Spawn Camping: Green Lantern Corps #3 Review

A few weeks ago I reviewed a comic book about a video game that was actually a damn good Green Lantern story. By contrast, the latest issue of Green Lantern Corps is a Green Lantern comic that is, for all intents and purposes, a video game.

This book is what Green Lantern would be if it was a first person shooter in Hoard Mode.

You think I’m kidding? The whole video game vibe frankly bakes off of this book. For starters, look at that Alex Garner cover and tell me it doesn’t look like concept art from some FPS. The first person point of view, “your” hand coming into frame at right to shoot plasma beams at anonymous bad guys in armor with lightsabers… just replace the DC Comics slug with a health meter and the New 52 bullet with an ammo indicator and boom! You’ve got a shooter! A shooter designed by a focus group loaded with Asperger’s patients (“So how about we give stormtroopers lightsabers and have them fight Green Lanterns? Jesus, Bob; they’re all peeing!”), but a shooter nonetheless.

The whole video game vibe continues right into the story proper and doesn’t stop, from the weird aliens coming in multiple waves, to the Green Lanterns using their rings – weapons that can turn whatever you imagine into reality – to do nothing more than create a plethora of BFG9000’s to mow the aliens down. Part of me thinks that writer Peter J. Tomasi took a screen grab of an epic Red Bull-and-Stoli-fueled Gears of War session, emailed it to artist Geraldo Borges, and said, “Lightbox this, but make everything, y’know, green. But don’t trace the chainsaws on the ends of the guns; I don’t want to get sued.”

You can argue whether or not giving a Green Lantern book a video game feel is the right thing to do – and I’ll argue that in a minute – but you’ve got to admit that playing a shooter in hoard mode is exciting and action packed. And that excitement carries through to this book. There is a palpable sense of tension as the Lanterns, stranded on the planet Xabas and seemingly beyond the reach of rescue or backup, try to hold back the waves upon waves of Ringslayers advancing on their position. It’s refreshing in the face of so many New 52 books that are creeping along to build up enough issues to sell a trade paperback to have an issue of something that is loaded with action… even if that action makes you idly wonder when someone’s gonna get with the teabagging.

And that action is well supported by the guest pencils by Geraldo Borges. This guy walked into an assignment where he needs to draw about a half-dozen different alien species, a variety of outlandish weapons and, at times, dozens of swarming Ringslayers, and frankly, the dude’s up to the task. Borges’s art isn’t particularly stylized; it’s just good, solid, easy-to-follow comic art, which in a book with this many balls to keep in the air, is all you need. He’s also got a few panels with some absolutely killer facial expressions… but unfortunately, he also has a couple where he commits one of my pet peeves: he draws a character’s eyes where they don’t quite go in the right direction. In the mid-issue double page spread, where the only person speaking is Guy Gardner (Meaning, thanks to the dialogue balloon, your eye is drawn to him over any other character on the page), who’s right eye looks rolled up in his head like he has lazy eye, or is perhaps suffering a stroke. It’s a minor art issue as these things go, but it’s distracting, and it tends to take me out of the story.

And pulling me back from the story is something that Tomasi’s story, unfortunately, just can’t support. Because once you’re out, you can think. You can think things like: “Huh… so these Ringslayers appear to be landbound infantry armed only with melee weapons. So why don’t the Lanterns just, I dunno… fly above them and take them out from relative safety?” Or things like: “Um… if Lantern Porter can only safely teleport five people at once, why is he trying to teleport thirty Lanterns to Xabas, when he could just teleport there alone and evacuate the (say it with me!) five Lanterns? It seems like a super-effective way to keep from, I dunno, dying!”

So in conclusion, this is a hard book to put a “buy” or “don’t buy” label on. If you like big, dumb action that you don’t have to (and in fact shouldn’t) think too hard about, or if you are a fan of watching first person shooters instead of playing them, or if you’re just tired of comic book issues where nothing seems to happen, then this is definitely worth a pickup. Otherwise? Take your three bucks to Gamestop and get a used copy of Gears of War. It’s just like this issue, only with chainsaw guns.