All things must come to a close in order to relaunch.
Creative Staff:
Story: Dan Jurgens
Art: Mike Perkins
Colors: Hi-Fi
Letterer: Dave Sharpe
What They Say:
And after that, it’s Hal Jordan versus the Cyborg Superman for all the marbles in the heart of Coast City! You might recall that the last time Cyborg Superman visited that town, things did not turn out well…
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The Green Lanterns book draws to a close with this installment and the current arc that began with the fiftieth issue and creative team that came on board. I’ve long enjoyed Dan Jurgens’ work so I was happy to reconnect with his stuff for a run and see that it’s still largely the same. That’s admittedly a bit of a mixed bag depending on how you view it but it was like a comfort series. Mike Perkins finishes out the run as well after having some rotating teams for a bit before this and combining his work with Hi-Fi on colors definitely delivers a solid looking work. I like the layouts he comes up with overall, including some of the really creative ones, as well as how well he nailed down the character designs.
The one area I disliked was that after getting into the series because of Jessica and her being at the forefront, Hal took up a lot of space once he came back into the picture. The opening portion brings us back to Earth where Henshaw is looking to make his destruction of Coast City previously a lot more definitive since it was rebuilt well. This is a personal fight for Jordan for obvious reasons but it’s felt like Coast City and more Earth-based material has been MIA forever. The fight is decent when you get down to it and I like that he was smart enough to call in for help with this situation rather than rely on just himself to deal with Henshaw, especially with the phantom ring thing that gives him an edge over other Lanterns.
The battle around Mogo is dealt with fairly quickly overall but mostly it falls apart once Eon is fully dealt with – only to disappear himself much like Henshaw does, allowing this to be brought back another day instead of some proper closure. There’s some nice wrapup material to recent events that plays out as we get Ganthet revealing that they’ve been rebuilding Oa in secret and that Hal’s new mission with the other Lanterns is to bring the batteries back once they’re set up there so that they can be properly cleaned of Henshaw’s manipulations. The small moments are decent and it allows everything to fall into a kind of simple reset back to zero ahead of the relaunched series. But we do get some nice closure for Jessica at this point as she’s opting not to go back to Earth and instead is going to explore the galaxy some.
In Summary:
Green Lanterns ends well enough in that it closes up the current storyline and sets a few things into place for the next team to pick up without having to really deal with it. With this being the wide team book we got to cover a lot of different characters and that worked well. While I grew up reading about Hal he became someone I was glad to have moved to the background to explore other characters more. His time here is decently used but everything feels as though it’s being done in shorthand rather than fully fleshed out. But, in the end, it just wraps up the current story and only sets Jessica on her own path beyond that, leaving it feeling a bit hollow unfortunately.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: DC Comics via DC Universe
Release Date: October 17th, 2018
MSRP: $3.99
