Green Lantern #65
Written by Geoff Johns
Art by Doug Mahnke
The second month of the war kicks off here, and it does so with the ‘Wog in chains, so that Krona can tell us just why certain people are immune to his control while others aren’t, and as everyone figured, it’s Parallax. It’s always Parallax. Anyway, getting back to what matters we’ve got Hal and Guy at “The Green House”, their snowy safehouse in Sector 2000, and they are without rings. It’s time to regroup, it’s time to figure out just what the hell to do next. Johns does a great job getting directly to the point, and the issue kicks off with a bang…well, a boom, and we see Hal do something that he hasn’t done in a long, long time.
Fly. It’s astonishing, Hal gets to be a pilot! And we get the built in humor that Guy has apparently never been on a flight with Hal “Highball” Jordan before. The ship is put over pretty heavily, but I honestly think Johns just wanted to accent the ‘goes fast’ nature of it while putting over that Hal is an awesome pilot. That’s how it reads at least, though to be fair, if this hadn’t been done in event mode I could have gone for a full issue of Hal and Guy powerless on a ship together, but instead we get about five pages of it.
The pacing of this issue is murder, it’s just so quick to jump from point to point. Yes, I understand that this is part four of a ten part, three month crossover, and that time really is off the essence, so I can’t really get mad at any writer involved in this event for rushing through something like Hal and Guy getting back to Oa. I can, however, get mad that this entire issue feels like a plot filler. Like Johns took a checklist of stuff that needed to get done and went through it when writing this issue, because that’s how it reads. Is it organic? Sure, but while normally Geoff has a nice and natural flow to issues like this (because we all know he does a lot of them), this one really reads like he was painting by numbers.
Doug Mahnke is a rockstar, and his army of inkers is his entourage. Seriously, the credits for the issue list off five different inkers, which always reads to me like a rush job but…this issue doesn’t look like a rush job. Mahnke continues to show us why he’s the man with the responsibility of DC’s best selling ongoing title, and the issue looks as amazing as usual. There are a lot of things that go on here that we haven’t seen much of lately, like people who aren’t wearing costume, which means the return of Hal’s bomber jacket! The ship also looks pretty awesome, as do most of the scenes involving it. Though without spoiling what (to be honest), is a minor spoiler, the ending and the design work there is awesome.
Four down, six to go, and unfortunately this issue doesn’t really do much outside of basic setup. Sure, basic setup is important, but it almost feels like it’s too early in the event for an issue like this. Now, none of this is to say that the issue is bad by any means, just that nothing really happens except for the last page. It’s a nice build for part five, which, thankfully, is also this week. At least there’s that, this issue might have been relatively uneventful, but there’s a whole other issue this week too!
Overall?
7/10
