Green Lantern: Emerald Warriors issue 2 – A man throws up snakes that then eat eyeballs

This week Green Lantern: Emerald Warriors issue 2 was released and I was pleased with what it contained. The cover is a little misleading, anime death angel Bleez only shows up at the end, but nonetheless the contents were definitely strong enough to merit a purchase. The series focuses on Guy Gardner, who’s a great character, but succeeds generally in it’s closer focus approach to the Green Lantern Corps and its mythos. Whereas Green Lantern is the superhero book and Corps is the team book, this book is about the space cop and his troubles. This theme is explored through the main character, who contemplates his legacy at the start, as well as other characters like Arisia and Kilowog, whose analyses of their stations in life were sorely needed. It even looks like we’ll get a greater focus on members of the other corps, something many fans have been calling for since their introduction.

I’d read some reservations about the book when it was announced and with the release of its first issue, but if things continue this way I can say confidently they were without merit. Green Lantern charges along, too quickly, adding to the mythology and GLC’s scope is too large to give us important face time with the characters. This book bridges that gap and in so doing pumps up the Green Lantern mythos and makes it come alive.

On a side note, this issue pointed me to a success of Johns’ restoration of the GL franchise I had never seen before. As referenced in the blog post’s title, this issue introduces a psychic villain who vomits up snakes that somehow by eating eyeballs allow him to take control of other psychics and form a psychic network with the aims of revenge on the Guardians for some previous wrongdoing. That’s just kooky comic villainy in its most delicious form. What I realized was that in creating (or putting a greater focus on) the concept of the mistakes of the guardians of the universe throughout time, Johns has given the Green Lantern a rich new well from which many villains can be born. Batman villains are all about mental illness. Now Green Lantern villains can be about sins of the past. This idea– that a policing or governing system can make mistakes and that these mistakes will come to haunt it– is iconic and fits perfectly with everything that the corps is about. One more reason why the Lantern’s dominance may be here to stay.

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