DCU Comic Book Reviews

GREEN LANTERN #54

The New Guardians, Chapter Two

July 2010

Written by Geoff Johns

Pencils by Doug Mahnke

Inks by Christian Alamy, Tom Nguyen, Keith Champagne, Doug Mahnke

Covers by Shane Davis and Alex Garner

Synopsis

In New York, Atrocitus feeds on the anger of the citizens on the subway.  In New Mexico, Sinestro (Yellow Lantern), Carol Ferris (Star Sapphire), and Hal Jordan (Green Lantern) attempt to lift the white power battery, but it won’t move.  When all three try to lift together, they have a vision of the resurrected and a command to find the entities of the color spectrum.  On Daxam, where Sodam Yat and the Ion entity are powering the sun to make it yellow, an unknown person removes Ion from the sun, turning it red once more.  Ion is then imprisoned, along with Parallax.  Meanwhile, the white power battery transports Sinestro, Carol, and Hall to New York City, telling them Atrocitus will help.  When they confront Atrocitus, Hal is suddenly yanked upward, where Lobo is waiting for him.     

Review by Binkley (e-mail)

Yeah, this was very good.  I mean, any story featuring the Red Lantern cat Dex-Starr automatically gets some sort of approval.  It is a cute little fur ball who sprays deadly red blood.  How can you not like it?  But then to top it off, Johns adds in hints and teases surrounding Atrocitus and his past and drops a little more information on the white battery and more on the various entities, and it certainly elevates the good quotient of this issue even more.  Geoff Johns is slowly building to another big Green Lantern story, weaving in a new mythology involving the color spectrum and the entities.  The reason that I don’t seem to be more enthusiastic about this story is, as I mentioned last review, the fact that it feels like a redux of the Black Lantern story.  I am all for following up on Big Events, but it almost feels like Johns is just writing the same story, using the structure, but changing a few of the facts.  Hell, we’ve already had the plot of Hal rounding up the various corps, which is where it seems like this is headed.  In addition, some of the scenes are duplicated in Brightest Day, so it feels like I’ve read parts of it already.  Don’t get me wrong, I am enjoying the hell out of this story and as I said at the beginning of the paragraph, this is very good.  It just feels like déjà vu. 

Didn’t notice it the first time, but Johns named the police officer (who are often called “pigs”) Sheriff Hamm.  Get it?  He even kinda looks like a pig. 

Based on the map, it looks like the orange entity (Ophidian) is somewhere in North Dakota, the Star Sapphire entity (The Predator) is in Nevada, the red entity (The Butcher) is in Idaho, the blue entity (Adara) is in New York, and the indigo entity (Proselyte) is in Massachusetts (although the icon looks more like the one for the yellow entity).