Green Lantern (2011 Series) #2

October 17, 2011

Title: Sinestro Part 2

Writer: Geoff Johns
Pencils: Doug Mahnke
Inks: Christian Alamy, Keith Champagne
Colorist: David Baron
Letterer: Sal Cipriano
Cover Artist: Doug Mahnke, Christian Alamy, Nathan Eyring
Editor: Brian Cunningham
Publisher: DC Comics

Thaal Sinestro, the newest member of the Green Lantern Corps, doesn’t want the job. So he’s come to Earth to seek out the man he replaced, Hal Jordan, in the hopes of getting them both what they want: putting a ring back on Jordan’s finger, and getting the green ring off Sinestro’s. Trouble is, Sinestro’s previous Corps isn’t too happy at what they see as his betrayal. The interaction between Hal and Sinestro is really entertaining. Even though they’re ostensibly working towards a common goal, Sinestro still feels the compulsion to exert his dominance over his former foe, even to the point of dishing out a humiliation when he feels like Hal needs it. There’s also a nice amount of tease regarding where this story is going next (specifically, Korugar, Sinestro’s home planet). As much fun as this book is, it really takes off when Hal gets a chance to go into action again. Johns and Mahnke clearly don’t intend to leave him on the sidelines for very long, and that’s all to the good.

Rating: 8/10

Green Lantern: Sinestro Corps Special #1

June 28, 2007

Quick Rating: Excellent
Title: The Second Rebirth

The greatest threat to the Green Lantern Corps rises!

Writer: Geoff Johns
Art: Ethan Van Sciver & Dave Gibbons
Colors: Moose Baumann
Letters: Rob Leigh
Editor: Peter Tomasi
Cover Art: Ethan Van Sciver
Publisher: DC Comics

For months now, a mysterious force has been going throughout the universe, recruiting beings with the ability to create great fear. In this exemplary special, the full power of the Sinestro Corps is known, and the DC Universe knows fear like never before.

While on Earth, the Justice League rounds up members of the Society to inquire about Sinestro’s whereabouts, in outer space, Kyle Rayner and a pair of fellow GLs encounter Sinestro rings spinning through the universe. The rings are only the first salvo, though, and before the book is halfway over it is clear that the Green Lantern Corps is in for perhaps the deadliest war it has ever known.

Geoff Johns does what he does best here – he pulls together disparate continuity threads to tell his story. It’s clear, reading this issue, that he has been planning this epic for a long time, as he picks up on story threads from his own Green Lantern: Rebirth, Infinite Crisis and 52, as well as several tales written by other writers (Ion, for instance), to create a story with a universal threat, but that is singularly unique to the Green Lantern titles. This is a story about fear – that’s Sinestro’s weapon. And to have any chance at victory, he has to find a way to create fear in a warrior class specifically chosen for its fearlessness.

And he does it.

Johns re-teams with his Rebirth partner Ethan Van Sciver on the artwork, and Van Sciver again proves just how good he is. His designs for the disparate aliens that make up the Sinestro Corps are the stuff of nightmares, and it’s easy to see on the faces of our heroes just how much hell they’ve been put through. They look like heroes who have already come through a war, and this is a war that’s just beginning.

Johns and Dave Gibbons team up for a back-up tale as well, re-telling Sinestro’s origin from his own particularly biased point of view. This works well as a nice primer for a newer fan who may not quite recognize Sinestro or understand what makes him such a threat.

If you haven’t read Green Lantern in a while, this is the book to come back for. Johns and Van Sciver have made magic together more than once in the past, and it’s a blast to see them doing it again.

