Review: Green Lantern Corps Vol. 2: Lanterns United trade paperback (DC Comics)

Morgan Hampton leaves the most interesting political aspects of Green Lantern Corps Vol. 2: Lanterns United implied, bringing to the forefront contrived action instead. It’s an exercise in not trusting the reader; Lanterns United is an improvement over the failed comedy of the first volume, but this is still a book that hasn’t found its footing yet.

At four regular issues and a DC K.O. special, Lanterns United feels short, perhaps necessarily as an interstitial issue between its own Starbreaker Supremacy crossover and hooking up with DC Next Level in the aftermath of K.O. I wonder if DC should’ve have just given Corps a K.O. story then; instead, we’ve got the world almost ending in this book (for different reasons than it’s ending elsewhere) just after the world almost ended in the last volume, and at some point it begins to feel a bit overblown.

[Review contains spoilers]

At the end of Green Lantern: The Starbreaker Supremacy, the audience was left with the idea that all the various-hued Corps might have to live together on Oa, where their batteries were now located. That was not explicit, however, nor is it even explicit at the slightly time-jumped start of Lanterns United; rather the various Corps simply are living together on Oa in different cities (who knew Oa had cities?) and the audience is dropped in the middle of their not getting along.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

I’ve praised writers in the past who don’t get caught up in explaining the minutiae but rather understand that the reader will catch up; I can’t necessarily fault Hampton in that regard. But as United gets to where it’s going, I couldn’t help think that the more interesting story might have been the fine details — where all these regions of Oa have been all this time, how they decided who would live where, how entire cities were built, and so on. Not the most pulse-pounding considerations, but Corps could maybe use a not-pulse-pounding volume, and also I tend to think the right writer could make it work.

Instead, this is the moment that the alien Enquar decides to take his revenge for grievances against the Corps, which involves sneaking off Oa and then returning in the form of a water planet to deluge and destroy said Lanterns. We just saw the planet Lantern Mogo take out Thanagar in Jeremy Adams' Green Lantern Vol. 4: Civil Corps, which preceded Hampton’s first Corps volume, plus the Starbreakers invading Oa, so when Hampton titles the issue “War for Oa,” I couldn’t help think, “Again?”

Enquar is interesting as a kind evil cosmic Lorax, authentically aggrieved at the pollution of his home world (though, also kind of a space vampire, so see again the Starbreakers). Hampton has done well setting this up, as Enquar was in the background in scenes in Green Lantern Corps Vol. 1: New World Rising, seeming there for comic effect; a water-being, he has a tendency to liquify and re-form as a baby. But Hampton and artist Fernando Pasarin’s first depiction of Enquar has him in handcuffs, where in this book he’s just walking around Oa when he, rather coincidentally, chooses his moment to go bad; I wasn’t sure it all made sense or how much thought Hampton had given to the pieces.

The Enquar storyline, however, can’t even fill this book’s scant issues, so Hampton fritters away another with John Stewart versus Kyle Rayner’s old enemy Effigy. Much as I like seeing both Effigy and the villain Fatality who factors here, I didn’t feel Hampton gave them much personality beyond snarling rogues (oddly, other characters mention John and Fatality’s past relationship, but not the two themselves). Effigy is really just “the thing to be hit” in a trite sequence where John’s Lantern-construct sister has to be hurt so John can admit he cares about her. It’s not the strongest use of either Effigy or the issue itself just to get this alt-timeline John back to where his doppleganger was just a couple issues ago.

Best, then, is the single-issue sequence where the various Corps have to battle Larfleeze, who’s been stoking strife among the others. That’s short, though, and the Oans having their emotions controlled by Larfleeze after their emotions were just controlled by Sorrow also feels repetitive. One of the book’s artists, either Pasarin or Will Conrad, draws a heck of an explosion during the fight, but it’s such a huge mushroom cloud that it misleads the audience into thinking the damage is greater than it is, which is to say basically nonexistent.

Included here is Jeremy Adams' DC K.O.: Green Lantern Galactic Slam special. Cynically, this feels like an addition just to pad out this book, since Adams' book is Green Lantern and this issue stars Kyle Rayner and his team who appear in Green Lantern. It’s stuck, very awkwardly, between the third and last chapters of Hampton’s story, and that only maybe makes sense because Hampton’s epilogue takes place after DC K.O., but I’m not convinced. Still, I do highly enjoy the internal continuity Adams builds between his books, whether Green Lantern and Aquaman or that his space wrestler Omega-Bam-Man has traveled from Flash to Green Lantern to here.

But I’m unsure exactly what Adams is doing in this issue. His origin for Omega reveals that the wrestler comes from a planet where “men have a toxic gene … so our society relegated them to non-physical activities during something called the Great Submission.” Cast out for his “awesomeness,” Omega departs his planet with the wrestling federation that destroys the planet in its wake.

Omega is often played for laughs (we learn too that his haircut is based on Superman’s mullet), so probably this is a send-up, with shades also of Lobo’s ultra-violent origin. At the same time, Omega being “oppressed” for toxic masculinity (not that we see him do anything untoward) perhaps feels too close to a real argument, and there’s been gender issues in Adams' previous works that might have needed a second look, too, so there’s precedent for looking at this askance.

Green Lantern Corps is not the only DC series where it feels like proximity to DC K.O. has required a tapping of the brakes. My hope is that after Green Lantern Corps Vol. 2: Lanterns United, all else out of the way, Morgan Hampton can open up and really start telling some stories; there’s a bevy of plotlines across all the Corpsmen that get no attention here. Then again, that’s what I hoped after Green Lantern Corps' first volume, too, so maybe the problem is my expectations.

[Includes original and variant covers]

Rating 2.0