Green Lantern #18, 19 (DC)

writer: Geoff Johns
artist: Ardian Syaf, Szymon Kudranski

These are some of the final issues of Geoff Johns writing Green Lantern, something he's been doing since 2004 with the Rebirth mini-series.  Now's as good a time as ever to acknowledge that his interpretation wasn't for everyone.  This is the sort of thing you expect from a generally popular run.  It's perhaps also inevitable when the movie more or less based on this run was more or less a failure at the box office.

#18 picks up with Hal Jordan and Sinestro in the dead zone where they've been trapped for the last several issues thanks to Black Hand (last prominent during Blackest Night a few years back).  One of my personal criticisms of Johns has been that he hasn't always had a strong focus on Hal, the character he helped bring back as an undisputed heroic figure.  What Johns has spent most of his time doing is expanding the Green Lantern mythology.  He's done that in a lot of ways, notably with the idea of the entire traditional color spectrum having its own league of champions, a concept suggested by the prior existence of the yellow ring Sinestro has used and the Star Sapphires.  It might be argued that all Johns has ever done is work on the details neglected by others, treating them as vital elements rather than static concepts.

As the issue progresses, we're reminded that Simon Baz, the most recent human to become drafted into the Green Lantern Corps, has also joined Hal and Sinestro in the dead zone.  Predictably, Sinestro uses the opportunity to selfishly advance his own objectives, believing that he's the only one capable of confronting the First Lantern currently rampaging around the franchise.

Since the New 52 relaunch, Johns has done an excellent job exploring both Hal and Sinestro, and so for them to have ended up in this predicament in an appropriate cumulative point.  When Johns has his characters converse, it's different than when, say, Brian Michael Bendis does so.  Bendis is like a strictly comic book version of Joss Whedon (who has also written comics).  He specializes in clever dialogue, grounded in context but mostly emphasizing the character of the writer.  When Johns does it, he's emphasizing the characters and their particular narratives.  Hal and Sinestro are characters obsessed with their own narratives.  Javier Marias wrote about something called "narrative horror" in Your Face Tomorrow.  This is something neither Hal nor Sinestro suffer from.  Hal is always trying to rise above his problems.  Sinestro is always trying to deny his, or else simply wording them in the best manner possible.  That's what Johns truly seems to grasp.

When those on the outside free Simon, they get Sinestro along for the ride.  Yay everyone but Hal!

#19 is a lot about how Hal intends to follow them out.  The only way is to die and wield the power of the black ring, which only works on the dead.  To do this he has to willingly sacrifice himself.  We've already seen that you can't just die in the dead zone.  Hal discusses this option with Tomar Re, an iconic Green Lantern from a previous era, dead a very long time in continuity but featured (and voiced by the great Geoffrey Rush) in the movie.

Because Simon (the only human Green Lantern created by Johns) and Sinestro are back out in the real world, there's a greater emphasis on the action there.  Simon has been the focus of the title since last fall's #0, but he's taking a back seat in these last issues from Johns to the more familiar faces.  Johns will still be writing him in the Justice League books, so I guess there's that.

The First Lantern, Volthoom, has apparently been a lot like the Batman crossover event foes, doing much the same thing from series to series, and this bugs some readers.  That's par for the course with these events.  It depends on how distinctively the individual writers tell the same story.  Maybe in the collections I'll get to see for myself.  In this issue, he has Sinestro see a vision of his life if he'd never become a Green Lantern.  Sinestro's relationship with his homeworld of Korugar has long been a key element of franchise lore.  In the way Johns has presented him, Sinestro could very easily have been a character on Lost, someone with a dark past in need of redemption that doesn't seem so hard when they're seen in sympathetic light (that's literally every character on Lost).

Hal was contemplating last issue making the leap to his death and everyone else's salvation (well, he's the hero of the title and everything), and he's doing the same at the end of this one.  Johns brought him back from the dead at the start of his run.  Does he reverse that at the end?

When the new writer comes aboard two issues from now, Hal will still be around.  But is the whole point of the First Lantern to provide Johns with another patented reality swipe?  It seems possible.  Johns did it in Infinite Crisis and again in Flashpoint.  That could very well be how next issue ends.

We'll see.