Green Lantern #3 – Review

By: Geoff Johns (writer), Doug Mahnke (penciller), Christian Alamy, Keith Champagne, Mark Irwin, Tom Nguyen (inkers), David Baron (colorist)

The Story: You know what the Korugans need?  An Occupy movement.

The Review: Just as Green Lantern has risen in stature in the last few years to the point where he now has the same iconic status as Superman and Batman, so has Sinestro gone from second-tier villain to one with a profile equal to, say, Lex Luthor or the Joker.  Like them, he started out with a very narrow, almost caricaturized personality: cripplingly arrogant.  But under Johns’ pen, Sinestro has grown more self-aware, masterful, and complicated, signs of a first-class character.

In a lot of ways, he possesses more of those qualities than even his heroic counterpart, who remains impulsive and direct.  These differences lead to a lot of rich interplay, as you can see in this issue.  While Hal’s chemistry with Carol has staled a little over the years, his and Sinestro’s has stayed as fresh as ever, never failing to produce a fun moment or line between them: “Turn the green to black.”  “Wait…black?”  “Your training really stopped after I left, didn’t it?”

Their continued dialogue also shows what sets Sinestro apart from leagues of villains out there.  No matter how manipulative or megalomaniacal, he retains a cloak of nobility about him.  You always get the sense he thinks, even in the midst of his most depraved actions, that he’s in the right.  It’s a strangely attractive paradox in an antagonist, explaining why Hal can get pulled along so easily into his greatest enemy’s agenda.  You can’t imagine Batman deigning to hitchhike with Joker on some hare-brained clowning scheme.

As it turns out, Sinestro has a point about this whole Korugar thing.  One thing you can count on is he may not give a fig about the rest of the universe, but his fondness for his own homeworld and people is a constant, even though they see him as nothing more than a universal stain upon their species.  We still don’t what the Sinestro Corps gets out of enslaving the planet, but there’s a certain poetic justice to their using Korugans’ fear to fuel the guiding emotion they stand for.

Of course, Sinestro has a plan to turn that all around, which he wants executed in his usual meticulousness (“Don’t forget what I said.  We wait until—”  “After sunset.”  “Seven minutes.  No matter what.”), but he can’t foresee everything.  We know he has a certain blind spot when it comes to Korugans he has a personal connection with, and one appears at just the right moment to set his strategy astray: Arsona, a fiery spirit equal to Sinestro himself, who declares to her captors, “Korugar will never be afraid.  Not again.”