Green Lantern Corps #47 – Review

by: Peter J. Tomasi (story), Patrick Gleason (art), Rebecca Buchman, Tom Nguyen, Keith Champagne & Mark Irwin (inkers)

The Story: Goodbye Darkness: The title says it all. This is the denouement of Blackest Night, the replanting of the trees in the Shire after the fall of Sauron. A lot of friends got hurt. A lot of friends are gone. Old relationships of trust were broken and new ones were made. Blackest Night was the near death experience for the Corps and this issue is about survivors.

What’s Good: If you’ve been following the Green Lantern corner of the DCU for a while, you care a lot about Guy, Kyle, Kilowog, Arisia, Salaak, and all the other heroes that filled the ranks of the Corps. After Blackest Night, I think the readers need a bit of a breather too – a time to miss characters lost. Tomasi takes that feeling, the need for a rest, the exhausted satisfaction at the end of a marathon, and he puts it into a book. He packs the emotional power of that near death experience with overt mourning (a mass funeral, picking up broken mementos) and the denial and stress and emotions of hidden mourning (changing jobs, living for today). And although I can’t say much about an interesting theme that Tomasi threads through this book without spoiling, at times I saw the Corps as a metaphor for the military and at times as a metaphor for the Catholic priesthood. Pretty cool stuff. Tomasi has written a great issue to give us the moment we need to catch our breath before we plunge headlong into Brightest Day.