Final Crisis 1 Cover

I think I finally figured out what’s odd about J.G. Jones’s otherwise great cover for _Final Crisis_ 1: the ring’s not lit up. Clearly he spent some time playing with a flashlight and a digital camera to figure out how a Green Lantern ring would cast shadows, but the ring itself is dark and the logo easily visible. It’s like the light’s coming from the space between Hal Jordan’s knuckle and the back of the ring. Shouldn’t looking straight on at the ring be like looking right at a lightbulb?

Green Lantern Sinestro Corps Checklist

Over the past few nights I’ve reread the big Green Lantern event from last year, The Sinestro Corps War. I really liked the story, finding it to be the perfect sort of fun, widescreen superhero action you want in comics. The story was designed to be very easy to read, with minimal tie-in issues. Despite what by my count adds up to 23 books, that’s actually very low for many summer “events”, like Marvel’s Civil War. In fact, while the main two books telling the story were Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps, the subplots are split up properly such that you can easily start with the initial special and then read only one or the other title and still get a coherent read out of it. Of course, with any crossover, if you want to get the whole picture, it can get hard to know which books to read in what order.

The story is very much foreshadowed in both titles from the very start, beginning with Green Lantern: Rebirth and popping up here and there in both Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps. You’ll see Batman get offered a yellow ring, you’ll see the Zamorans’s purple rings, you’ll meet Ranx the sentient city, and a new direction for Black Hand, but none of it is required reading. Below are the books that bear the official “Sinestro Corps” logos, plus a story from twenty years before the crossover started that’s absolutely essential to it. I’m actually very surprised the didn’t reprint it in one of the issues.

1. Tales of the Green Lantern Corps Annual 2: Tygers, a 1986 story by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neil, upon which Geoff Johns draws heavily. It’s been collected in DC Universe: The Stories of Alan Moore, and can be read online here.
2. Green Lantern 18: Tales of the Sinestro Corps back-up story about Despotellis
3. Green Lantern 19:Tales of the Sinestro Corps back-up story about Karu-Sil
4. Green Lantern 20: Tales of the Sinestro Corps back-up story about Bedovian
5. Sinestro Corps Special 1: Sinestro Corps War, part one
6. Green Lantern 21: Sinestro Corps War, part two
7. Green Lantern Corps 14: Sinestro Corps War, part three
8. Green Lantern 22: Sinestro Corps War, part four
9. Green Lantern Corps 15: Sinestro Corps War, part five
10. Green Lantern 23: Sinestro Corps War, part six
11. Tales of the Sinestro Corps: Parallax 1
12. Green Lantern Corps 16: Sinestro Corps War, part seven
13. Tales of the Sinestro Corps: Cyborg Superman 1: includes Tales of the Sinestro Corps back-up story about Kryb
14. Green Lantern 24: Sinestro Corps War, part eight
15. Tales of the Sinestro Corps: Superman Prime 1
16. Blue Beetle 20
17. Green Lantern Corps 17: Sinestro Corps War, part nine
18. Green Lantern Corps 18: Sinestro Corps War, part ten
19. Tales of the Sinestro Corps: Ion 1
20. Green Lantern 25: Sinestro Corps War, Finale
21. Green Lantern 19: Sinestro Corps War Epilogue
22. Green Lantern/Sinestro Corps Secret Files 1: includes Tales of the Green Lantern Corps story about Morro

I don’t necessarily recommend reading everything up there. You’ll probably enjoy the story much more just reading the main books (bolded above). The Blue Beetle tie-in is entirely inconsequential to the main conflict, but presents another angle to the big fight on Earth and fits in nicely with that book’s characters. The four Tales of the Sinestro Corps books fill in the characters some, but weigh down the narrative flow more than they help I think. The Epilogue isn’t too important, and the Secret Files book is a cool thing that I would have loved as a kid (and still do!), but doesn’t add to the story much. Finally, the events of Green Lantern 26-28 spin directly out of the War story, as do Corps 20 and 21, but I haven’t listed them above.

