Green Lantern 23.1
Special “Villains Month” Title: Relic 1
Robert Venditti, Rags Morales
Forever Evil Crossover
Spoiler alert! You have been warned!
This Green Lantern tie-in issue confirmed a frightening reality for me as a reader: I don’t really like aliens. At all. I followed the various Green Lantern titles throughout the last five-plus years because Geoff Johns made the titles just so damn readable, what with singlehandedly reinventing (and rejuvenating) Sinestro and making Hal Jordan go from bad guy to good guy and back to the best Green Lantern of all time. In a sense, he restored order to a broken character and a cast that had gone stagnant. Then he finished his run. And I took that as a jumping off point. But Villains Month brought me back because one of the crossovers features Mongul (a Superman villain in my opinion) and Sinestro (a villain that has always interested me due to his lack of seeing himself as one). That, and the whole fact that I’m a sucker for gimmicks, tie-ins, and crossover events.
So here’s the skinny. It’s got good art from Rags Morales and a decent story by new series regular writer Robert Venditti, but all in all, it suffers from what always scared me away from Star Trek, Star Wars, Green Lantern, and in all honesty, a majority of the sci-fi genre in general: Not enough humanity. In a sense, it’s way too confusing for casual readers, readers (like me) who may have dropped the book (or all four of them) after Johns and company abandoned ship, and I have no idea what’s going on or who (or why I should care) about any of these characters. Who is Relic? What makes him different than any Green Lantern (or alien space bad guy) out there that we’ve read about year after year after year and seen in movie after movie after movie? He wants to destroy the spectrum of colors (which makes absolutely no sense to me) because… Why? But more importantly, why do we need an entire issue explaining what the various colors mean and how he plans to get rid of them? The answer is simple: To make a quick four bucks.
This issue is nothing short of prologue to a story that I don’t really care to read. It’s leading into Lights Out, the next Green Lantern crossover event, which is going to continue to prove that there is no need for four (five, if you count Larfleeze) Lantern titles each and every month. One is more than enough. Though I am looking forward to the Sinestro and Mongul issues (and hesitantly approaching the Black Hand one), I have to say that this issue just takes way too much previous knowledge on the part of the reader to be enjoyable. That Morales art sure is great, though. Almost enough to justify the purchase entirely. Overall, this issue is not worth the extra dollar, but it’s a decent enough single issue for hardcore Lantern fans or even those who are interested in the upcoming crossover. Save yourself a buck and get the regular cover if you’re a regular reader.
My Rating: 3/5
