2 out of 5

Tom Taylor why hath thou forsaken meeee

(Continuity editors – quickly, haven’t I opened a review with that same phrasing regarding something / someone else?  Get back ro me ASAP, please.)

(HR – do we have any continuity editors on staff?  I haven’t heard back yet, and I’m pretty sure in the digital world I’m supposed to get instant feedback so, like, do something about that, like hire or fire as you deem fit, pay raises delayed until next year, etc.  Also: Boobs.  Amirite?)

(Self – I’m thinking you have no staff.  This presupposes some type of business model, which presupposes a business, in which case I think you need to reassess what it is you think you’re doing here.  But this also means these demands fall onto you to fulfill, as would the punishments in lieu of their unfulfillment.  Unsure how you want to handle that, but suicide is always, like, safe.)

(No.  – Cont. Editor Boberick)

After declaring Mr. Taylor the new god of comics, low and behold should a Green Lantern mini-series happen upon the new trades list.  Well, fuck.  I haven’t read Tom’s Injustice work yet, but part of the reason I was standing behind him is that he’d shown me he could handle heroes with aplomb – Superman/Batman, Wolverine – and the guys who can do that without sinking into what I would call a “house” style of a Geoff Johns or Bendis are rare.  Morrison rare.  The tier inbetween features your Waids and Ruckas who can knock out solid arcs, but inevitably get swallowed up by editorial.  But Tom was showing a knack for a niche, working characters fully to hid own design while working with continuity.

But GL books are a mother fucker.  If you’re not a fan of Johns’ style operatics, I’d argue that solid runs are few and far between.  GL is like a lot of the DC mainstays in that sense – Supes, Flash – where the difficulty lies in making someone with always-on powers have an ongoing storyline life.  Lantern, though, has the extra wrinkle of being all intergalactic.  Superman is, at the very least, embroiled with Earth generally, but the Corps is bred for cosmic tales.  Great powers great responsibilities, yadda yadda.  Space operas can be super cool, but you’ve got the power ring thing defeating the grounding aspect of a spaceship and crew.  So, thus far, unless someone happens into a chance to isolate things somewhat, you’ve got a huge problem of scope with GL, and we’re too far into this game to start building from the ground up.

This is the burden Taylor must heave, and I don’t envy it.  So, sure, I’m taking some of the blame off his shoulders.  Furthermore, given that this was a lead-in to the resetting Rebirth, Tom needed a way to escalate the conflict while leading us to an ending where everything could reset.  Somewhat self-defeating, yes?

Still, though I’m not claiming to know the How, I’m sure there are ways to solve that puzzle more effectively than this arc.  So it’s not a complete pass.

Whatever came before, the Corp finds themselves stuck in a dying universe.  The hitch – which could’ve used some more exploration, though perhaps that was handled in a different series – is that the universe exists in the past, and has to die for the Corps’ real home to exist.  The goal, then, is to find a way to get there before the dying occurs, and of course we get a ticking clock of a few days.

This is plenty good fodder, and the first few pages of the book – though hurriedly shuffling through characterizations of our primary GLs Guy, John, and Kilowog – set up a nice, snappy “get home” mission statement that’s in line with Tom’s other writings I’ve read.  But this plan is delayed by an approaching planet, which turns out to be the condensed home of a protected peoples and their giant guardians Dismas and Ausras.  The GLs then begin to argue over whether or not to help this planet, and thereafter the comic devolves into plot- and logic-holed stupidity.  Why was this escalation necessary?  Maybe there were pre-existing plotlines to resolve.  Maybe there were future plotlines to hint at.  In both cases, the answer is: Rebirth.  That’s the only reason.

The argument – is it worth the effort to save a planet that was already dying? – feels pointless, because the stakes aren’t clear.  The big bad that’s revealed has zero time to become a big bad, and so feels equally pointless.  The other half of the Corp, cut to once every other issue, has no role except to eventually he rebirthed, so they’re pointless as well.  Taylor’s brief attempts at character exploration via flashbacks are too random to feel of use to the story.  And there’s only the barest sense of “green lanterns might” when the corps applies themselves to some of the planet’s inner-working mysteries; otherwise this is all about positioning them for – yeah – rebirth.  Motherfucking crossovers.  Props to DC for recognizing the need to rejigger things (…again…), but its always at the cost of building any continuity, a la this title.  Sucks that a writer I’m digging got the task of piloting the sinking ship.

Art-wise, it probably doesn’t help that Im not a fan of Sciver.  His overwrought detailing is a very Jim Lee way of doing things, and though his character designs and GL effects are cool, its a mismatch for Taylor’s slightly jovial writing style.  Other artists step in later – Ardian Syaf, Cliff Richards, Jack Herbert – and are a better match, but any sense of consistency is spat on by inkers changing in-issue, mid-sequence.  I won’t claim to have any idea what it takes to schedule / produce these books, so we’ll consider it a necessity, but it’s an unfortunate one, especially when it causes such disparate changes in a book’s look.

Also included in this trade is the after-effect of this mini: Green Lanterns: Rebirth, although it’s oddly uncredited (it’s by Sam Humphries, Geoff Johns, Ed Benes and Sciver) and called a “preview”, so it feels like DC doesn’t want me to care much about it and so I don’t, and it’s not factored into the review.  There’s no direct tie to Oblivion, excepting some crossover characters, and I think it’s only of interest if you were following rebirth in general.

As a last potshot, I realize this is DC’s bottom tier of trade printings, so I’m not expecting much in the way of bonuses (i.e. there are none), but it would be nice if the printing was done with a touch more gutter near the spine so as not to cut off panels / words.  We’ve been doing this printing thing for long enough now for this not to be an issue anymore, but alas…