Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Comic Book Reviews 4/8/2009 : Part 1

I picked up six books this week : Superman : World of New Krypton #2, Transformers Spotlight : Drift, Solomon Grundy #2, Secret Six #8, Battle for the Cowl #2, and my most anticipated book of the week…..Green Lantern #39, the beginning of the Agent Orange story arc. Review for GL #39 is below; the rest will be posted in the next day or two. Click below for more:

Green Lantern #39
Story by Geoff Johns
Art by Philip Tan

Since the big tease at the end of the Sinestro Corps War just over a year ago that told us of the upcoming War of Light, we’ve met the Yellow, Blue, Red and Violet Corps. Along with the well known Green Corps, that just leaves us with two, Orange and Indigo…and so far, in one issue, the Orange is pretty damned creepy.

For those that have not really been following, first let me say shame on you. Now, the individual corps are powered by sentient emotion, with the Orange Corps powered by greed. The leader of the Orange Corps is Larfleeze, also referred to as Agent Orange, and he seems to define and exude the greed that powers his ring. We meet him on the planet Okaara, deep in the Vega System which is off-limits to the Green Lantern Corps, as the Controllers are attempting to locate the Orange Light of Avarice. Well, they find it and definitely get more than they bargained for as they are quickly and brutally slaughtered by Larfleeze’s greed powered constructs.

Much of this issue is dedicated to Hal Jordan’s struggle with now wearing two rings (Green and Blue) and his apparent destiny of leading the Blue Lantern Corps into the War of Light. These parts were a bit slow as I found myself wanting to see more of the Orange Corps.

The most interesting part of the Orange Corps to me right now is the fact that we’ve been shown designs by Philip Tan for the past month of all different sorts of alien species that will comprise the Orange Lantern Corps, but it looks like they will all be constructs from Larfleeze. This is clever, considering that since Larfleeze harnesses the power of greed, he would not want to share his power with anyone. This has the potential to make him extremely dangerous if he is the only one harnessing this power.

The issue ends as one of the greed constructs (a giant creepy floating head in outer space) attacks Green Lantern Stel and sends him back to Oa with a sort of Trojan Horse mission. Larfleeze appears before the Guardians in a rage because they have trespassed in the Vega System, not knowing that the Controllers (former associates of the Guardians) are no longer affiliated with them.

All in all, this issue was great, with interesting writing and art. Philip Tan does a very good job of rendering the GL characters and Geoff Johns continues to weave his incredibly deep and well laid out plot through these books.

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