Green Lantern: Robert Venditti Charting New, Familiar Territory

With the launch of Superman Unchained this week and the beginning of Scott Snyder and Greg [...]

By Russ Burlingame - June 12, 2013 01:01 am EDT

With the launch of Superman Unchained this week and the beginning of Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo's Batman: The Zero Year coming as well, DC fans will likely find themselves fairly blase about the changing Green Lantern status quo. After all, it's not like Geoff Johns came ON to the book. He left it and, in the eyes of many fans, left it worse off. But is that actually true? We checked out Robert Venditti's first issue last week and wanted to get a few words in edgewise before the big week of Scott Snyder and Man of Steel kicks into high gear and everybody forgets that anything else is happening in this business. Because it wasn't long ago that everyone in comics was wondering: How's the new Green Lantern? Well, it feels...suspiciously not-new.

Robert Venditti's Green Lantern is building a solid, if unspectacular, foundation so far and Billy Tan's artwork is by and large pretty great. If you're looking for a bold, new direction, though, you're looking the wrong way. This is more like a flashback book to the '90s. The '90s weren't a great era for Green Lantern, honestly (recently in an interview with ComicBook.com, veteran comics writer Keith Giffen called that period of the title "moribund"), and that's likely to raise a few eyebrows. It's a concern I can't say I don't share after one issue, although Venditti's track record (X-O Manowar started out slow compared to the series' regular pacing, too) earns him some benefit of the doubt. Still, the Guardians are gone again. At the end of the Johns era, they were killed and replaced by the children they made with the Zamarons. Here, Venditti sends even the new Guardians (not to be confused with Kyle Rayner's lantern team the New Guardians) away, leaving Hal Jordan to oversee Oa and the Green Lantern Corps all on his own. In the opening pages, we get a flash-forward to a battle with Relic, in which the Lanterns' power batteries (and even the Central Power Battery) are depleted husks. Carol Ferris breaks up with Hal, chastising him for being too committed to the Green Lantern Corps but also for being generally irresponsible. It's more "I love you but we can't be together," something that fans got their fill of during the Emerald Dawn era before Ron Marz revitalized the book with the introduction of Kyle Rayner. It's a callback to the character's Silver Age history when these sorts of storytelling devices felt a bit less contrived. The scene also calls into question whether Venditti really "gets" the Star Sapphires and how Carol's power works--but it seems like he's building to something there, so we'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

And that's what this issue has the feel of: it feels as though Venditti has been tasked with getting the title back to where it needs to be to start fresh, and that there are a lot of things he has to put into place before he can truly begin his run. That's a little crazy, though; the series has just finished the most critically-acclaimed run in the history of the character, and leaving the things that Johns left you to carry forward would seem to make a lot more sense than trying to start from scratch. You reboot the franchise after Batman & Robin, not Skyfall. With no Guardians, no Central battery and a severely depleted roster following their battle with Volthoom, though, that's exactly what the Green Lantern Corps is doing; they're starting over, including going back to another trope of the Gerard Jones era: fresh new recruits, not all of whom are happy to be Green Lanterns. They seem set up to be the series' comic relief now that Guy Gardner will presumably be moving full time over to Red Lanterns. The comic has a sense of urgency to it, as Hal Jordan's life and the Green Lantern Corps all seem to be collapsing around his shoulders at once. That urgency is deceptively static, though; it seems like we're being told that things are really bad, not shown, with the characters being moved around the board like chess pieces in service of a larger status quo, which isn't yet visible after the first issue. It's a status quo that will feel odd, but probably fresh, to that large chunk of the Green Lantern audience who either never read, or have long since forgotten, Gerard Jones's forgettable run on the title. We old-timers, though, are perhaps looking at it with slightly different eyes--scratching our heads in wonder that such an unremarkable period of the character's history could be recreated so faithfully in a high-profile new launch. Of course, the New 52 is all about the New. Could we see a few of these key concepts riffed on in a way that makes Venditti's run unrecognizable within three issues? Very possibly. Still, one hopes it starts to come together soon. Venditti is an exceptional talent, but he's best known for creator-owned work, and for his nuValiant run. Those are both places where writers are afforded a significant amount more leeway than Big Two superhero books, so if the book feels so familiar (and not in a good way) for too long, readers may begin to doubt he has a master plan.

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