Green Lantern Corps #21 // Review
Phamosa Jungle. Zarin Oa. Guy Gardner is looking for love. Literally. To be more specific, he came to the jungle looking for the lost emotinal entity of love. What he’s found is a predator that’s trying to kill him. An honestly for a Guy like Guy Gardner...that kind of makes sense, He’s in danger and this is only the beginning in Green Lantern Corps #21. Writer Morgan Hampton and the art team of Vasco Georgiev, Serg Acuña and Juan José Ryp are joined by the coloring team of Arif Prianto and Matt Herms in the continued exploits of the corps.
Dealing with a big, ugly purple monster is only part of Gardner’s problems. He’s been sent into the jungle by The Book of Oa--the central repository for much of the knowledge and wisdom of the Green Lantern Core. He's on the sort of being controlled by it. Then he's very confused. And it doesn't help that the book itself is talking to him through his mind. Telling him that he's the only one who's ever understood it. His general state of confusion over things makes this kind of an unsettling prospect. He's going to have to really work if he's going to be able to understand what it is that he understands.
Hampton dives right into the heart of magical space fantasy with a deeper look into some of the mythology behind the DC universe. Given the number of cosmically powerful entities that are out there, the current threat for the Corps feels like it's overlapping a whole bunch of other things. That doesn't make it any less compelling. It just feels kind of weird in respect to all of the rest of the cosmic stuff that's going on and then DC universe. It's hard to get a universal picture on it all as it all seems to be consisting of conflicting energies that are all very powerful. It's difficult to put it together in a way that feels truly monumental while respecting everything else that's going on in every other corner.
The art team does a pretty good job of collecting a whole bunch of desperate characters and bringing them together into a single cohesive story. The emotional reality is facing the central ensemble, feel a bit muffled and muddled with art isn't as good at drawing on the emotional core of the story. That being said, they do a really good job of delivering weird action and exotic energies and things of that nature. The alien is certainly here. The deeper emotional core of everything is a little bit more tricky to defined.
And once again, the series is circling back on the dawn of the Silver ageGreen Lantern as it itself closer to Hal Jordan once more. He is the quintessential character in the history of the Green Lantern rings. It makes sense that they would occasionally want to draw back to him. The Green Lantern end DC Universe has covered so much ground, though. It would be nice to see them continuing to move forward in directions that aren't quite so irreverent to the past.
