It's not often a run as epic as Geoff Johns' Green Lantern comes along, so we aim to celebrate it now that's its come to its conclusion (which we loved). Johns is responsible for over 100 issues of Green Lantern, and his mark can be seen on the other spin-off titles such as Green Lantern Corps and Green Lantern: Emerald Warriors.
With so much material to choose from, you've gotta believe that it was hard to narrow them down to just ten favorite moments, and even then we cheated a little bit. So take a look at our top moments and be sure to let us know your favorites as well!
Johns Reflects on 9 Years of Green Lantern
Spoilers for the entire run, including last week's finale, below!
From: Final Crisis: Rage of the Red Lanterns #1
Johns had spent quite a bit of time carefully planting the seeds for what would become the Red and Blue Lantern Corps, but it all came to a head on the day of Sinestro's execution after the Sinestro Corps War. This was the space battle you always dreamed of as a kid, only better. Pretty much anything that could have gone wrong during the Green Lanterns' prisoner escort mission did, and it was all the more awesome for it.
A squad of Sinestro Corps members assaulted the convoy of Green Lanterns, killing many of their number. Then the cutest little kitty you could imagine shows up and melts the head off a yellow corpsmen, signaling the arrival of the napalm-projectile-vomiting Red Lantern Corps. That splash page will go down of one of the most grotesquely violent in the series as we see Atrocitus ripping a GL in two while Zilius Zox devours one of Sinestro's goons whole. But just when all seemed lost with Hal Jordan and John Stewart's shields burnt away by the red napalm, Blue Lantern Saint Walker appears, boosting their power levels up to a staggering 200% and saving their lives.
The battle was thrilling, but more importantly, it signaled the coming of the fabled War of Light and showed us that a comic about aliens flying around with different colored power rings could be totally hardcore.
From: The Entire Run
Ganthet is the man. He's the only Guardian that does whatever Guardians forbid themselves from doing, namely feeling the feels, but also rockin' a sweet ponytail. Fed up with their increasingly poor decision making skills, he and his Guardian-girlfriend Sayd expressed their feelings and were banished from the GLC. But it didn't matter because they resolved to do what they knew to be right in a powerful showing of their union. When vowing to help Hal Jordan stop the Blackest Night prophecy from coming true, Ganthet stared into Sayd's big Guardian eyes and held her tiny Guardian hand to create the hope-powered Blue Lantern Corps (which matches their skin better, anyway).
It's tough to choose just one moment for Ganthet, so we chose to honor his entire arc. He's just chock full of displays of awesome. When Blackest Night was going down, he's the one who created his own ring and deputized himself as a GL for the fight. During War of the Green Lanterns, he saved Kyle Rayner and John Stewart from each other and lost his hand in the resulting explosion, but that didn't stop him from later unleashing an atomic bomb level power blast. By acting apart from his fellow Guardians and caring for individuals instead of the whole, Ganthet has had a story as complex and entertaining as anyone else in the Corps.
From: Green Lantern [2005] #46
Johns’ run on Green Lantern is as much about Hal Jordan as it is his arch nemesis, Sinestro. Originally a GL, Sinestro’s lust for control had him keeping a dictator-like grip on his homeworld of Korugar, which got him booted from the GLC. Johns played off Sinestro’s use of fear to get his way by having him found his own army of ring-slingers who harness the yellow power of fear instead of will, egotistically named the Sinestro Corps. But after his fall at the end of the Sinestro Corps War, Sinestro’s leadership role was taken by none other than the alien warlord Mongul.
One ring per person? Forget that! Mongul slapped on eight of those babies and ruled a majority of Sinestro’s former followers, but not before re-christening them the Mongul Corps. What is it with these villains and the uncreative names? Mongul wrought fear across the galaxy, and specifically had his yellow corpsmen terrorize Sinestro's homeworld of Korugar instead of protect it. It wasn’t until after Sinestro broke free and Indigo-1 transported him to Korugar that he got a chance to take care of business.
The two fear-mongers waged an incredible battle that ended with Sinestro impaling Mongul’s entire body with construct spikes, and then dropping the colossal Yellow Central Power Battery on top of him for good measure. Ouch. If a lesson was to be learned, it was that you should never touch Sinestro’s stuff.
