Sinestro #3 – Review

By: Cullen Bunn (story), Dale Eaglesham & Rags Morales (art), Jason Wright (colors)

The Story: As with most former dictators, it’s hard to wring an apology out of Sinestro.

The Review: So I saw Transformers: Age of Extinction last night, the first Transformers film I’ve ever seen beyond the trailer. This isn’t really the time and place for a fully-fledged review of the movie, but for those curious, I’ll say that it’s extremely distressing to see how much money could be spent to produce something so soulless and utterly lacking in redeeming quality other than visual spectacle. Clearly very little of that $210 million budget was expended on the writing.

More than anything else, I’m angry at myself for actually paying money to see the film and thus indirectly supporting such wanton lack of integrity. That’s the upside of reading comics; even if you feel like you’ve wasted your money on some bad issues, you can take comfort in knowing the profits aren’t terribly encouraging anyway. And with that, I think I’ve successfully brought us back to our real topic of choice, Sinestro #3, which might not be exceptional, but at least it has characters with dimension, which can’t be said of certain works with a gajillion times the resources.

Sinestro #1 – Review

By: Cullen Bunn (story), Dale Eaglesham (art), Jason Wright (colors)

The Story: Just when you need a fear-mongering dictator, he decides to give it all up. Figures.

The Review: As Hal Jordan’s primary arch-nemesis, Sinestro has always been a formidable villain, but in recent years, under Geoff Johns’ revitalizing pen, he’s now become one of the all-time greats of DCU antagonists. In some ways, he blends elements of two of his peers; he has rationality and arrogance to rival Lex Luthor, but like Joker, he has loftier aims than merely destroying his rival. But Sinestro is more than their amalgamation; he’s nobler and more capable of genuine sympathy than either.

Weird as it is to say that Sinestro has a heart, it’s the only way to explain how he can be driven to weariness, even something like depression. These are foreign emotions for most other villains; they require a degree of self-reflection that would take a villain too close to questioning his purpose, and God forbid we should have that. But for all the violence and callousness of his methods, Sinestro’s purpose has never been outright evil. He can appreciate the costs of his actions, which is why here, we see him weighing his real, personal losses against his scant, vague achievements.

Green Lantern #19 – Review

By: Geoff Johns (story), Szymon Kudranski (art), Ardian Syaf (pencils), Mark Irwin & Guillermo Ortego (inks), Alex Sinclair & Tony Avina (colors)

The Story: Now Sinestro can join Superman’s support group for sole planetary survivors.

The Review: As Johns winds down on what has been an impressive eight-year run on his most popular series, he’s clearly aiming to give as loving a send-off as he can to all the characters he’s given new life to.  He’s made Hal Jordan the centerpiece of the Green Lantern franchise again; he’s turned Sinestro from a villain you took for granted to one you fear, respect, and even sympathize with; and he’s given us Simon Baz, the most unpretentious and human of Lanterns.

I expressed some concern last month that Simon has lately lost the spotlight in this series and was even in danger of becoming an extraneous character in the presence of Hal and Sinestro.  Now, however, I understand that this is Johns indulging in nostalgia, coming up with the most fitting and resonant coda to the two characters he’s developed the longest.  Both Hal and Sinestro have had long, personal evolutions, and now’s the time to examine what has come out of that.

Green Lantern #5 – Review

By: Geoff Johns (writer), Doug Mahnke (penciller), Mark Irwin, Keith Champagne, Christian Alamy, Tom Nguyen (inkers), Alex Sinclair & Tony Avina (colorists)

The Story: Instead of power rings, maybe it’s best the mob goes back to pitchforks and torches.

The Review: It’s a funny thing about people.  We spend a great lot of our time figuring them out, usually to no success, and then we end up pinning semi-arbitrary labels on them anyway.  We hold onto those labels far longer than reasonable, even with all the evidence to the contrary, and then at the drop of a dime, we switch out those labels for new ones, sticking to those just as fervently and with just as little support.

That’s pretty much what’s happening between the people of Korugar and Sinestro in this issue.  In a few blinks of the eye, they go from readying themselves to waste him to shouting hoorahs in his name.  In their defense, Sinestro does accomplish exactly what he set out to do, which is to free his homeworld from the corps he created, and it’s mostly the impressionable children who look at him adoringly, while the adults seem to have no idea what to make of him now.

But that’s completely understandable.  As this series has gone on, it’s gotten harder and harder to remember that Sinestro is considered a villain in the grand scheme of things.  He’s just so darn competent that objectively, you can’t help admiring the guy to some degree.  In fact, as you watch him coolly whip out back-up plan after back-up plan, executing each one with perfect precision, you get vibes of Batman, master of prep-time himself, and you understand why Hal seems to rub against both men the wrong way.

I suppose it’d be poor form to talk about an issue of Green Lantern without mentioning Hal at some point.  Really, though, he’s been so overshadowed by his “partner” these issues that he’s become a sidekick in his own title.  In a way, he deserves that status.  The first issue saw him down on his luck, with no job, no house, no mode of transportation, mooching dinner off his girlfriend, who he can’t bring himself to commit to, all of which makes him seem like the boy who won’t grow up and throw down some roots.

Green Lantern #4 – Review

By: Geoff Johns (writer), Doug Mahnke (penciller), Christian Alamy & Keith Champagne (inkers), Alex Sinclair (colorist)

The Story: Sinestro, you can’t just hand out these power rings like they’re candy!

The Review: Oh, come on—seeing Hal get fried in the Yellow Central Battery was all good and fun, but no one thought for one second that would be the end of it, right?  That’s the thing with the vast majority of cliffhangers: even when they’re done well, you don’t actually fear that the fate of your favorite characters hang in the balance.  Mostly, cliffhangers are an exercise for writers to produce the most ludicrous cop-out ideas possible.

In this case, it turns out the Yellow Central Battery’s intruder-destroying measures are restricted to only certain individuals: “You are not Sinestro.  Transport to Antimatter Universe aborted.”  It ejects Hal immediately, rendering his attempt to destroy the battery from the inside mostly pointless, except for a few “life flashing before his eyes” panels which yet again emphasizes that Carol is the love of his life.

And if that isn’t enough, Johns brings up the couple again a few pages later, when Hal gets thrown into a Sinestro Corps decharging cell and decides to use the very last drop of his secondhand power ring’s energy to summon a construct of Carol.  It seems a bit out of place to insert a corny romantic moment smack-dab in the middle of dramatic prison scene, particularly since that specific well of material has run a bit dry lately, but it’s touching, nonetheless.

But the real emotional substance of the issue comes from Sinestro, who has pretty much hijacked the starring role of this title.  The drama doesn’t get any sweatier or intense than Sinestro having a reunion with his people (and former subordinate) in a jail cell.  Kudos to Johns for continuing to develop such a rich back-story for the villain/antihero; it’s always impressive when comic book characters are revealed to have relationships beyond their vigilante lives.

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.”