The War Of The Green Lanterns

Well, I have to say that I haven't been looking forward to "The War of The Green Lanterns" with as much anticipation as I had been looking forward to "Blackest Night". Probably because of how disappointed I was with "Blackest Night", but don't get me wrong, I think that for quite some time now we've been getting the best Green Lantern comic books ever.

Let me say that I just love cosmic space comics that read like a modern mythology burnt across the heavens but these sorts of comics, no matter how cool their initial conception, often fail to pull off the sweep and grandeur of truly universe shaking/shaping events. My standards are a bit twisted however in that, I think the hands down, all time best, space opera was Jim Starlin's battle between Adam Warlock, the Magus and Thanos back in the seventies. If you like space opera and haven't read it, I recommend "Marvel Masterworks: Warlock Volume Two". Marvel's Masterworks publications are awfully pricey but if you've got the disposable income, this one's worth reading. In any event, I tend to want my cosmic drama's to be as good as this.

As I said, I think Green Lantern has been awfully good lately but I think for awhile it got Great with the "Sinestro Corp War" which was just brilliantly executed by Geoff Johns, Dave Gibbons and Ivan Reis. The subsequent rise of the other various lantern corps was brilliant and took an interesting silver age mythos and built it into something truly unique and spectacular.

But, then came "Blackest Night". Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the major story points of "Blackest Night". It all followed perfectly from what had gone before and there were moments of brilliance, not the least of which were the re-imagining of Black Hand and Nekron, but, it lasted so long and all those points of light seemed to be completely drowned out by page after page of a seemingly infinite number of variously colored lanterns blasting at each other. There were also too many totally lack luster cross overs. Okay there were some really interesting ones, the Superman family cross overs were an interesting take that I hadn't seen coming, especially so soon after the death of Jonathan Kent but, for every bright spot like that there seemed to be a dozen re-runs of material I've seen dozens of times. How much more insight do we need into the grief of Dick Grayson or Donna Troy over the deaths of their loved ones?

So, I have to confess that I haven't really been looking forward to "The War of the Green Lanterns". All I've been anticipating is more endless pages of huge numbers of lanterns blasting at stuff. (For what it's worth I really like pages of spectacular renditions of armies of lanterns blasting at stuff, but, lanterns are soooooo powerful, they shouldn't be facing events or enemies that need so many of them so often.) But, now that we are three issues into the war, I am very much enjoying it. The re-imagination of Krona is glorious... this is the way he always should have been portrayed. The capture and utilization of the "entities" to corrupt the Corp and the Guardians is interesting and I'm hoping that our understanding of the entities and the Guardians will be expanded. Best of all... although we have gotten some great art of massive amounts of green lanterns blasting stuff, the focus seems to be on Hal, Guy, John and Kyle, de-powered... with impossible quests before them. The stuff of legend. All I can say as at this point, I'm really looking forward to the rest of the story and can't wait to see where it goes.

I have one question though, about the Guardians. These guys are billions of years old and have been successfully protecting the universe all that time, why is it that they always seem to be wrong about everything? I hear people ask the same questions about Jedi Masters in the Star Wars movies. It begins to seem like a cheep plot device to highlight the rebellious, independent streak in our heroes. That rebellious independent streak is really popular with adolescent boys and American men in general. But, story device or not, I'd like to see there be a really good reason in the story why these wise old creatures with nothing but good intentions got everything so wrong.