Green Lantern never really rated on my super hero radar.
There is something about all those colour themed DC superheroes that never really did it for me: Green Arrow, Red Arrow, Red Tornado, Blue Devil, Blue Beetle etc.
I suppose, looking back on things, the other problem was that I never really ‘got’ any of the Green Lanterns. Who are they and why do they do what they do? As near as I could tell none of them had enough of a reason for being to make them jump off the page.
Not that I had anything against Green Lantern, I just had no reason to pick the book up. Until the Sinestro Corps War that is. I guess like a lot of other people this gave me the high concept hook necessary to make the book worth checking out. So I went back to the beginning of the current Green Lantern reboot to have a look, beginning with Green Lantern: Rebirth.
In a nutshell, the Silver Age Green Lantern Hal Jordan had been dead for a number of years (although his spirit was still running around, fused to a supernatural being called the Spectre) after going crazy, calling himself Parralax and destroying the Green Lantern Corps. As inevitably happens in comics, it was eventually reasoned that the old status quo still had some life in it, so the central conceit of Rebirth is to bring Hal Jordan back to life, expunge responsibility for his murderous rampage, rebuild the Green Lantern Corps and if there is time, give Hal Jordan an actual personality.
Given that Rebirth is meant to get us from A to B we perhaps should not expect a great comic but Rebirth does all of its tasks reasonably well. The explanation of Hal’s Parralax episode is almost plausible in a comic bookey way, but it is by no means a seamless retcon. We get told that the whole Parralax episode was engineered by Sinestro which sounded pretty shoehorned to me. And for the life of me I still can’t work out how Hal came back to life.
Most of this stuff is forgivable because we know that by definition comic retcons have to be shoehorned but it can’t help on occasion pulling me out of the story.
The bigger problem I find is with Geoff John’s writing. I like Johns. He comes up with decent plots but his stories always just seem to be a indistinct sequence of fight scenes. Yes, they are comic books and fight scenes are par for the course, but there is nothing particularly imaginative about how these fights resolve themselves. Not only is this the case in Rebirth, but also what happens in his Brainiac arc, Legion of Three Worlds, Rage of the Red Lanterns and Sinestro War. I give Sinestro War extra marks because at least the Guardians have to remove the kill injunction on the rings to enable the Green Lantern Corps to fight back against the Sinestro Corps.
The weakest element, however, remains Hal Jordan. I still don’t really know or particularly care who he is. Yes, he is fearless, and doesn’t follow the rules but this is still barely a two-dimensional character.
All this being said, I still enjoyed Rebirth. There are worse things that can be said about a comic than it was action packed and the art of Ethan Van Sciver undoubtedly made those scenes more effective. So I’ve hung around and will until the end of Blackest Night, but whether I stick around after that will depend on whether Johns can resolve the event cleverly (as opposed to Hal just blasting away with the ring) and whether the contours of Hal’s character become better defined.
