Comic Review: Green Lantern Season Two #4

Script by Grant Morrison

Art by Liam Sharp

Colors by Steve Oliff

Letters by Tom Orzechowski

Bye minen trothers, Morreisin hauth doun itt waunce ‘gayn.

This is a very fun mag.

The Green Lantern has been a notable bright spark in a sea of endlessly recombinated plots and stale characters and boring concepts pretending to be the brave new thing. Morrison’s a big name for a reason, and The Green Lantern has been the comic equivalent of a wry and dry joke, a gallows-humor retrospective delivered by a man performing a slow and methodical autopsy of comic tropes. It is a magazine defined not just by the originality of its voice, but by the immense amount of experience that the voice has – while perhaps someone besides Morrison could conceivably write something like this (Ellis comes to mind, though that name has become somewhat contentious over the past couple of days), very few writers approach the medium with so much dedication and so little self-importance. The Green Lantern is many wonderful, wonderful things, and this issue is absolutely no different. As always, the art is up first.

Art:

Liam Sharp’s textured and authoritative art has been gorgeous since the first issue and continues to be such. Sharp is noteworthy for the flow of his lines, and for his willingness to explore new angles and new styles for individual shots. He’s a master of the craft, with some panels looking almost like regular art and others harkening back to bronze- and iron-age methods to make an impact, a choice which perfectly complements the narrative’s excavation of that era. Shadows here are achieved with small but inky pools of black complemented by thick and juicy hatching, again approaching an iron-age style at times in its texturing but maintaining balance in a far more conscious and purposeful way than anything from the era ever did. The panelwork doesn’t stand out, but when you look at it more closely, you’ll realize that no two pages have the same layout – this lends every page a fresh feeling while being easy to overlook. It’s a subtle hand that can add so much to the flow of the book without calling attention to itself.

Speaking of skilled but subtle hands, the colors also deserve special mention. Those of you who are fans of mine and make it your business to read everything I write (I speak of course to those who will be reading this in 2030 when I am the head of a small comics review empire and I have the income of a small country) may notice my Metal Men #7 review from this week spends time discussing the lack of conscious intention and positional awareness on the colorist’s part in relation to the shading. If you were wondering how I want a colorist to approach shading, look no further than this book – one side of a character is shaded less than the other side, and when a light source is behind a character, the front of the character is shadowed. “But Quinn,” you growl, slobber seeping between your serrated teeth and pooling on the dungeon floor, “isn’t that basic technique? Surely, ignoring light sources is the exception and not the rule?” Unfortunately, my friend, you couldn’t be more wrong. Look through most medium-effort and even some high-effort comics and you’ll find that the inkers and colorists alike spare hardly a thought to light sources when you get right down to it. It’s something that we should expect as a matter of course, yet it’s actually quite rare to find an artist these days that recognizes the importance of these details. There are some styles that can ignore light sources with impunity, but if you want something that approaches a realistic atmosphere – not necessarily a realistic style, but a realistic visual atmosphere – the shading becomes significantly more important.

The lettering in the book is competent and works well with the art! I wish I had more to say, but aside from a few font and shape choices, I think that the lettering does its job and does it well. Nothing more to say here. 

Oh, and a special mention: God bless Sharp and Oliff both for not putting the godawful New 52 lines on Barry. I’ve always hated them, and to see him in a costume without them taking up a bunch of real estate is so nice.

Story:

Continuing Season Two’s pattern of episodic silver/bronze age wackiness, this sees Hal team up with Barry to go to a clockwork planet and fight a bizarre semi-sentient army of toys commanded by absurdist, Carrollian rulers made of gold. Along for the ride is a minor character from Hal’s toy salesman days, a rival saleswoman by the name of Olivia Reynolds. Any attempt to review the story as a story will end in defeat – there’s hardly one to speak of. But that’s part of the charm of this book: reminding us that a comic does not always need a story to be entertaining and fun and thought-provoking. The story here is a classic one, with our heroes being whisked away to fight an otherworldly threat beyond logic and imagination! And it hits! The utter strangeness of all of it is incredibly fun, and Morrison’s bizarre un-English again lends a Carrollian lilt to the villains while also being just barely understandable with a moment’s thought. It’s a truly difficult line to walk, and Morrison does it with utter panache. Reading even a single line of it is a pleasure, and to have so much of it is a joy. It also manages to be inherently threatening and a little scary in a way that’s hard to put one’s finger on. Perhaps it’s the almost chthonic and guttural tone in which the language is so clearly meant to be muttered, or perhaps it’s the totally alien nature of the bad guys. Either way, the sinister golden men and their uncomfortable patchwork toys are super fun villains. It’s just a blast, as Hal tells Barry at the end of the issue.

Speaking of Barry, I think a large part of what makes this issue work is the classic, Brave, and the Bold style of the team-up, and the acknowledgment of the history that these two have. The Hal/Barry combo has always been one of my favorites in comics, and to see the banter and chemistry that they have is heartwarming in a really legitimate way. It feels like hanging out with two old friends who never get a chance to catch up. That feeling is also heightened by the classic framework of the issue because you as a reader also feel like you’re hanging out with an old friend in the form of the style of story. But, just like seeing an old friend, it’s not quite the same as it used to be. It’s a bronze age book, but a little more mature, a little more self-aware. It still does many of the same things it used to do, but now it does them by choice instead of from habit. And you know, you’ve changed too. You’ve lived through new things. The complexities of the world have changed both of you, and you know it, and nothing will ever be like it was back then, but…

Damn if seeing that old friend doesn’t make you smile just the same.