Green Lantern: The Starbreaker Supremacy is fine as far as Green Lantern events go. It is even perhaps refreshing that there are no great changes or revelations for the Green Lantern mythos in this one, and rather it’s “just” a story of heroes versus marauding villains.

That’s something the Green Lantern titles have needed, particularly in the Geoff Johns years, and so I wouldn’t dismiss an accessible Lantern tale out of hand. At the same time, Starbreaker does seem small, smaller even than the Green Lantern: Civil Corps event that preceded it, at a time when this newest iteration of the Lantern franchise maybe does need to start to be about something?

I would venture there’s revelations, new paradigms, new challenges all to come by the next issue of both Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps. Personally, I’d have stuck at least some of that into this book’s finale. Obviously withholding such things gives the audience a reason to come back, but the danger is having the audience wonder why they were there in the first place.

[Review contains spoilers]

Two storylines come to a head in Starbreaker Supremacy, quite aside from the attack of the vampire sun-eaters. One is that Razer and Aya, star-crossed lovers separated at the end of Green Lantern: The Animated Series, are finally reunited; the second is that Lantern construct Ellie has finally unlocked the origins of Teen Lantern Keli Quintela’s mysterious gauntlet. Writers Jeremy Adams and Morgan Hampton coordinate this well, arriving at the big moments just as the Starbreakers eliminate all emotion, torpedoing Razer’s interest in Aya and leaving Keli with other things to (no longer) worry about. It’s a clever kick-off that gives the audience some stakes in the Starbreakers' interruption.

At the end of Starbreaker, the various Lantern hues form a truce against a common foe, their power batteries now all housed on the Green Lantern homeworld of Oa. Whether that’s permanent or whether the Reds maybe carried off their battery after the fight, for instance, I’m not sure; the story doesn’t tell us in it’s all-too-brief epilogue.

That would be significant, all the (sometimes warring) Lanterns having to share Oa to power their rings, who might limit whose access, the political wheeling and dealing thereof — a development, among Lantern developments, less esoteric and more concrete. But again, if this is true, the series hold it back until their next issues, so the biggest implications of the crossover, its “point,” remains opaque.

In between these, Starbreaker occupies itself with typical crossover fare, a majority of the characters venturing to a far off locale to accomplish a McGuffin and come back again. Here, it’s freeing the various Lantern entities from the Source Wall, something I admit I didn’t follow so well.

Apparently this all dates back to Robert Venditti’s Green Lantern: Lights Out event some 10 years ago, except the entities are bad now (or at least an annoyance) and the Lanterns don’t want them around any more? It didn’t quite square with what I remembered (surely space dolphin Ion is a friend!). And evoking “Lights Out” only underscores Starbreaker’s deficiencies — “Lights Out” revealed the Lantern energy as a finite resource, creating something of an environmental crisis among the Corps, whereas Starbreaker is about … lopping the hands off space vampires?

Near the end of Starbreaker, Lantern John Stewart sacrifices himself, a moment that I also didn’t totally understand, taking as it does from the minutiae of Geoffrey Thorne’s Green Lantern run (good, but now three years past). There’s a dual problem here of, one, the audience can’t be that altogether bothered because of course the writers aren’t killing off John Stewart, and two, the moment isn’t even played for that much pathos within the story, as if even the characters know John’s death isn’t bound to be permanent.

Admittedly it’s taken me longer than it should have to realize how connected Adams' Green Lantern run up to this point and Thorne’s run are, with the Source Lantern that was central to Civil Corps having originated with Thorne, but again, there was some time in between. But I would hope, now that the final events of Thorne’s run are really coming into play, that DC might collect Thorne’s uncollected John Stewart: The Emerald Knight special with Hampton and Adams' next Green Lantern Corps collection, given that Starbreaker ends with a splash of that alternate Knight John Stewart from the so-called “Dark Sector.” If the two runs will be that interconnected, at least collect all the pieces.

As with Jeremy Adams and Morgan Hampton’s Green Lantern Corps Vol. 1: New World Rising, there’s nothing wrong with their portrayal of the Lanterns in Green Lantern: The Starbreaker Supremacy. Among a big cast, not everyone gets a role — Jo Mullein is pretty far in the background, for instance — but neither is anyone depicted poorly or out of character. The art by both Xermanico and Fernando Pasarin is strong and well matched; it should come as no surprise that the chapters I thought were weakest were the ones with a guest artist and a more cartoony, less realistic style, even if that matched the arrival of the animalistic Lantern entities. But still, I'd like a book with a little more meat on it.

High hopes for an upswing now that these titles have left the crossover behind.

[Includes original and variant covers]