Green Lantern #9 – Review

By: Geoff Johns (story), Doug Mahnke (pencils), Christian Alamy, Keith Champagne, Mark Irwin, Tom Nguyen (inks), Alex Sinclair (colors)

The Story: Considering the success of rehab on Hollywood celebrities, this isn’t surprising in the least.

The Review: While I generally like Johns as a writer, and there are quite a few of his works I greatly enjoy, I still stand by my position that he doesn’t bring all that much depth to what he writes.  He has a great love of symbolism, of trying to mine the moral out of every tale he tells, but whatever meaning he puts into his stories, they’re always right there, just underneath the surface of the plot, and quite easy to grasp.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in his portrayal of the various color corps in this series.  We all know what Johns means when he has the Red Lanterns spitting up blood uncontrollably with rage.  It’s pretty obvious why Larfleeze is completely alone as wielder of avarice.  Same with the Star Sapphires’ semi-obsessive pursuit of love throughout the universe.  And let’s not even get started with the whole fear-versus-will conflict between the Yellow and Green Lantern Corps.

WCBR’s Top Picks

Dean’s Top Picks

Best of the past week: Mind the Gap #1 – Admittedly, it wasn’t the strongest week in comics history, and that’s allowed a comic that wasn’t “awesome” to win honors.  But….that’s how it goes sometimes.  It looks like Jim McCann and Rodin Esquejo have a nice, longer-form mystery to tell us and I’m personally looking forward to it.  This comic has three things that set it apart:  (a) wonderful art, (b) a sense of freshness and (c) not knowing what will happen next.  Runner-up: X-Factor #235 – Talk about running against the grain!  There are no characters I “love” in X-Factor.  The art is a little spotty sometimes.  It is never central to any big Marvel stories.  And….I’ve been trying to convince myself to drop X-Factor for years, but every month Peter David writes an interesting and compelling tale that keeps the series on my pull list AND makes me wonder why I keep it on such a short leash.

Most anticipated this week: The Walking Dead #97 – It’s amazing how much I still anticipate this comic after nearly 100 issues.  As much as I’ve criticized it during reviews for “nothing happening”, I KNOW that I’ll be downloading this onto my iPad and furiously reading it during lunch on Wednesday.  This issue probably won’t feature anything HUGE (as the big events will likely be saved for issue #100), but we should be starting to see the basic shape of whatever horrifying things are to come.  My anticipation is also increased by the fact that last issue was a big improvement over the series’ recent form.

Other picks: Batman #9, I Zombie #25, Morning Glories #18, Takio #1, Wolverine and the X-Men #10

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Alex’s Top Picks

Pick of the Week: Invincible Iron Man #516 – This book has been on fire lately, even if no one seems to have noticed.  Exciting, high-stakes, and character work that leaps off the page for both the good guys and the bad guys.  This is Iron Man at its finest with energy to spare.

Most Anticipated: Uncanny X-Force #25 – Rick Remender begins a big new arc of X-Force.  That alone should excite.  This promises to be more than the Otherworld “breather” (by X-Force standards).  This is also the first issue that’ll see Mike McKone on art and the preview pages have already shown that that’s as awesome as it sounds.

Other Picks: Batman #9, Demon Knights #9, Frankenstein: Agent of SHADE #9, Green Lantern #9, Fatale #5, Captain America #11, Journey into Mystery #637, New Avengers #26, Punisher #11,  Wolverine & the X-Men #10