Al Ewing’s Absolute Green Lantern Vol. 1: Without Fear has at times an interesting paranoid bent, approaching an apocalyptic locked-room tale along the lines of Lord of the Flies and, most pointedly, Under the Dome. Late in the book, at its most complicated, I felt Ewing did well bringing some of the alienness back to the Green Lantern mythos, keeping things familiar enough while adding sufficient new layers to make it all weird again, no longer the same story of Oa and the Guardians we’ve heard so many times.

My biggest hesitation about Absolute Green Lantern is the fit of artist Jahnoy Lindsay. I hardly read much manga, so I’ll admit to lack of experience if not outright unintentional bias, but the flop sweat you sometimes see on characters' faces (manpu, I’m told) strike me as campy. I liked Lindsay on Superboy: Man of Tomorrow, which lent itself to that aesthetic; on Green Lantern, sometimes I thought Lindsay was really on it with the gore and horror, and then sometimes I thought the art took an otherwise affecting scene and moved it into melodrama.

This push and pull, and maybe something about the way the story is told primarily through flashback, put me off; Absolute Green Lantern is my least favorite among all the Absolute books I’ve read so far (my only one left is Absolute Flash). But it’s not bad by any means; I’m intrigued to see what comes next, the ways in which Ewing works in related DC figures is clever, and there is some significant continuity between Green Lantern and the other Absolute books. Not a poor showing, by any account, but maybe just the most outside my frame of reference.

[Review contains spoilers]

Our main characters here are Jo Muellin, Hal Jordan, and John Stewart. While Jo was still a police officer and John still an architect, one notable aspect is that Ewing pulls the Hal Jordan fighter pilot center completely out of the mythos; of all the other Green Lantern aspects that are worked in here, Carol Ferris and Ferris Aircraft are completely absent. Insofar as there even is a Corps yet (we haven’t totally seen such), the metaphor seems to be for law enforcement (if not just basic spiritual enlightenment); there is none of the daredevil, postwar “Right Stuff” aesthetic that pervades most traditional Green Lantern runs.

That is useful toward pointing Green Lantern in a different direction; at the same time, Ewing can’t really get away from a conclusion involving a superhero with green light and a supervillain with black light shooting ray beams at one another, so I’m not sure the full potential is reached. Indeed Without Fear is far, far better when it deals with the townspeople of Evergreen trapped under a dome, trying to figure out the rules of the alien forcefield and considering how to survive, than when it gets down to a generic comic book slobberknocker. Too, I would say, Lindsay’s art is stronger in the former than the latter.

And as I mentioned, I don’t think the flashback structure quite worked for me. We get from the beginning that Hal, former toy salesman (a nod to his history), has been infected by the “black hand” power, which he can’t control and, we see twice, tends to lash out when provoked. The bit late in the book where Hal shoots the Abin Sur in a fit of misunderstanding is effective, but at that moment we already know so much about the what and why that I don’t think it was as gripping as it could have been. Same with Jo receiving her powers, and the “twist” that the “hero” Jo has inadvertently caused more destruction here than the “villain” Hal. Then, of course, Jo and Hal face off rather predictably.

At least, having the black hand doesn’t make Hal the book’s go-to villain, but rather that “black,” or Qard, is just one level of enlightenment up which a person can progress (Ewing does well here reframing some of the Lantern colors, including that Guy Gardner is still red, but that red now indicates patience and restraint). It seems like the book turns, or at least will turn, on the relationship between Jo, Hal, and John, friends turned superheroic allies, but I didn’t think the one casual conversation that Ewing gave us was enough to invest us in them emotionally.

Why does Hal work as a “collectibles dealer”? With Hal no longer a pilot, is he just kind of a tenuously employed vagabond? Have the trio only known each other as adults, or from high school or childhood? I was taken by an urge to re-read James Tynion’s Nice House on the Lake while reading Green Lantern and it rather feels like that kind of connective tissue we need here (see also Scott Snyder doing some of the same “high school friends” work, and better, in Absolute Batman).

In this, the penultimate book of the first set of Absolute titles (for my reading list, anyway), Ewing includes a lot of acknowledgment of the other titles, such that (in my head at least) I can see Green Lantern functioning as the final rising action of Act One. Much of this is delivered by way of evil businessman Hector Hammond, who worries over competition from Lazarus and its leader from Absolute Superman and who has an upcoming meeting with Veronica Cale from Absolute Wonder Woman, not to mention references here to Gateway City and Gotham. With the Absolute agent Cameron Chase, Ewing repeats a gag from Absolute Martian Manhunter, and I wasn’t sure if that was coincidence or indicative of something.

Not to mention that aside from Jo, Hal, John, Guy, Hammond, and Chase, Green Lantern uses or at least mentions Kyle Rayner, Simon Baz, Alan Scott, Todd “Obsidian” Rice, and Sylvester “Star-Spangled Kid” Pemberton — plus the threat of Mogo. That’s a lot of DC content, and with the JSA associations, farther reaching than other Absolute titles that stayed within their “families.” With Green Lantern’s somewhat truncated timespan (more Absolute Wonder Woman than Batman) and limited locale, this book feels a bit insular, but these other touches reflect a wider world considerably.

There are times that the concepts in Absolute Green Lantern Vol. 1: Without Fear felt combatively opaque — when the Abin Sur (a title, not a name) is talking about Jo as “anomaly” or “the Tomar,” for instance. But this isn’t a detriment; rather it’s been a long time since the “alien” in the Green Lantern mythos has really seemed alien, since all the major history hadn’t been adjudicated so many times as to become predictable. I still think Absolute Green Lantern looks too simple — that the art doesn’t give added heft to the story — but I appreciate this one doing something maybe a little more different than even some of the others.

[Includes original and variant covers, character designs]