Geoff Johns on Sinestro Corps

Interview with Geoff Johns about the Sinestro Corps story in Green Lantern

Alan Moore's Green Lantern Tales

In 1985-1987, Alan Moore wrote three short Green Lantern stories for DC. All three were about various Green Lanterns who were not the major characters starring in the books at the time, allowing Moore to come up with whatever crazy sci-fi stories he wanted. Recently Geoff Johns and Dave Gibbons have latched onto Moore’s stuff, making them very important works to the current Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps titles. Johns’s backup story about Sinestro Corpsman Despotellis is a straight riff on the Mogo story, the villains from Tygers have all been introduced, Mogo has been given a recurring role in Green Lantern Corps, and the prophecy told to Abin Sur is starting to occur.

The three stories have recently been collected (along with For the Man Who Has Everything and Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, considered to be some of the best Superman stories ever told, and seminal Joker story The Killing Joke) in the DC Universe: The Stories of Alan Moore trade paperback. 4ColorHeroes also has the original issues for sale at reasonable prices.

Scans Daily has copies of all three stories if you want to read them: Tygers, from Tales of the Green Lantern Corps Annual 2 is here, and Mogo Doesn’t Socialize and In Blackest Night are here, from Green Lantern 188 and Tales of the Green Lantern Corps Annual 3, respectively. I’m probably going to pick up the trade paperback at some point, but the scans serve as a nice preview of Moore’s mainstream stuff.

While I was poking around Scans Daily, I also found this post showing how a one panel throwaway scene in Green Lantern 22 references a story from eleven years ago. None of this is stuff you had to know to follow the plot, but I love that the creators are going back through the older books and picking out these little gems.

Green Lantern Color Speculation

Green Lantern has been lots of sci-fi fun lately. It kind of sounds silly to write it all out, but in the comic book world Geoff Johns makes it work beautifully. When he and Ethan Van Sciver rebooted the title a few years ago, they added in the beginnings of a concept that there are different energies in addition to the Green Lantern’s green energy, all of which are keyed differently. Green Lanterns harness willpower to make it work, and the energy comes out green. Sinestro uses fear, and it comes out yellow. Recently Johns wrote a story about Star Sapphire and the Zamorans, hinting that their major motive is love, and that the Star Sapphire power works the same way as the Green Lantern and Sinestro energy. This led to the big reveal at the end of that issue, showing three pedestals holding a green, yellow, and violet lantern, and a bunch of empty pedestals, along with a “gotta catch ‘em all” line. Internet speculation is that eventually we’ll see an entire emotional energy spectrum.

The Sinestro Corps Special contains the following dialog which is widely believed to be the tip-off to what the other emotions are going to be:

Cyborg Superman: Without life, there will be no fear or avarice or hate.

Ganthet: Without life there is also no hope or compassion.

Sayd: Or love.

We’ve already seen that fear’s color is yellow, and love’s color is violet, so mapping the remaining emotions to colors, we get:

• Hate: red

• Avarice: orange

• Fear: yellow

• (neutral): green

• Hope: blue

• Compassion: indigo

• Love: violet

Which also sets up a nice set of dueling pairs:

• Love vs. Hate

• Compassion vs. Avarice

• Hope vs. Fear

This puts green in the middle. Green Lantern rings work on sheer willpower alone, and require their bearers to set all emotions aside. What’s interesting also is that the Zamorans are villains, so it doesn’t look like Johns is setting up one side of the spectrum to be good versus evil. Love can be destructive, hope can be false, and so on. If each color gets a lantern corps of its own, that will mean the Green Lanterns are going to be stuck battling off colors from all sides.

A scene in an early issue of 52 contained a chalkboard on which Rip Hunter had written a jumble of things, many of which turned out to be clues to the series later plot development. Booster Gold 1, released a few weeks ago and written by Johns, featured a similar chalkboard, on which the words “Beware the Red Lantern” were written. Pair this with statements by Van Scriver that he an Johns are going to do another big GL some time after the Sinestro Corps stuff, and it seems that they have a whole rainbow coalition war planned for down the road.

