Reader Participation: I Have A Question About Green Lantern Comic Books
16 Comments | Posted: March 1st, 2009 | Filed under: Reader Participation, Thinking About Comics | Tags: green lantern
From what I can tell, the Green Lantern books have now spent a large chunk of about two years of storytelling to internecine combat between various factions who share the whole lanterns-and-rings motif. I actually quite enjoyed The Sinestro* Corps War and can see the appeal in exploring these new groups, but are the Green Lanterns still fighting people who don’t vomit blood or have oath and magic wishing ring on top of the rest of the junk that’s going on in the universe they’re supposed to be protecting? Is that being addressed?
*Sinestro. Were Genocidus or Stabbicon such great guys that they didn’t see that one coming? (Yes, it’s a hacky gag, but really. Sinestro.)
The best part about the name Sinestro was all the time when he was a good guy. How many years (in the story, anyway) was he the BEST Green Lantern, the guy they thought was the number one do-gooder? And his name was Sinestro.
Anyway, no. It does not seem like they have much time for non Lantern based threats right now.
That goes to something I’d been wondering about… why do they spend so much time on Oa? They have entire sectors to protect, only one lantern to watch over a huge stretch of space, yet at any given moment there are a ton of them on Oa. That would be like all beat cops from all over the country spending all their down time in Chicago. “Just finished my shift here in Queens, time to pop back to Chi-town.”
It was my understanding that he was called Sinestro because he was left-handed. Not because of any future fascist career path his parents had laid out for him.
Not following the books, but from what I can tell from other’s reviews (mostly Every Day Is Like Wednesday) the two big plots are the Rainbow of Rings stuff and a tangential thing where the Guardians say the GLs can’t have romantic relationships with each other. Also maybe Hal Jordan is both a Green Lantern AND a Red Lantern now?
Am I a bad person for wondering if they just did this multi-colored lantern thing to sell more T-shirts?
That party is gonna be off a-tha hook.
/outdated Arrested Development reference
No, it’s all “Blackest Night” prologue stuff which means it’s all different colored Corps. Hal is now a member of two Corps and almost a third, but I wouldn’t dare spoil it. At this point, it’s lost a bit of the urgency of the Sinestro Corps War, but for the most part the different colors are tied enough into interesting charatcers (Blue with Ganthet, for example) that none of them feel extraneous. That could change next issue when The Orange Lanterns come along as they seem to only be tied to the aliens that created The Darkstalkers (remember them?).
As far as the rest of the calamity in the universe not being addressed, it seems like most of it is tethering itself to one faction or another. It’s like Green Lantern: The Lost & Damned. Sure, there are other criminals in Liberty City, but if they’re not on a bike, who cares?
I’m glad I reloaded this page before I posted, because Benjamin did a much better job with all that than I did. I’ll just say that the main other thing of the past two years has been a retelling of Hal’s origin (and by including Atrocitus, the best darn blood-vomiter in all of comics, it also served as a “Blackest Night” prologue.)
Having never played that “Grand Theft Auto” game, I’m comparing the current war of colors to Nintendo’s “Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem.” Especially after the last issue.
And Caroline, if they do use the multiple colors to sell T-shirts, my fervent hope is that no one buys the orange ones. (See, it would be ironic because orange represents avarice, and…eh, it was more clever in my head.)
Well John Stewart at least is still running around with the Justice League, so he’s doing some other stuff. But figure there are at least 7200 Green Lanterns and they’ve only been focusing on about a dozen or so, so I guess we can assume the others are doing their Lanternly duty in their home sectors.
You can be pretty sure Dkrtsky Rrrr is keeping his beat.
You can always count on him.
You mean the Controllers? Who are, lest we forget, the former Oans who said “fuck this pansy-ass shit” and went for something decidely more martial in their approach to fixing up the universe? Seems perfectly relatable to the existing canon to me.
As for Sinestro, I always thought it was something in Korugarian that didn’t exactly translate and the phonetic approximation just sounded bad.
The best part about the name Sinestro was all the time when he was a good guy. How many years (in the story, anyway) was he the BEST Green Lantern, the guy they thought was the number one do-gooder? And his name was Sinestro.
Why should a conglomerate of alien species notice and/or care about the Earth English word that a top Lantern’s name kinda sounds like? I understand “Larvox” has some pretty negative connotations in the Daxamite tongue, but I wouldn’t hold it against the guy ’cause he’s a royal righteous Lantern.
GREEN LANTERN CORPS has been suffering from the fact that the last few plot arcs all have the same basic outline: Someone targets Lanterns/their families/their loved ones, a bloody fight ensues, the Guardians make a stupid decision, Mongul smashes shit up.
I mean, it’s entertaining enough, but I’m kind of ready for this event to happen and be done with.
Looks like Carrie White at the GL prom…
Nonsense! All KINDS of fabulous things have been going on over in the Green Lanterns. Hal just had another origin with Hector Hammond, Black Hand AND Atrocitus and Sinestro, Guy and Kyle reopened Warriors on Oa,fought Mongul and went on a diplomatic mission to the Star Sapphires. Oh, and Kyle is busy painting a nice new mural, which will also be a public works department achievement on Oa. Probably trying to spruce the place up after the last time it got trashed.
They’ve had trials, and the whole Final Crisis thingie going on, not to mention all the new color corps that are showing up. In between all of this stuff, they go out and patrol their sectors. The do manage to keep busy.
Well…except Hal who hangs out on Earth shagging his girlfriend all the time.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the universe, Rann and Thanagar went to war, Lady Styx wiped out countless worlds, and L.E.G.I.O.N. participated in a coup on many more.
You’d think at least one Green Lantern would have shown up for some of those events…
<3 stabbicon.