From: Blackest Night #2
It sucked when Aquaman died, but when Blackest Night came around, suddenly we didn’t mind anymore. During the event, a villain named Nekron unleashed countless Black Lantern rings across the universe to raise the dead to wipe out all emotion, i.e., all life in the universe. Zombie versions of beloved heroes such as Earth-2 Superman, the Martian Manhunter, and even Ralph and Sue Dibny rose from the grave and got to work on ripping out emotionally-charged hearts from anything with a pulse.
But all of those pale in comparison to Aquaman. He ripped out a man’s still-beating heart and used his often-mocked power to talk to sea life to unleash a pack of ravenous zombie sharks on some Atlantean soldiers. From here on trout, Aquaman seriously proved his abilities were no squidding matter and you could dolphinitely say he scaled up his ability to kick some bass.
From: Green Lantern [2005] #25
The big black spot on Hal Jordan's hero record is when he was driven mad at the destruction of his hometown of Coast City. Instead of letting it remain a sore subject, Johns made Coast City into a pivotal element in his overarching Green Lantern story. The city that was once a crater was rebuilt and given a second chance at life, a clear metaphor for Hal being reborn and proving himself as a hero once more.
After being reconstructed during the events of Rebirth, Coast City remained a ghost town despite government-mandated economic and population incentives, save for Hal and a paltry number of families. If Cyborg Superman and Mongul had once destroyed a city and killed its 7 million citizens, you might think twice before settling down there, too.
After the city was under attack (again) during the Sinestro Corps War, Hal used his ring to tell everyone to flee for their lives. Yet they remained. They had been inspired by Hal and the GLC, and shone green lights from their windows in moral support of Hal's fight against Sinestro. Afterward, the city saw a population boost to over 2.5 million people, earning the title of The City Without Fear.
From: Green Lantern Corps [2006] #18
The chapter of the Sinestro Corps War where Sodam Yat takes on Superboy Prime is technically written by Peter J. Tomasi and not Johns, but since it was a part of Johns' overall story, not to mention being epically sweet, we just had to include it on this list.
With Superboy Prime gone Grade A crazy and reinvigorated by the rising sun, he dove fist-first at Sodam Yat, who also received a power boost of his own in the form of Ion, the entity of willpower that fuels the Green Lantern Corps. Being a Daxamite of Kryptonian descent, Sodam was now a Green Lantern/Superman combo, which is, frankly, totally boss.
The brutal brawl included heat vision blasts, Earth-shattering punches, and tractor-trailor headshots, as well as a particularly morbid move by Superboy-Prime when, after landing in a graveyard, he stopped fighting to inscribe morbid messages to Sodam onto two tombstones with his laser vision. The fight's turning point was when they crashed into a power plant and Sodam thrust a uranium rod into Superboy-Prime's mouth. Horrifyingly, Superboy-Prime bit it off like a Twizzler and used it to impale Sodam, weakening him considerably. It wasn't long before Sodam was so bloodied, beaten, and full of poisonous uranium that he fell unconscious.
Evil may have won the battle, but fans got an epic fight they'd never forget.
From: Green Lantern [2011] #0
Having yet another Earth GL seemed like a curious move for Johns to make, but it's hard to complain when the character was such a slam dunk. Even though he only received one story arc of his own, Simon Baz made an unforgettable impact by allowing readers to experience a fear of something more relatable than space monsters and zombies: the fear that creates prejudice within a culture.
Johns shows how Simon, a Lebanese-American Muslim, was affected by the horrific events of 9/11, as well as the economic downturn of Detroit. The result was a gripping political thriller that gave readers something new to chew on, not to mention the fact that he carries a gun just in case the ring ever runs out of power. Not a bad idea.
Simon's most powerful moment comes when he tries to use the ring to bring his brother-in-law out of a coma, despite B'dg telling him that it's impossible. Simon was new to the Corps and rules didn't mean anything to him, so it was his faith in miracles that made the ring's energies succeed in reviving his loved one. This proved why Simon deserved the ring while also giving a minority underrepresented in comics a great character to get behind.
