For a comic with a slightly different preceding volume, Jeremy Adams' Green Lantern Vol. 2: Love and War is pretty excellent, perhaps — dare I say it — the Hal Jordan series we’ve been waiting for a while now. Nor would it be particularly difficult to look at Love and War and think, “This is what Adams meant in Green Lantern Vol. 1: Back in Action,” whether that quite holds up to scrutiny or not. Most impressive is Adams making short work of a Green Lantern mystery that stalwarts including Geoff Johns and Robert Venditti approached but never quite cracked.

There’s plenty good work done with other members of the Green Lantern Corps, too, making me all the more eager for Adams' Corps spin-off series to come.

[Review contains spoilers]

In Green Lantern Vol. 1: Back in Action, Adams' Hal Jordan displayed some worrying behavior — showing up at every turn to flirt with Carol Ferris, who’s engaged to someone else, and hanging out with what’s revealed to be a construct of the deceased Kilowog. That Adams doesn’t portray either of these as particularly worrisome within the book made Action feel lopsided and dark, as the audience wasn’t totally sure under what lens to view the proceedings.

Much of that is swept under the rug by the end of Love and War. Hal’s construct buddy is never mentioned again (after seeing the circumstances of Kilowog’s death, this is even more obviously set to be reversed), and by the end Carol has dropped her fiance and set off after Hal herself, so I guess those two messed up kids deserve one another. All is well that ends well, especially if being a whole volume’s removed makes where we started out a bit fuzzy.

But Adams' Green Lantern really picks up steam about the time he cameos Madame Xanadu, an unlikely character for this title, through to bringing back Tom Kalmaku and referencing DC’s 1988 Millennium crossover and Tom’s membership in the New Guardians. Since Adams' riotous Black Adam story in Future State: Suicide Squad, I’ve admired both his penchant for the irreverent (he works in an Omega-Bam-Man appearance here) and his blending far-reaching DC genres (see Black Adam plus DC One Million); Razer, Madame Xanadu, and Tom Kalmaku certainly fits that bill.

Adams' Tom reveals that there’s been secret failsafe Green Lantern power battery on Earth all this time, for one, and second, that there’s so many Earth Lanterns because they have an “excess of will” that makes them “well suited for survival.” Out of story, it’s obviously by dint of authorship that so many Green Lanterns come from Earth, but in story, a variety of Lantern writers have approached but never quite cracked the question of the Earth Lanterns. Adams, I felt, did it simply and convincingly, integrating the “willfullness” of the human Lanterns (Hal especially) that we’re already familiar with.

From there, the book folds into a “rebellion against the United Planets” story, losing the earthbound locale that had been an attractive part of Adams' Lantern. But Adams writes the other Lanterns well, notably Jo Mulleins, with good moments too for Simon Baz and Kyle Rayner, and displaying everyone’s concern for Teen Lantern Keli Quintela — all of it rendered sharply when Xermanico’s on the art. Relatively, the Green Lantern titles have hopped around a bit lately — 12 issues of The Green Lantern by Grant Morrison, 12 issues for Season Two, and then 12 issues of Geoffrey Thorne’s Green Lantern; Adams' depiction of the Lanterns feels nicely of a piece with Thorne’s, despite that Adams could have as easily gone his own way. Too that Adams is continuing the story of corrupt United Planets lead Lord Premier Thaaros, as begun by Phillip Kennedy Johnson during his Superman: Warworld saga (Thaaros is also in Johnson’s parallel Green Lantern: War Journal).

I appreciate DC including the backup stories and there’s a couple “name” ones here — Kyle Rayner’s creator Ron Marz writing the character with art by Dale Eaglesham, who drew the character under Judd Winick; and Sam Humphries on Jessica Cruz, whom he wrote for about 30 issues in Green Lanterns. They are fine, light by necessity, though Marz’s story sees Kyle pouring out his worries to a mute construct of his long-dead girlfriend Alex DeWitt, and Alex still being an empty vessel to hold Kyle’s problems 31 years later feels a bit tone deaf.

The most pleasing “get,” however, is Justice League International et al’s Kevin Maguire drawing Guy Gardner and (a) Lobo in Adams' Superman: House of Brainiac tie-in. Even if Maguire’s flat-top interpretation of Guy’s current hairstyle is inexplicable (like a stack of pancakes on Guy’s head), Maguire still demonstrates himself the king of facial expressions — Guy eyeing Lobo up and down in the second part is a subtlety few others can match, not to mention the spit take sequence a page or so later. I’m not quite sure we’re meant to recognize the Lobo here as the New 52 “replacement” Lobo, but I’d like to think we are.

I feared for where we were with the Green Lantern franchise after Jeremy Adams' Green Lantern Vol. 1: Back in Action. After Green Lantern Vol. 2: Love and War and with the new Green Lantern Corps series on the way, those concerns are almost completely assuaged. Hopefully the series makes good on this book’s promise that Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps' fate is now inextricably tied to Earth; a less cosmic, more superheroic take on the Green Lanterns is exactly what I’m looking for.

[Includes original and variant covers]