Green Lantern Corps Volume 1: Fearsome

I’ve mentioned somewhere before about how inflation is built into superhero comics. The good guys have to take on increasingly powerful bad guys, or more of them. Then the good guys have to multiply so that you get more of them too, either by being paired with regular sidekicks or assembled into teams of heroes.

For the Green Lantern this translated into series like the Green Lanterns (plural) for the DC Universe Rebirth (I made some notes on Rage Planet here), and the Green Lantern Corps for the New 52. I don’t follow these things closely enough, so I wasn’t sure which came first. On checking into it, the New 52 was launched in 2011 and Rebirth in 2016. So now I know.

In any event, the GL Corps weren’t new in 2011 since they’d been around since near the beginning (I even remembered them from when I was a kid), but having armies of “Lanterns” (as they’re called) in every issue felt to me like just part of the same “more is more” mentality. And what makes it worse in the case of the Lanterns multiplying is that they’re all basically the same. They’re different species united from all the far corners of the universe, but their super powers are all just whatever “constructs” they generate from their rings. So having two of them, or 7,000, just feels redundant if not overkill.

Well, on to this iteration of the Corps and its ceaseless battle against evil in all its forms.

Things kick off here on a very dark note indeed. Some evil force attacks a Lantern Corps “sector house” and quickly disposes of the two Lanterns stationed there, decapitating the one and slicing the other in two. This sets off an alarm back at Lantern HQ (on the planet Oa), and a team of Lanterns, headed by Earth representatives Guy Gardner and John Stewart (not of The Daily Show), is sent out to investigate. They soon discover another major crime against the universe: All the water has been sucked off of a planet inhabited by a race of friendly-looking beaver creatures, leaving behind a dry sea-bed of corpses. Then, just to send a further message, the resident Lantern guardians of the blue beaver planet have been left impaled on stakes.

To be honest, after reading the first couple of issues of this one I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep going. It just seemed grim. I’m no prude when it comes to splatter, but there was an incongruous cruelty to the proceedings here, with various scenes of torture thrown into the mix that I really didn’t care for. And nobody rises above it. I didn’t even like Guy and John very much, and thought the only way they were being made bearable was because of how bad the bad guys were.

As for those bad guys . . . they weren’t working for me at all. They go by the name of the Keepers because of the role they had watching over the Great Green Lantern Power Supply (a.k.a. the Central Power Battery), before the Lanterns decided to up sticks and move, leaving the Keepers to rot on their miserable home planet. So they had a legitimate grudge, but I didn’t really understand all the politics. As for the Keepers themselves, they’re just the usual army of mooks, made to look like zombies. They have incredible will power and an imperviousness to the constructs of the Lanterns, so they can just sort of overwhelm the Lanterns until the green guys power up with some old-school weaponry. Even so, they’re looking likely to take over until Guy hits upon the expedient of dropping a fear bomb on them that turns them into a bunch of crybabies who are then sentenced to dig graves for all their victims on the blue beaver planet.

I didn’t care for this at all. It’s dark but not very smart and even by the end I hadn’t managed to keep any of the Corps members’ names straight. But I picked up almost the whole series of these when the library got rid of them in an overstock shelf-clearing, so I’ll read a few more anyway and see if things get better.

Graphicalex