Blackest Night: Green Lantern [Paperback]

This review really exists in 2 parts, one very positive and one very negative.

The positive first: this is really the end result of some stunningly fine effort to make Green Lantern into a top level brand again. Geoff Johns has the rep he does for a reason, and starting with 'No Fear' he has made the Green Lantern name a flagship of the DCU. In this collection, the 'Blackest Night' story is in full swing and the war among the rings is ripping across the Universe. The artwork is sharp, and the stakes are made very clear as the conflict builds to involve even the Spectre, DC's avenging hand of God.

Now for the negative, and really the reason that this collection gets 3 stars and not 5. Why DC would decide to collect pieces of the 'Blackest Night' run in collections by comic title and not story chronology is baffling. I usually choose to avoid the cliffhanger nature of monthly comic portions of a major crossover in favor of reading big blocks in collections. With an event like 52, DC rightly released the whole story as collected editions, making it easy to find and read the whole thing without chasing pieces in various trades. Here, they only collected the Green Lantern comic, with no regard for story continuity. Imagine watching a show like The Wire or Lost, but skipping a few episodes every time. That's what they've done here. In place of the story, we have 2 paragraph summaries of what's missing! Chopping this event up like this does a disservice to both the creators and fans by providing an incomplete story. A shame.

So there's the reason for the 3 star rating. The story is top notch, the method of collection is amateur hour.

I gave Blackest Night four stars because it was pretty much relentless action almost from beginning to end and I felt readers need the occasional breather. It also seemed to be incomplete, missing a lot of back story with events happening with no resolution. Having read THIS book (confusingly ALSO called Blackest Night) it's clear to me that the actual story is interlaced between the core Blackest Night series and the ongoing Green Lantern series and possibly the Lantern Corps series. Reading just one book leaves a ton of questions open. For example in Blackest Night the Spectre is taken over by the Black Lantern Corps and then... nothing. In this book the Spectre is a member of the Corps with no explanation and has a HUGE impact. You need both books to make sense of it. This book offers up the back story on how the various lantern corps joined together to fight the Black Lanterns. As much as Blackest Night needs this book this book needs Blackest Night even more.

The fact of the matter is that I enjoyed this collection more than the Blackest Night mini-series itself and that may be because I read this second and it felt a lot more complete. Since it's from the Green Lantern series it's much more Lantern Corps centric featuring the ongoing fighting between the seven colored corps including battles between Atrocious and Larfleeze and Sinestro and Carol Ferris so on. One question I had was how come Larfleeze seems to have diminished in power since I last read about him. In previous books he was supposedly as powerful as an entire corps with his amazing 100,000% fully powered ring but now he seems about on par with Atrocious or Sinestro. Mongul makes a fantastic appearance in a dual with Sinestro. When the Black Lanterns finally start pouring forth all the corps are forced to put aside their differences just to stay alive.

Besides the Spectre this collection also spends more time on the new ring wielders and I won't reveal who they are but they are well established DC characters with personalities to match the rings. There is a major appearance by Parallax that I don't remember being mentioned in the Blackest Night and Hal Jordan makes a desperate decision that seems unlikely given his past. This book also features Sinestro after his dramatic transformation but never shows how it happened. The point I'm trying to make is that if you intend to only get one of the two books you're going to get a very muddled, incomplete story and you can drop my review score down at least one star. If you get both it's a very good story but even then I wouldn't put it amongst the all time greats in the history of comics. Geoff Johns may have gone to the well a few too many times milking the same themes over and over again. Yes, we know that Hal feels shame over his time under the control of Parallax and we all know the Sinestro is still pissed that Abin Sur gave his ring to Jordan but we really need to get past these things and move on.

The Blackest Night series as a whole doesn't really have the big event feel of other DC big events because it occurs over a very short period of time and consists of little more than a lightning strike by the Black Lanterns that I estimate is resolved within a day or two in comic book time. It also focuses on a much smaller group of characters than other events. This collection is mainly about Hal, Sinestro, John Stewart and to a lesser extent Carol Ferris, Atrocious and Larfleeze (who always rocks). One final thing to note is that this book does not have an ending; you have the read the main Darkest Night book to get that.

Multiple tie-in's to comic book mega-events are nothing new, but tie-in's that are actually worth your time and expand the main story are something of a rarity indeed, at least to me anyway. With Blackest Night, DC's latest collected mega-event, writer Geoff Johns creates a new Lantern Corps that is composed of deceased heroes and villains, and threaten to destroy all existence as we know it. This tie-in features issues from the main Green Lantern title which ran parallel to Blackest Night, and fleshes out much more of the main story as well. From witnessing Green Lantern villain Black Hand's disturbing admission into the Black Lantern Corps, to Hal Jordan and Barry "The Flash" Allen tangling with the resurrected Martian Manhunter, to Hal teaming up with arch-nemesis Sinestro and other various Lantern Corps, and a showdown between the posessed Spectre and a Paralax-possessed Hal; Green Lantern: Blackest Night isn't just smashing, it's essential. Doug Mahnke provides a majority of the pencil work here, and does a more than fine job in doing so as well. Since Johns brought Hal Jordan back from the dead and re-launched the Green Lantern title, he's done virtually no wrong during his run on the title, and that trend continues. After reading this, and Blackest Night, you'll be hoping that his run never comes to an end.