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A review by rhganci
Green Lantern, Vol. 4: Dark Days by Robert Venditti
2.0
(2.5 stars) It looks like the reboot has finally hit the Green Lantern corner of the New 52, and that reboot, 20 issues tardy, hits very, very hard. Somehow the stakes seem impossibly large and totally game-changing, while at the same time moving so fast--these eight issues are paced with such hurry that none of the huge elements that Venditti puts into play seem particularly well-developed.
Basically, we have a series of plot strands converging to create a new mission for the Green Lantern corps: an ancient villain, a visit to the Source Wall (a familiar element of Green Lantern lore that is always super cool), and a huge, game-changing revelation that will affect all of the lantern corps throughout the galaxy. While those elements all converge at the end of the volume with a solid tease that there is yet something even bigger going on, the story rushes through all of the details, dutifully dropped one after another, to get us to the new conflict. This pacing is really a detraction from the whole volume, because rather than getting a chance to experience and understand--and thereby to react--to these new stakes, we process them intellectually, adopt the concept and then move immediately on to the next piece of the puzzle. While I understood what was happening, I found myself struggling to care about it, and by the end of the volume I had the sense that whatever these changes will bring to the Green Lantern storyline would be kind of a bad idea.
The art is very goodlooking, if uneven at times, but Tan's pencils are detailed and sharp, and thanks to great colors the constructs--lots of machine guns, food platters, chainsaws, fists, axes, and trains--look excellent. The combat sequences are easy to follow and have a lot of interesting dimensions, and a lot of the space travel bits are done with a lot detail in the cosmos itself. The scenes at and around the Source Wall are, as they should be, the best of the volume.
I'll be interested to see where all of this goes, if there's a plan to backtrack for the sake of drama and lore, and what the big plan is for all of this. It's really the future of the whole Green Lantern universe at stake now, rather than a group of characters within a single circumstance, and for me that's where the suspense lies. There's a lot to process here, and as such reading this volume feels a bit more like work than comics should. Where the Green Lanterns go from here will ultimately decide how effective, or lasting, the changes represented here will be.
Basically, we have a series of plot strands converging to create a new mission for the Green Lantern corps: an ancient villain, a visit to the Source Wall (a familiar element of Green Lantern lore that is always super cool), and a huge, game-changing revelation that will affect all of the lantern corps throughout the galaxy. While those elements all converge at the end of the volume with a solid tease that there is yet something even bigger going on, the story rushes through all of the details, dutifully dropped one after another, to get us to the new conflict. This pacing is really a detraction from the whole volume, because rather than getting a chance to experience and understand--and thereby to react--to these new stakes, we process them intellectually, adopt the concept and then move immediately on to the next piece of the puzzle. While I understood what was happening, I found myself struggling to care about it, and by the end of the volume I had the sense that whatever these changes will bring to the Green Lantern storyline would be kind of a bad idea.
The art is very goodlooking, if uneven at times, but Tan's pencils are detailed and sharp, and thanks to great colors the constructs--lots of machine guns, food platters, chainsaws, fists, axes, and trains--look excellent. The combat sequences are easy to follow and have a lot of interesting dimensions, and a lot of the space travel bits are done with a lot detail in the cosmos itself. The scenes at and around the Source Wall are, as they should be, the best of the volume.
I'll be interested to see where all of this goes, if there's a plan to backtrack for the sake of drama and lore, and what the big plan is for all of this. It's really the future of the whole Green Lantern universe at stake now, rather than a group of characters within a single circumstance, and for me that's where the suspense lies. There's a lot to process here, and as such reading this volume feels a bit more like work than comics should. Where the Green Lanterns go from here will ultimately decide how effective, or lasting, the changes represented here will be.