Green Lantern: New Guardians #1

As I mentioned, the Green Lantern books have been mostly spared from the reboots and re-imaginings that the rest of the DC lineup got. Hell, most of the Lanterns didn't even get the eye-cancer-inducing new outfits that every other superhero got. So this book, featuring Green Lantern Kyle Rayner, picks up in the middle of everything that was going on last month. Which is good news if you like having 6 other types of Lantern Corps, each with their own color and emotion. But it's bad news if you don't like ideas that Geoff Johns came up with after losing a bet or after he realized he needed royalties from more GL-related books to pay off his coke dealer or whatever the situation may be.

The GL books, when done right, should be a good blend of sci-fi, superheroes, and police procedural. Writer Tony Bedard has a couple of really great science fiction comics, some of them even at DC, using superheroes, so he really has no excuse for not writing a great comic. What we got instead was an okay comic with some real structural flaws. Simple stuff like, indicating that a flashback is indeed a flashback, doesn't get done. There's a retard-tacular scene where our hero explains to a little kid that he's not the Hal Jordan Green Lantern. A) Why would this kid care B) Why would Kyle bother explaining anything? C) Why even make the comparison between the two GLs? Let each GL shine in their own book.

Tyler Kirkham's pencils are pretty good. The color work, which is pretty important in any book called GREEN Lantern, is mostly solid. It is weird that he colors Kyle's hair, which should be black, as gray. Is Kyle now a silver fox, in the grand tradition of George Clooney and Anderson Cooper? Here's hoping.