IGN: Geoff Johns Interview: Round Two

IGN: Geoff Johns Interview: Round Two

On Green Lantern and Justice Society.

Geoff Johns on Sinestro Corps (spoilers)

Geoff Johns on Sinestro Corps (spoilers)

Heart of the Corps

Heart of the Corps

Interview from January with Sinestro Corps artist Ethan Van Scriver

Best Shots Extra: Green Lantern: Sinestro Corps Special

Best Shots Extra: Green Lantern: Sinestro Corps Special

This was the only comic book I read that came out this week, and man the trip was worth it. I realize that “event fatigue” is setting on, but this is one to pick up.

Behind the Page: Ethan Van Scriver

Behind the Page: Ethan Van Scriver

This is an older one. Long interview with Green Lantern: Rebirth artist Ethan Van Scriver.

Green Lantern's Homecoming Blues

Green Lantern’s Homecoming Blues

Ron Marz discusses returning to the character he created.

Tapping into Evil: Ethan Van Scriver on Sinestro Corps

Tapping into Evil: Ethan Van Scriver on Sinestro Corps

I’m probably unhealthily excited about this one. The first back-up Sinestro Corps. story in the most recent Green Lantern was really, really good.

scans_daily: Tales of the GL Corps! "Mogo Doesn't Socialize" and "In Blackest Night"

scans_daily: Tales of the GL Corps! “Mogo Doesn’t Socialize” and “In Blackest Night”

Two great Green Lantern stories by Alan Moore.

Green Lantern creator dead at 91

Green Lantern creator dead at 91

Martin Nodell created the golden age Green Lantern Alan Scott.

Ethan Van Sciver on Green Lantern

Newsarama just published [a long interview with artist Ethan Van Scriver][1], who drew Green Lantern: Rebirth last year. The interview’s pretty long, but here’s the exciting part, where he talks about Green Lantern:

NRAMA: You did some DC work with books like Impulse and Flash: Iron Heights, as well as a few gigs at Marvel, including New X-Men with Grant Morrison. At what point did you feel like you had really made it as a comic book artist?

EVS: That still hasn’t really… well, maybe that happened recently with Rebirth, but up until then, I always felt like a very small fish in a big pond. I still do feel like that. I feel like I’ve been very, very lucky. But I still don’t feel like I’ve made it. I haven’t achieved everything that I wanted to achieve yet. And I’m still very much in awe of my peers. So I’ve got a little ways to go yet.

NRAMA: What is your favorite thing you’ve done? Is it Rebirth?

EVS: Yeah, I think so. So far. It’s something that I can read over and over again and still enjoy. You know, most of the work that I’ve done is hard for me to look at now, with some time gone by. But Rebirth is really just good. It’s a fun read. I recommend it.

NRAMA: What’s your favorite issue?

EVS: Of Rebirth?

NRAMA: Well, your favorite issue of anything you’ve done.

EVS: I would say the first issue of Rebirth is my favorite, because I think it’s Geoff’s writing at his best. Geoff tells me he thinks the fourth issue is the best because there’s so much cool stuff going on. And there is. I mean, there’s Green Arrow with the Green Lantern ring, there’s Hal rising up out of his coffin, there’s all this great stuff. But Issue #1, I think, is the best thing he’s ever written because it just hooks you right away. It’s so full of mystery, and so strange. And you just feel a rainy breeze, like something’s happening, something’s coming — it’s on the wind.

NRAMA: And you created Parallax for that. It must have been really fun to come up with the design for that freaky looking thing.

EVS: Parallax — Geoff just said he’s this ancient fear entity. Obviously, if he is fear, he’s older than anything. I think Geoff just described him as a big, huge monster. I guess I thought primitive, and I was thinking, let’s mix insects and dinosaurs and try to maintain some of the design for the Parallax costume — try to incorporate that into his biology. And I ended up with that thing, which was good enough.

