Review: Green Lantern Vol. 1: Back in Action trade paperback (DC Comics)

For a while I’ve wished for an Earth-based Green Lantern title. As Geoff Johns' Green Lantern grew ever more cosmic and complicated, and runs that followed by Robert Venditti and others followed suit, a back-to-basics superhero vs. supervillains, civilian-identity-and-supporting-cast-type Green Lantern book often seemed very attractive. Thinking about it now, perhaps the last time we really had that was Ron Marz and Judd Winick’s successive Green Lantern Kyle Rayner runs, so maybe all this is a desire to return to that.

In the Dawn of DC Green Lantern Vol. 1: Back in Action, writer Jeremy Adams gives us Hal Jordan back on Earth, which is a start. By the end, Adams and artist Xermanico deliver us some pulse-pounding action sequences, and there’s some developments with Hal’s ring that I’m interested to see explored. But Back in Action starts slowly, for one thing, and its biggest liability is front and center, Hal Jordan himself. Jury’s out on this one, and I’m curious to see what Adams will do next.

[Review contains spoilers]

No sooner is Hal back on Earth than he’s sniffing around Carol Ferris. His first stop is to ask Carol out to dinner, which she refuses because she has a boyfriend; we then see Hal make a 24-hour push to rise in the ranks at Ferris Aircraft until he’s piloting Carol and her boyfriend Nathan’s jet. Hal then promptly locks Nathan in the bathroom so that he can continue to talk himself up to Carol.

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This is not the first time I’ve wondered if the era of Hal Jordan might be over. I guess “romantic cad” is the Hal character’s personality, and one can’t say Adams is mis-writing him any more than writing a grouchy Guy Gardner or a bumbling Clark Kent. But characters also grow with the times, and I’m curious as to the mental math Adams is doing here, whether the value of keeping Hal’s historical “heel” portrayal is really worth having the book’s protagonist come off like a stalker.

For me, it put a damper on the beginning of the book. We’ve got two chapters where Hal does do some cool Green Lantern stuff but also wholly disregards Carol turning him down; then there’s the two-issue Knight Terrors tie-in, which has nicely scary bits but also a few different sequences of Hal using his ring to make guns that he shoots at his foes. This obviously isn’t as out of character as if it were Batman, but Green Lantern shooting guns (with “Ptow! Ptow!” noises) felt callous to me on Adams' part.

We can also intuit early on that Kilowog is either dead or presumed dead and Hal’s struggling with that, having created a Kilowog construct with his ring. Maybe all of this, Hal in mourning and his behavior and so on, is tied together, but I had difficulty centering myself in this book. Green Lantern’s throwing out a pitch for a Little League soccer game, the kind of “hero about town” stuff we don’t see enough of these days, but he’s also stalking Carol and talking to an imaginary Kilowog, and that makes for a bright book with weirdly dark, even disturbing undertones. And I can’t quite tell if that’s all intentional on Adams part or if he doesn’t have a full perspective of how the story’s coming off.

I did like, immensely, some updates/restorations that Adams makes to Hal’s Green Lantern powers, that Hal can now make constructs in different colors, even lifelike, and also that he can, with effort, make separate constructs that he can control independently. It’s a difficult “pat your head and rub your stomach” aspect to the power ring that’s immediately relatable, and Xermanico depicts it well in sequences in Green Lantern #4 and #5. I never quite thought Hal wouldn’t triumph, but Adams and Xermanico have a couple effective instances of Hal sweating it out in close calls.

I also appreciated the modernity that Adams brings to Hal’s circumstances, namely that pilots are out and drones are in. It’s not as simple as all that, of course, but equally in Hal “piloting” two constructs at once, we do begin to see a Green Lantern who does less work directly in the fray and more controlling proxies from afar. Back in Action is largely setup, but my hope is that Adams indeed settles Hal down into a status quo that reflects some of this — has the modern world passed Hal by in career as well as in social dynamics? Superman’s a parent, Batman’s a parent, and Hal’s still Hal — I’d be interested to read a meta-text that grafts this character essentially unchanged since the Silver Age on to the here-and-now and tries to reconcile him.

I’m getting my DC universes all mixed up, because I saw Razer at the end of this book and thought to myself that he’d already debuted somewhere in the DCU, but then realized I’m thinking of Razer’s cameo late in the Young Justice TV show following Green Lantern: The Animated Series. This will be interesting, sure, though admittedly Razer showing up isn’t quite as exciting as it would have been some years ago. I do hold out that Kilowog is not actually dead, though we’ve seen him killed before too and resurrected; one way or another, he’s enough of a DC staple that I’m skeptical he’s gone for good.

It'll be a few more weeks before Jeremy Adams' Green Lantern Vol. 2 arrives, and even longer from when I read Green Lantern Vol. 1: Back in Action, and wrote this review. Which is to say, it’s been a bit of time, reading pile-wise, that Hal Jordan has out there in the world and, by my estimation, kind of a strange guy. Again, I don’t know what to make of all this; hopefully Adams had a plan.

[Includes original and variant covers]

Rating 2.25