As the Green Lanterns face off against Nekron, Abin Sur is sent to save the most important thing there is – on Earth.
What They Say:
FLASH FACT! He survived the crash!
The Review:
While things on the Earthbound side of the Flashpoint universe has been rather mundane in a way from what we’ve seen before, with it mostly focused characters and events that aren’t otherworldly, a look at the universe comes to us from the Abin Sur miniseries. One of the more frustrating things about the Green Lantern characters is how they deal with the amount of space they cover, and that gets brought out here in spades as a problem as Abin Sur, one of the more enlightened Lanterns in the service who values all life, has multiple galaxies that he patrols. It sounds nice on paper, but the real issue is that it’s pretty damn ineffective when it comes to doing real galactic police work. It’s almost the same as having one really good cop in New York City. He handles what he can while he gets around, but there’s a damn lot of crime and events going on elsewhere the he misses and is oblivious about.
This book shows us Abin through the years to some degree, showing us him as a child where his older sister scolds him for treating a bug poorly, reminding him that we’re all connected and he depends on even a small creature like that for the things he likes in life. It’s brief but gets the point across. The present day shows him taking that further with how he values all life, which is why the robotic Manhunter creatures are things that he despises and deals with quickly. But while he’s so focused on protecting life, he’s disconnected from it as well as he doesn’t even hear those that he saves when they ask the simplest of things like wanting to know his name. Abin is a strange set of contradictions because of that and other things that surface. When Sinestro comes to him seeking his help in convincing the Guardians to deal more forcefully with the Black Lanterns, he has that very deferential nature about their bosses and will wait for them to decide. But he can be set off very easily, such as when Sinestro talks about his sister for just a moment and that causes Abin to slug him. Which doesn’t quite fit with his whole respecting life thing.
What is interesting is that because of the events that are unfolding on Earth with the Amazons and Atlanteans, the Guardians are taking notice and want to take care of something there, which Abin is pretty qualified for, though he’s going to go off the rails again and show that he’s unstable because of his strong beliefs. With the battle against Nekron being waged as it is, the Guardians want to bring the White Entity off of Earth because there’s a chance the indigenous population there could very well destroy the world. There’s some decent material about the why of it being there, but to send someone so concerned about the sanctity of life to a world where it teeters in the balance, and where as we’ve seen in another series that millions are going to die in a plan to try and save it, you can’t imagine he wouldn’t get involved. But it also goes back to my core problem with how the Corps is set up to some degree in that Abin should have been aware of all of this long before now, before it got to this point, because of the danger that’s there. And with the Guardians having something so valuable there, to not have some sort of real presence there to keep an eye on the overall stupidity just reeks of poor planning at best and utter incompetence at worst.
Digital Notes:
This Comixology edition of Flashpoint: Abin Sur – The Green Lantern contains the main cover as seen with the print edition with no variants or other extras included.
In Summary:
While I’ve long liked the Abin Sur character, he’s gotten a bit of a bump in the last few years and in particular from the movie this summer and this rendition is just unlikable. And I get it where that’s part of the point, but it cuts a lot of the connection you can make to the character, which in turn keeps you from caring what happens to him and whether he achieves his goals. Nobody comes out of this book as a decent character or one that you would follow, which is not what I’ve found with the other books for the most part so far. The Corps hasn’t changed much in this Flashpoint world, which definitely makes sense when you consider that they’ve had no real involvement with the planet so their path may have missed a lot of events because of that, but who they are as an organization isn’t radically changed. I went into this book really curious to see what they’d do, but it left me very cold towards future issues.
Grade: C-
