Teaser for War of the Green Lanterns
- Thread starter Admiral_Young
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CoIE is terrible for the first six issues, remains bad despite a few awesome parts (Barry Allen's sacrifice is the utter highlight of the book), has more false endings than Return of the King, and all too often the focus of the story turns to something highly lame, like Psimon or DC's World War II nonentities... that is, when it's attempting to focus on anything at all. It also gives young readers the impression that the Hubble Telescope could unleash an apocalyptic evil, and daftly misconstrues what antimatter is, which is a pretty simple concept.
So, CoIE is scattershot, hard to read, harder to enjoy, and constantly undermines its own epic bent.
The George Perez art is, of course, sweet, but he's done far better.
Fatally, CoIE is not even really about anything more than its surface, that is, superheroes fighting an evil god who has existed since the beginning of time. Maybe it's about sacrifice, but whatever.
Whereas Infinite Crisis has real ideas, even if the question it poses to the reader is as simple as whether the ends justify the means.
IC can ask such questions, because it provides us with identifiable antagonists. As I've mentioned before, Alex Luthor comes off at least as heroic than any of the protagonists, despite the text's efforts to drag him down to the level of cold murderer, and even Superboy's descent into madness is explicable.
From a storytelling standpoint, IC is more focused. It doesn't spend four issues sending random losers through time to fight shadow puppets, it sets Alex's Society and Superboy directly against the superheroes. Even the earlier confrontations are thus generally cooler, because they're not against literally nameless henchmen, but well-known supervillains or a psychotic with the powers of a Silver Age Superman.
The science is of course still tremendously awful, but that's comics. There's a guy who can lift mountains based on solar power. There's nothing quite so offensively bad about it as the notion that scientific exploration can kill trillions.
Of course, IC has its missteps. Many, many missteps. Lex Luthor wandering around for issues at a time is a misstep. The failure to fully recognize Grant Morrison's contribution to the history and abilities of the Psycho-Pirate is weird, since it does acknowledge it by vague allusion. A lot of stuff winds up explained or resolved outside of the IC miniseries--like, the Spectre's appearances within the pages of IC are negligible and not remotely understandable without having read Day of Vengeance (which, by way of compensation, was pretty awesome).
Yeah, it's by no means great, maybe not even good, but it's very ambitious and succeeds where CoIE, in my opinion, did not.
I will admit that maybe my differing reactions have to do with reading CoIE in isolation (I was three when CoIE was being run in pamphlets), while I was pretty caught up with what was going on in the DCU while I was reading IC. But I still think OMACs are cooler than shadow demons, and Alex Luthor is several billion times a better supervillain than the highly boring Anti-Monitor.
Kestrel said:
It was way too convenient.
Also, the Spectre is supposed to be an arbitrary murder machine.
Hal Jordan is a focused murder machine.
Also, iirc, Jordan-as-Spectre was the story engine for the return of Ollie Queen, another move which I hated.
It's maybe not quite as dumb in execution, and it sorta kinda worked under deMatteis. But, hey, what doesn't? That guy rules.
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I think CGI cheapens comic books.
It's just a teaser though...it's not like they're actually using CGI in the actually books.
The idea reminds me a little of the Sinestro Corps War (which I thought was awesome BTW). Also, with the Blackest Night, which was another big war. I guess Brightest Day is supposed to be the breather, but I wish Johns could come up with something besides another war to accompany and capitalize on the Green Lantern movie. In any event, I'll probably be checking it out.
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