Green Lantern #1

Straight from "The War of the Green Lantenrs" and the old universe, comes Green Lantern and "Sinestro" written by Geoff Johns and pencilled by Doug Mahnke.  One of the very few books whose background history did not get changed with Flashpoint or the relaunch, Green Lantern picks up right where it left two months ago.

Cover Art by Ivan Reis

It could be that I am already suffering of Green Lantern overexposure, but I did not find this book that interesting at all.  In many ways it is as if we were starting all over again: we have this reckless guy Hal Jordan at a very low point in his life, messing up and being stupid, when suddenly an alien cop comes offering him a power ring, end of the issue.  That's one way of seeing it.

Another interpretation for this issue is that we get to see what happened after War of the Green Lanterns, but is being told as if the loss of the ring caused Hal Jordan to go broke, have poor credit, no money, getting evicted, and acting like a loser.  How did exactly losing the ring cause any of this?  Ring or no, he was going to have poor credit anyway, so why is it being painted as if the ring is the reason?  This issue is not particularly friendly to new readers either, as you have to know a lot of what has happened before to understand why things are the way they are in issue #1.

The writing was weak and there was dialog missing from a lot of pages; this left a lot of the responsibility on Mahnke's hands, and maybe it is just my whining doing the talking -you know what I mean,- but he did not deliver as he had prior to the relaunch.  If with the other titles launched this month we say solely by their first issue that they look promising and a success, then it would be fair to judge Green Lantern the same way, only that it would not fare that well.  So for all the great stores this title has given us in the past five or six years, I will say I'll give it a shot for the next two issues, but if they are as this first installment, then it won't be long before the GL hype goes away.