DC Comics has created some amazing concepts since it started making superhero stories with 1938’s Action Comics #1, and one of the best has stood the test of time like few others: Green Lantern. Back in the Golden Age of Comics, Green Lantern was a man named Alan Scott, his ring and lamp magically powered, giving him an amazing array of powers. The concept would get a refresh in the late ’50s, with a new Green Lantern named Hal Jordan debuting and the Green Lantern Corps, an intergalactic police force that upheld order across the universe, becoming integral to the setting. The concept had its ups and downs over the years and it all reached a culmination 18 years ago.
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It was an awesome time to be a fan of Green Lantern. Hal Jordan, the greatest of the Green Lanterns, had returned to life and got a new series from the hottest writer at DC Comics, Geoff Johns, with superstar artists like Ethan Van Sciver, Carlos Pacheco, and Ivan Reis. Readers were also treated to a Green Lantern Corps title, one that focused on Green Lanterns from around the universe. All of this led inexorably in one direction and to a story that even today is the greatest Green Lantern story ever: “The Sinestro Corps War”.
“The Sinestro Corps War” Was Everything Superhero Sci-Fi Should Be
The seeds to the story were planted in Green Lantern: Rebirth. This story revealed that Parallax was actually a fear entity that had possessed Hal Jordan partly because of Sinestro. This story was one of the most important Sinestro stories, and showed him on a different level than we had seen him before. At the end of the story, he disappeared into the anti-matter universe, and the next time we saw him, he’d be riding herd on his very own fear powered Lantern Corps: the Sinestro Corps, starting their reign of terror with an attack on Oa.
“The Sinestro Corps War” was, honestly, perfectly built. Between the end of Green Lantern: Rebirth and the 2007 beginning of the story, Johns had been building it towards it, introducing seemingly disparate elements like the returns of the Manhunters and Cyborg Superman, the Anti-Monitor’s corpse showing up in Infinite Crisis, and the debuts and returns of numerous Lanterns. When The Sinestro Corps War Special #1 dropped, we cared deeply about the modern Corps, which made the blitzkreig attack on Oa so devastating and violent. The war began with a blood bath and it went on from there.
The rest of the story saw the Corps up against a force that has been watching them the entire time and creating an army specially designed to destroy them. Several of the story beats were based off ideas from the Alan Moore story “Tygers”, like the Living City of Ranx and Sodam Yat, but a lot of it was all new, as the Green Lantern Corps tried to strike back while protecting Mogo from Ranx. By the time we get the battle between Yat and Superboy-Prime, readers had already witnessed the battle of Mogo, the return of Parallax, and the raid on Qward, all before the climactic battle on Earth that would sow the seeds for the future.
On top of all that, Johns and fellow Green Lantern writers Peter Tomasi and Dave Gibbons created the lore for the Sinestro Corps. The “Tales of the Sinestro Corps” back-up stories gave us the origins of the individual members of the corps, and numerous parts of the story gave readers the history of the Corps in the short time it existed. It’s a story that does an amazing job of giving readers everything they need to enjoy it, on top of some of the greatest action and drama of all time.
“The Sinestro Corps War” Took the Green Lantern Books to the Next Level
Before “The Sinestro Corps War”, the Green Lantern books were fairly popular, but kind of on a downward trajectory after the successes of 2005. Fans were almost on their way out when this story slapped them upside the head and suddenly a funny thing happened: the Green Lantern books became top-selling comics and stayed that way until the end of Johns’ run on the team in the early to mid ’10s. All of that success came from this one story.
“The Sinestro Corps War” was a blockbuster story unlike anything that readers had seen in a Green Lantern comic. It showed readers the heights that the books could be taken, the kind of amazing action that they could give them. It gave form to the idea of the Emotional Electromagnetic Spectrum, and set the stage for even more great stories like “Secret Origin”, “Rage of the Red Lanterns”, “Agent Orange”, and Blackest Night. However, none of those stories had the hype or originality of “The Sinestro Corps War”, as great as they could be, and that’s why it remains the best.
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