From: The Entire Run
Like we mentioned, Johns' run is as much about Hal Jordan as it is Hal's arch nemesis, Sinestro. Sinestro was there when Hal came back in Rebirth, he flipped Hal's world upside down with the Sinestro Corps War, and he fought alongside him in Blackest Night. They were bitter rivals with a long, long history, but something changed when the unthinkable happened: Sinestro was re-inducted to the GLC.
Suddenly, their blood-feud became more of a begrudging buddy cop dynamic. These most bitter of enemies were forced to see eye-to-eye and use teamwork to win the day. Yet for every step they took forward to understanding one another, they two two giant leaps back as they disagreed on everything from their methods to their agendas. Luckily for us, this was often done to hilarious results.
Their relationship saw its most fascinating moment in the final chapter of The Wrath of the First Lantern when Sinestro, who often mocked Hal for his past failings, was subjected to losing his home and being possessed by Parallax, just like Hal once had. After that, Hal and Sinestro understood each other like never before, and were finally able to admit that they will always be friends. It was a moment as poignant as it was tear-jerking, and it made the perfect endnote to one of the most complex relationships between a "hero" and a "villain" in comics.
From: Green Lantern: Rebirth #3
This one single element is what made the nine years of storytelling that followed so compelling. Johns proved his comic book genius when he decided to take the corniest of concepts and turn it into something clever and personal. In the olden days of comics, a GL’s weakness was the color yellow. Yup, school buses, gold, bananas -- you name it. But Johns saw that yellow was the color of fear, as in a yellow-bellied coward.
Johns seamlessly weaved a new layer of mythology into the GLC by saying that long ago, the Guardians imprisoned Parallax, the dangerously powerful yellow entity of fear, inside the Central Power Battery. It laid there dormant, an impurity in the ring that made it so that if a Green Lantern ever felt fear, their power would falter.
It was revealed that Parallax had reached through Hal’s ring and slowly wore him down, making him more susceptible to fear, which visibly caused his hair to gray on the sides. Hal was led down a dark path by Parallax until he finally cracked when his home city of Coast City was destroyed. Hal went mad, killed his fellow Lanterns and the Guardians, and absorbed the battery’s power and Parallax along with it, which got him fully possessed by Parallax and made him into a bonafide super villain.
By doing away with Green Lantern’s most cheesy element and replacing it with an evil fear-demon-insect, Johns not only made the Green Lantern mythology that much richer, but he redeemed the GLC’s greatest hero, in a sense, of his most horrible crimes. The creation of Parallax also paved the way for the other colored corps, which each have their own entity based on a different part of the Emotional Spectrum -- another element that proved to be a highlight of the world Johns created.
From: Green Lantern: Sinestro Corps Special #1
If anything truly tested Hal's mettle as a superhero and proved that a GL could hang with the big boys, it was the Sinestro Corps War. In order to show just how capable Hal and the GLC were at overcoming evil, Johns stacked the deck against them so badly that even the mightiest of heroes would be shaking in their spandex: Cyborg Superman leading the Manhunters, Superboy-Prime in a power suit, and the freakin’ Anti-Monitor!
Not to mention that Kyle Rayner possessed by Parallax and Sinestro himself were bowing down to the trio just to cement that these guys were on another power level entirely. Turning to that page will forever be remembered as a chill-inducing memory of just how screwed the GLs were about to be.
The event itself was the Empire Strikes Back of Johns' Green Lantern saga. Long term plot threads came to fruition with explosions of will and fear in a galactic-sized conflict that rocked the foundations of the GLC. It not only featured some of the best moments of the series -- including the previously mentioned Coast City shining bright and the instant classic of Superboy-Prime vs. Sodam Yat -- but the fallout cracked open mythology of Green Lantern and let all the colors of the Emotional Spectrum get in on the ring-slingin’ action.
Joshua writes for IGN and likes to think he was the inspiration for Simon Baz. Join him in some Ratwaffle cheese and follow him on Twitter or IGN.
Source : ign[dot]com
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