Comic Book Review – Green Lantern: Brightest Day and War of the Green Lanterns

Green Lantern: Brightest Day (2011)
Reprints Green Lantern #53-62
Written by Geoff Johns
Art by Doug Mahnke and Shawn Davis

Green Lantern: War of the Green Lanterns (2011)
Reprints Green Lantern #63-67, Green Lantern Corps #58-60, and Green Lantern: Emerald Warriors #8-10
Written by Geoff Johns, Tony Bedard, and Peter J. Tomasi
Art by Doug Mahnke, Tyler Kirkham, Fernando Pasarin, Ed Benes, and Ardian Syaf

Blackest Night was a big success for DC Comics. It did something that few DC Comics event crossovers had done in recent history: put the spotlight on someone other than Superman or Batman. In this instance, it was Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps (and their multi-colored kin) that were made the focus. Bruce Wayne was dead (for the moment), and Superman was in the backseat for the story. The success of Blackest Night and Geoff Johns’ prominence was likely why Green Lantern’s continuity was left fairly untouched with the radical New 52 reboot. Brightest Day was a weekly series that followed BN, and the first collection we’re reviewing here are the Green Lantern issues that tied into that. In particular, they are part of an arc known as “The New Guardians.”

The New Guardians was a ten-part arc that serves mainly as connective tissue between Blackest Night and the War of the Green Lanterns. Because we’re in a lull between big stories, many of the chapters here focus on characters in a remarkably old-fashioned way. If you look at the landscape of comics at the moment, they have adopted this in an attempt to emulate the always-moving grand battle formula of the movies. It’s nice to have something close to a one-off type of tale. A problem occurs along the way. Because GL has risen in prominence, Johns and DC editors are using the book to point readers to other titles to pick up. Johns also wrote Brightest Day and wanted to make the two relevant, which can result in long sequences that don’t pay off here but are on the pages of something else.

At this point in John’s Green Lantern run, he has created a problem for himself. First, he relies heavily on the same tropes as he was writing from character to character. His Flash run introduced Barry Allen’s mother’s death as the driving force behind his decision to become a detective. Here in Green Lantern, we have Hal Jordan witnessing the death of his father in an airplane crash. That’s just one example, but if you read enough Johns, you see some repetition. The second is that Green Lantern’s stakes are so high that nothing can be a simple story by this point. If it’s a shorter arc, it’s a prelude to something even more epic. 

That unevenness leads to some characters’ short shrift here because we must hit the next plot point. Atrocitus, a character I initially did not enjoy and found a one-note, starts to get some depth only for that to be cut short. Instead, we get a very MacGuffin-y plot about needing to catch all the entities representing each power on the emotional spectrum. Johns definitely has fun finding human hosts for these entities, but the characters he introduces are flashes in the pan. I suspect he had an idea for a New Guardians ongoing following this that might feature these characters as a team, but the New 52 gave us a New Guardians series that spotlighted members of each Corps instead.

What works and needs to be explored more is Hal Jordan’s relationship to his job as a Green Lantern. Several characters make passing comments about when the last time it was he took off the ring. Jordan hasn’t had a personal life in a long time, something his longtime on-again/off-again girlfriend Carol Ferris reminds him of here. Even Superman seems concerned with the pace Jordan is keeping. Wow. That would be a fantastic arc to explore…but we need to set the pieces in place for The War of the Green Lanterns. Oh well. Maybe someday, someone else might develop that in an exciting way.

All of this leads into Johns’ final pre-New 52 arc, The War of the Green Lanterns, told across the three ongoing GL series of the time. There’s, of course, the Hal Jordan-led Green Lantern followed by Green Lantern Corps (which focused a lot on John Stewart but also some of the alien GLs), and Green Lantern: Emerald Warriors, a very short-lived book spotlighting Guy Gardner. This is strong evidence of how popular Green Lantern was then, that DC saw it financially profitable to devote multiple ongoing titles to the franchise. At some point, I need to revisit some of these, but I didn’t find them that great at the time. Johns was the only one I read regularly.

The story’s central antagonist is Krona, who first appeared on the Green Lantern pages in 1965. He’s an Oan, like the Guardians of the Universe, but who went rogue. That schism came from his obsession with seeing the universe’s beginnings. He built a machine to accomplish this, but it explodes while he uses it to create the Multiverse. He was punished by having his molecules dispersed but returned as part of a team-up between Hal Jordan and the Golden Age Green Lantern, Alan Scott. Over the decades, he’d be used again, and his actions in the past were responsible for the Crisis on Infinite Earths. 

His goal in The War of the Green Lanterns is to capture all the entities that power the emotional spectrum and force the Guardians to serve as their hosts. He also reinstalls Parallax inside the Central Battery, which has led to an infection of the entire Corps. This leaves Hal, John, Guy, and Kyle Rayner out in the cold, and they will need to use the other colors of rings to retake their home. Its set-up hints at many fun heist-type stories paired with fighting off the zombie hordes of mind-controlled former allies.

The art in this collection varies wildly. Doug Mahnke on pencils & ink in the pages of Green Lantern always delivers. I am astonished at his detailed line work, and every alien he draws feels exotic & interesting. The art in the other two books will sometimes look good but mostly fall short because it’s being directly compared to Mahnke. That was one thing that turned me off about the books at the time. You can tell how much a company cares about a particular ongoing title based on the artist they get to handle it regularly. Even if you don’t care for Johns, he always manages to find artists that deliver high-quality work – unless he’s running way behind schedule, we’ll do an in-depth review of his most recent Justice Society series one day.

The War of the Green Lanterns ends in a way that sets up the next arc. Hal Jordan and all the questions about his private life versus being a Corps member gets a resolution. That will kick off the Green Lantern title under the New 52 banner, which starts with a new status quo. There are many good ideas in this arc, but again, the focus is on so much loud & large spectacle that those good pieces fall by the wayside. The story lacks the emotional core it needs to make me care about it, and I can start to see Johns’ shine wane.