NRAMA: Do you think you’ll be drawing Parallax again?

EVS: That’s a loaded question, isn’t it?

NRAMA: Well, if someone was trying to find out if you’re doing a project with a lot of yellow rings in it, then yeah, I guess it’s fairly loaded.

EVS: Chances are, I will be drawing Parallax again, yeah.

NRAMA: Besides Parallax, another thing you added to the Green Lantern mythos is the ring signature.

EVS: Yeah. All the little glowing effects and things are a new addition to the Green Lanterns and the way they look now. You know, it started with Geoff because he initially said he thought it would be great if each one of the individual Lanterns had their own sort of beam that came out of their ring.

NRAMA: And didn’t he describe that in the narrative of Rebirth? There was a scene where Kyle and John and Hal were working together to take down Parallax, but each was doing it with a different style. John’s had the look of an architect, Kyle’s an artist, and then Hal with his straightforward fearlessness. Geoff actually spelled out why they looked that way and your art illustrated it.

EVS: Yeah! Yeah! It was amazing! He had it all worked out. And as soon as he just described it to me — I think what he originally said was that John’s ring would make a rigid, kind of squared beam, constructed.

NRAMA: Because as an architect, he would use rulers and straight edges.

EVS: Right. And from there, I remember we had these conversations where I would say, “Dude! John should be covered by this architectural bitmap wherever he goes.” I mean, the way he thinks and the way he solves problems in his work — he should actually wear that on his sleeve, literally. It should be all over him. And let’s do the same with everybody else. They’re all so unique and individual. And so I started to kind of flirt with it in the first issue of Rebirth, where I would give John these sort of light, architectural lines. And by the fourth issue, it was just, “Let’s play with this. Let’s go full force.”

NRAMA: They wear it now like part of their costume.

EVS: Well, from there, something happened where, you know, Geoff and I were talking about how the Green Lantern costumes are made of energy, instead of fabric or spandex. I think they’ve always been made of energy. I think everyone’s always agreed with that. And yet, people always draw them so that they look like spandex. It annoys me, because it seems like a lie. It seems like something an artist could fix very easily, and nobody has really done it, because we have this certain idea of what a superhero looks like. And so, I said the first thing that needs to go are the highlights in the black part of Green Lantern’s costume. It shouldn’t have those gray highlights anymore.

NRAMA: Because it’s energy?

EVS: Because if it’s energy, and if it’s black energy, it’s the absence of light. It should not be able to reflect light back. They should always be a black silhouette. And then I did a couple of sketches and showed them to Geoff, and Geoff liked them.

And then I thought, that symbol on their chest should be kind of like, since they’re this intergalactic police force, those are the badges. They should also perhaps work like sirens, so that they can jump off a Green Lantern’s chest and be three-dimensional like a hologram, and be seen from any angle and by any alien that’s around so they know what they’re dealing with. They’re about to deal with the Green Lanterns. And maybe it would flash and make noise when the Green Lanterns were racing to the scene. And it just opened up this whole new look, this whole new way of thinking about the Green Lanterns visually. And it’s way different. I mean, it’s different than what people have seen in the past. I think it helped to propel the book to a new audience.

NRAMA: Because it was so unique looking…

EVS: It just suddenly seemed so fresh. And the more you think about that, the more excited you can get about working on a Green Lantern book. The possibilities don’t just lie within, you know, “My ring can make anything. It can make a herd of green elephants.” A herd of green elephants? That’s actually boring. You know, there’s not a whole lot that you can do with that at the end of the day — it’s still just a green elephant. When you really think of the idea that these guys are an intergalactic police force and they’re just full of energy and individuality, and they abide by this code, this oath. I get goosebumps. I get excited about it. It’s so fun.

NRAMA: You’ve got it bad for these Green Lanterns, Ethan.

EVS: I’ve never been so motivated by any comic book property before. I really haven’t.

I have to say, I hated the thing where the lantern logos shoot out of their chests now, until I read his explanation of it.