pointless and bizarre.
Once you scrub the story of its relentless action and space melodrama, you’re left with a comparatively small bit of true meaning. You won’t find it in Hal’s character arc; from the beginning, Johns’ adoration for the iconic Lantern guaranteed his inevitable triumph in every conflict without having to sacrifice or change much of anything about himself. He won simply because he dared to try.
No, if there’s any real complexity to be found in this years-long epic, it’s in the relationship between Hal and Sinestro, which has only grown more compelling and nuanced with every passing year. Even here, where it seems they’ve reached a hopeless impasse in their values, when Hal asks if they were every truly friends, Sinestro doesn’t hesitate to answer: “That’s the tragedy of all of this, Jordan. Hal. We’ll always be friends.” For Johns, this is about as complicated and deep as it gets, but it’s a sobering, open-ended moment nonetheless, one that nearly in itself sells everything he’s written before on this series.
Obviously, after working on a single property for so long, it’s natural to feel a sense of ownership over it. But the fact is that even after Johns departs, this title will continue on. There’ll be another issue next month, with a new writer on deck, and the Green Lantern stories will continue and hopefully burn even brighter than before. So I have to disapprove of Johns’ attempt to hijack the series’ future by delivering his conceived endings for all the characters. Hal and Carol’s happy ending is well deserved and one Johns may have earned a right to propose, but to outright tell us what will happen to Guy Gardner, John Stewart, Kyle Rayner, and Simon Baz—characters he tended to neglect or marginalize during his run—is a little presumptuous, wouldn’t you say?
It’s astonishing that Doug Mahnke was able to draw nearly all fifty-something pages of this issue without perishing. It’s true that there are a number of panels that look noticeably rushed and consequently slipshod, as if the faces were in the beginning stages of melting, but that may have something to do with the six different people inking the issue. Otherwise, Mahke gives the whole thing as much energy and dynamism as he has done loyally for this series ever since he started, and surely nothing could be better than Alex Sinclair and Tony Avina coloring Green Lantern. Uneven as Johns’ writing could be on even this, his favorite project, Mahnke, Sinclair, and Avina have been nothing less than rock-solid all along.
Conclusion: Truth be told, the arc in itself is a disappointing thing and you might have imagined a tighter, more coherent end to Johns’ Green Lantern run than this. But the issue still delivers a ton of action, emotional sincerity, and pure enthusiasm, as much or more than when Johns started this run years ago, and for that, he deserves a great deal of credit.
Grade: B
– Minhquan Nguyen
Some Musings: – I do approve of the extermination of the original Guardians with the Templar Guardians to take their place. It seems like their regime will be a wiser, kinder one. I also approve of Ganthet’s survival; the pony-tailed midget deserves a happy ending after all the crap he’s gone through over the years.
Grade
Conclusion