4 out of 5

Ah, Mr. Morrison is back in full force.  This is glorious, Grant-celebrates-and-revamps-a-character stuff, minus the kind of forceful “this is different, ain’t it?” bits that made parts of his Superman and Batman hard to read without seeing the whole picture first.  ‘The Green Lantern’ – Grant’s ‘space cop’ revitalization of Hal Jordan – is certainly littered with callbacks to GL history of past and present, but it’s also very much its own thing, with the only prerequisite, really, being that you like comics.

Interestingly (to me…), I am currently catching up on League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and while sifting through the available analyses / reviews for those volumes, there’s an inevitable ‘Alan Moore vs. Grant Morrison’ debate / conversation that pops up, and while that’s a can o’ worms that’s been dented and torn open and scattered in a million other places – meaning I shan’t go into it here for now – I do find a very general difference to be: Alan disdains ‘regular’ comics; Grant embraces them.  They both love the format, undoubtedly, and the history, but Grant’s efforts to wrap his all-is-connected myth-influences-reality views into the decades of whichever character he’s writing’s lore comes across as celebratory, while also promoting an inspired need to continue moving forward.  Alan, in his ABC Comics genre workouts (Tom Strong; Top Ten) and in the expanding world of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, often seems to treat his nods to history and references as background; the stories take place on top of these things instead of directly because of them.  And that’s not better, or worse; it’s different.  Personally, though, this makes rereading Moore something to be done after you’ve forgotten some of the bits and pieces and can re-experience it somewhat fresh, whereas with Grant’s stuff in this vein, it’s generally a blast to read, and can be picked up again pretty immediately.

There are other contrasts and compares to be made, but coming back around to The Green Lantern: Morrison has re-found his footing and joy-of-writing (post what I consider some floundering after 52 that made me slower to pick up a book just ’cause his name was on it) to deliver something sincerely on par with his JLA work: so many ideas – so many BIG ideas – told with a confidence and bravura that just sells it, but then given this kind of grounding buddy-buddy personality via Hal’s straight-forward stubbly charm and his tuff cop banter with his fellow GLs, or back-and-forth with that issue’s foe.

Some super creepo Controller (I’m not a Lantern-follower, but there’s history there for those in the know or those interested; the book works whether you have the background or not) is constructing a super creepo weapon; Hal is tasked with stopping that from happening.  There’s some twisty-turns on the way to making that happen, but Grant writes it so that it doesn’t center around that, and delivers the ‘twists’ in a pretty punchy style that suggests he wasn’t imagining we’d been caught out at all; rather, the fun is in the boldness of the delivery and the runaround style in which Grant likes to construct his stories.  We pause ‘mid season’ with a wonderfully Morrison-y conundrum, and while a lot of the hijinks in these six issues prevents Jordan from getting a personality much beyond Super Cop, Grant gives the Corps and Oa more sense of ‘life’ than I’ve felt from most randomly sampled GL books, totally selling me on the character and having me thirsting for the remainder of this run.

The art… is interesting.  I’m confused by Liam Sharp, as I have been ever since I first really noticed him on Testament.  His fine-lined, detailed style looks, at various points, like Gary Frank – his very humanistic expressions, and mannerisms – like Frank Quitely, like Doug Mahnke, and even like Carlos Ezquerra, when things get heavy and the action heats up – but there’s this insane oddity where every few panels the art suddenly seems sloppier, and blurry.  I have no idea what this is, and I don’t see it remarked on in reviews, but it looks like panels are digitally zoomed in on after the fact, like they’re drawn at a different size and then blown up to adjust to the page flow or something.  And sometimes this effect seems to occur in layers as well, like just the background.  I’m almost absolutely misdiagnosing this, but it causes such a disconnect to me when I’m reading, and really upsets page flow when it’s egregious.  His art – when properly ‘sized’ – is otherwise great, if not really definitive in the way those other referenced artists are, and he captures a lot of great background characters / events throughout this half-arc.  (Although some of Grant’s dialogue cues feel under-represented in rare moments.)

90% of the time, the negatives I’ve mentioned are of little consequence, with that 10% buoyed by the incredible fun of the title and the inspired cliffhangers taking us from issue to issue.