Rating: 10

Untold Tales of Blackest Night #1

November 16, 2010

Title: Sea of Fear
Writer: Peter J. Tomasi
Pencils: Patrick Gleason
Inks: Sandra Hope
Colorist: Brian Buccellato
Letterer: Steve Wands
Cover: Ethan Van Sciver
Editor: Eddie Berganza & Rex Ogle
Publisher: DC Comics

What, you thought just because Blackest Night ended like eight months ago that DC was done with the franchise? Not long ago they released this one-shot, featuring “lost” tales that could have been told at various points during the main saga. Peter Tomasi and Patrick Gleason present the book’s framing sequence, in which Sinestro Corps member Lyssa Drak begins to examine the lost pages of the Book of the Black, to discover what happened to some of the characters who didn’t get the spotlight in the main title. It’s an effective enough framing sequence, one that fits in well with the character and the various Corps and gets us into the short stories easily.

Title: Deleted Scene(s) From Blackest Night
Writer: Geoff Johns
Pencils: Ivan Reis
Inks: Oclair Albert
Colorist: Rod Reis
Letterer: Nick J. Napolitano

The first two short scenes are literally “deleted scenes,” each of which was presented in script form in the “Director’s Cut” edition of Blackest Night #1. Both of them are really very strong. We’ve got a Ragman scene, where Nekron attempts to raise all of the hundreds of souls that make up his patchwork suit of rags. In the second scene, a group of villains from Keystone make a suicide pact to escape the swarm of the Black Lanterns and join the “winning side,” but a miscalculation thwarts their plans. These scenes were both excellent and fit well into the framework of Blackest Night, but I can see why they were left out. Neither of them advanced the main plot – they’re nice and add color, but aren’t necessary. A one-shot like this is a perfect place to feature them.

Title: The Evolution of Species
Writer: Adam Schlagman
Pencils: Jason Fabok
Inks: Ryan Winn
Colorist: Alex Sinclair
Letterer: Travis Lanham

The first full story in the book is an Animal Man tale with a nice twist. The dead chosen to rise were those that would get the strongest emotional reaction from our heroes, so Buddy Baker finds himself trying to save his son from a rampaging horde of extinct animals. It’s a clever idea, but Schlagman doesn’t stop there. He follows through Animal Man’s adventures throughout the Blackest Night, including the point where those heroes who returned from the dead were all turned into Black Lanterns and, later, into White Lanterns. The Black Lantern Animal Man makes a couple of disturbing proclamations, and it would be interesting to see if anyone is planning to follow up on the items he drops here.

Title: A Losing Battle
Writer: J.T. Krul
Art: Ed Bennes
Colorist: Brian Buccellato
Letterer: Rob Clark, Jr.

J.T. Krul, who wrote the magnificent Blackest Night: Titans miniseries, picks up where that left off in his Donna Troy story. This feels very much like an epilogue to that miniseries, featuring a Donna who has been “infected” by her own dead child. Dove tries to cure her, but the story follows through to the point where the Black Lanterns attacked. While this story is structured well, and Krul is very good with the characters, this story feels very superfluous. No real new insight is gained or added to the concept.

Title: Blackest Nightmare
Writer: Jeremy Love
Art: Brett Booth
Colorist: Andrew Dalhouse
Letterer: Steve Wands

The Scarecrow takes center stage in the next story, which shows us the moment he’s chosen to join the Sinestro Corps. This story, while also superfluous, is at least really cool. Sinestros have to face their own fears before they instill them in others, and digging into Scarecrow’s psyche to see what he’s afraid of works well. It’s not particularly surprising, mind you, but the execution is good and Booth’s art fits the character.

Title: An Incident on Korugar
Story and Art: Ethan Van Sciver
Letterer: John J. Hill

Ethan Van Sciver, co-creator of the multiple Corps, takes a rare turn as a writer this issue. When he and Geoff Johns were creating the Sinestros, he brought forth a lot of new character ideas, including Karu-Sil, who here faces her own Black Lantern (during the tentative peace treaty with the Green Lanterns) and unwittingly reveals a lot about her own past. This is probably the strongest story in the book, giving us some real meat for a character that’s only gotten a few minor appearances to date.

The book is fun, and a couple of the stories do give us some interesting background information. Ultimately, though, it doesn’t really feel needed, so it’s hard to give it a higher rating.

Rating: 7/10