Green Lantern #20Written by Geoff JohnsArt by Doug Mahnke, Ethan Van Sciver, Jerry Ordway and moreGrade: A+There are minor spoilers ahead, but nothing you haven’t seen if you’ve already read Green Lantern Corps from two weeks ago.
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Geoff Johns’s nine-year run on Green Lantern has not been without its flaws, but it will without a doubt go down as one of the great runs on any Big Two book ever published.That makes today’s issue all the more impressive; Johns does a few things that are virtually impossible to do and, by virtue of pulling them off, creates what’s arguably the single best issue of Green Lantern ever written. If not that, it unambiguously represents a high water mark for the character and the series.Johns has consistently drawn criticism for his endings; he’s been known to introduce a great idea and then spend a storyline building it up, only to have the final conclusion seem a little too “easy.” He and Mahnke avoid that here, giving a sense of scope and threat that would have been hard to match if his book weren’t expanded well beyond the paramaters of the average monthly comic. The oversized “anniversary issue” is rarely used as well as you’d hope, but here it’s just right. It feels as though Johns just wrote the script he wanted to write, and then submitted it and had it drawn, rather than trying to cram into a standard size or pad it out to a larger standard size for an annual-type story.
