Comic Review: Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps #46

Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps #46

DC Comics

Writer: Robert Venditti

Artists: Clayton Henry and Pete Pantazis

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.”

Oh hey, Gardner’s dad. Don’t see him very often. Wonder what’s up.

“The courage to change the things I can.”

…not a great dad…

“And the wisdom to know the difference.”

Uh oh.

This week’s Corps (I’m shortening the title to Corps because if you think I’m writing out the full title then I have a very nice bridge to sell you, interest-free for the first twelve months) continues the Darkstars Rising storyline, although the darkstars aren’t around very much. The GL team is spread out across the universe, all of them dealing with their own issues, and I personally like the Scooby-Doo “let’s split up” style of storytelling. Bouncing around from story to story always makes things fun for me, and it seems as though writers have an easier time pacing their issues when they have little mini-chapters to work with. So I’ll review each little mini-story by itself, and then come back to the issue as a whole.

First up is the art, since it’s the same across the whole issue. It’s…. I mean, it’s okay. It’s got this sort of odd plastic quality to it, by which I mean that everyone looks like they’re Plastic Man pretending to be a given character. Does that make sense? They’re just… smooth. Too smooth. The faces are smooth. The hair is smooth. The colors have a lot to do with this, I think. They make things a little more flat and reflective than they ought to be, and so we’re left with this art that’s just a little too clean. Hal Jordan and Hector Hammond probably suffer the worst from this. The facial expressions are actually fairly expressive, so the artist definitely gets some points for that. The panel work is completely standard except for a couple of inset panels here and there, and the art just doesn’t have a lot of depth to it. All in all, the art just doesn’t exactly impress or disappoint. It’s there. It tells the story well enough. Meh.

Okay, now it’s storytime! Story one: Hal Jordan and Hector Hammond. I commend Venditti on bringing back Jordan’s seemingly throwaway line about potentially killing bad guys from a long-ass time ago, and this take on Hammond’s character really is interesting to me. When Johns wrote him, Hammond was obsessed, yes, but still villainous. Venditti writes him almost as a child, with an extremely naive grasp on right and wrong but with immense power. I find it really interesting, and I’m quite curious to see how Jordan gets out of the jam Venditti’s left him in. Story two: Jon Stewart and Zod. These two characters have an interesting dynamic since they’re both leaders but drastically different kinds. Watching them go back and forth was pretty entertaining, and the sequence ends with a fairly satisfying (if slightly unbelievable) boast from Stewart. This one was pretty short, but an important piece to the rest of the plot arc by my estimation. Story three: Kyle, Space Cabbie, and the New Gods. Not a lot happens here. There are a couple of funny moments, but it’s just a little bit of filler with some relevance to the larger plot. Story four: I can’t tell anything about story four. But it’s pretty solidly character-driven and is probably the best one in the book. The only thing that I don’t quite like about it is that the emotional stuff can come across pretty heavy-handed, but I don’t think that’s the biggest complaint considering the context of the emotions.

This is a fine issue of Corps. It’s definitely filler, though. Just bridging the gap between one thing happening and another thing happening. A few events occur, but we’re not going to see the results of those events until next issue anyway, and there’s just not enough kick behind a couple of them to make them feel like actual cliffhangers. The story just felt like it slowed down a bit this issue, so I’d like to see it pick up next time around.