Review: Green Lantern: Rage of the Red Lanterns hardcover/paperback (DC Comics)

I find I like Geoff Johns' Green Lantern title increasingly not for the story itself, but for the issues Johns uses the story to address. Sure, Green Lantern: Rage of the Red Lanterns is about a burgeoning War of Light fought by a bunch of new Corps, leading up to Blackest Night -- but it's also a story about police officers and soldiers, and about capitol punishment, and it's those aspects that give this book my recommendation.

I didn't "get," at first, Green Lantern Hal Jordan and renegade Lantern Sinestro's friendship. To me, Sinestro's always been this weaselly-looking guy with a pencil mustache who taunted Hal and acted superior, evil just for evil's sake. But the Green Lantern: Secret Origins collection opened the two men's early friendship to me in a way I hadn't seen before, and now their every interaction drips with the love/hate often saved for Professor Xavier and Magneto, or Smallville's Clark Kent and Lex Luthor.

To that end, Red Lanterns finds Hal Jordan at the door of Sinestro's prison cell, post-Sinestro Corps War, letting him know that Sinestro will be the first prisoner executed on the Green Lantern Guardians' new death row. The scene drips with Hal's indecision, mourning the coming execution of his once-friend even as he tries to convince himself Sinestro is too far gone to rehabilitate. In true Geoff Johns-ian fashion, the interior of this story is also the exterior, and later the new Blue "Hope" Lanterns and Red "Rage" Lanterns represent Hal's warring loyalties.

Most superhero comics can be separated into Superman or Punisher camps: those heroes who do kill and those who don't. Indeed, even when we have an instance like the recent where Wonder Woman killed Max Lord, her action came with a great deal of soul-searching and consequence -- the Superman camp. What I enjoy about the debate Johns has opened with the Guardians allowing the Green Lanterns to kill is that without punishment, the Lanterns choose whether to kill or not based on their own belief systems, and must deal with their own moral feelings on the issue, as must any police officer or combat soldier. Killing isn't a given (nor forbidden) but rather something being discussed, and that seems to me a new layer in superhero comics.

(Of course, the fact that this decision by the Guardians was in some way influenced by Sinestro, a fact only Hal Jordan knows, only deepens the delightful tension.)

The meat of this collection ought be the new hues of Lanterns populating Hal Jordan's world, but personally I found these confusing. I think the Red Lanterns spit their ring creations, but I'm not sure; it seemed that in trying to make the other Lanterns different from the Green Lanterns, Johns doesn't give us much to recognize. It didn't help that the Blue Lanterns apparently lie to Hal about their powers, such that in the end I wasn't certain what was true and what wasn't.

I did enjoy the complication of the Green Lanterns having to side now with the Sinestro Corps against their joint foe the Red Lanterns with a sense of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." I also liked that Johns name-checked the 1990s DC Comics space series Darkstars -- any old Darkstars characters that Johns wants to use in Green Lantern, I'm happy to see them -- and will use the Controllers from that series to head the Orange Lanterns. Only, it's strange that in all the hues and all the Lanterns, only Green Lanterns are the good guys. Perhaps I might feel more of a connection to some of these new Lanterns if they had some purpose other than the Sinestro Corps' mindless conquest and the Red Lanterns' equally-mindless rage.

DC released the first part of the "Rage of the Red Lanterns" storyline (chapter four here) as a Final Crisis tie-in, but be advised the ties are minimal at best. Hal Jordan references the beginning of Final Crisis, but the two stories don't meet again; the Alpha Lantern characters that appear in Final Crisis get an origin in this volume's first story, but the Alpha Lantern central to Final Crisis doesn't appear here either. I imagine that readers who bought Final Crisis: Rage of the Red Lanterns the first time around might've been disappointed, though it's a good story nonetheless.

[Contains full covers]

In all, this remains quality Green Lantern work from Geoff Johns -- not earth-shattering necessarily, but certainly a well-written and enjoyable comic.