Radiant Comics

I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got three new comic plus a trade paperback collection:

And now for a review of something I’ve read recently.

I normally stay well away from Marvel and DC crossover stories but I happen to have been given this collection by a friend of mine. It collects “Tales of the Corps” 1-3 and “Adventure Comics” 4-5. The first are a bunch of short stories about the various colored Lanterns and the second was a two part tale of Superboy Prime versus some Black Lanterns.

If you don’t know about the “Blackest Night” crossover suffice it to say that the Green Lanterns were taking on a bunch of other colored Lanterns. That’s pretty much all I know about it. The short stories of the various Corps were the most interesting. They were mostly the back story of what was going on in the overall “Blackest Night” story and so were pretty easy to follow. And solidly entertaining.

The Superboy Prime story was a lot harder to follow. Just explaining who Superboy Prime is and his crazy backstory is too much for me. The art and script were nice but the plot was way too “Inside” for me to care about. A few people I know liked this story but they are better acquainted with the character than I am. Newbies beware.

Reading this volume brought up a couple of problems I have with “Blackest Night” in general. First off the editors and writers have done a good job over the years emphasizing that the Green Lantern Corps in not Earth or human-centric. The Green Lanterns’ beat is all over the galaxy and there are a myriad of Green Lanterns from all sorts of planets. There are Green Lanterns of all sorts of shapes, sizes, and species. So why is this whole story of various colored Lantern Corps based on the spectrum visible to the human eye? I’m sure all those alien eyes see colors that we can’t. I know it’s because it’s only a comic book made by humans for humans but it still bothers me. It’s the central conceit of the story after all.

As the writers also gave us a little history lesson about the various Corps throughout the stories they mentioned something that always annoys me. How come it’s only in sci-fi stories that we find societies that have “Abandoned emotion”? First of all it’s crazy, second: it’s impossible, third: it’s stupid, and fourth: it makes no sense. Abandon emotion? How would a society even do that? Certainly no human society has ever attempted such nonsense. Because it’s nonsense. Yet still it lives on in clichéd sci-fi writing. I could do without it.

Anyway, the first half of this book is a pretty good read but I’d say the second half is for hard core continuity fans only.