Green Lanterns #26 Review and *SPOILERS*

Betrayal!....... and Recap

Written By: Sam Humphries

Art By: Ronan Cliquet, Ulises Arreola, Dave Sharpe

Cover Price: $2.99

Release Date: July 5, 2017

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

In our previous Extra-Sized Anniversary issue of Green Lanterns, we finally got our story moving in the direction that we've all wanted it to for a long ass time now and that's getting Volthoom back right and proper and showing himself to our heroes and with that, showing us what he had planned in seeking his revenge against the Guardians and the Lanterns themselves.  Yeah, it kind of turned into Volthoom just pretty much saying he's taking his ball and going back home to Earth-15, but it got us moving in the right direction at least and even did something that I wasn't expecting....... sending our heroes off to parts unknown, where they may just meet the Ultimate Warrior.  Yeah, that probably won't happen, but by the end of the previous issue, I was at least intrigued with where the story was going.  Let's jump into this issue and see what's going on in the world of the Green Lanterns and what trials they might face now that they're in a strange place and possible time and Simon being ringless.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

As our issue begins........ I realize that we're not going to get any kind of continuation to the story we left with in the last issue because instead of that, we're going to go over the information we've gathered through the previous issues about Volthoom and Rami's falling out, which is just glorified recap in my mind and serves no real purpose except to make sure that everyone is up to date with what we've been reading so far.  So yeah, we see this issue presented to us through Rami's journal, where he describes the fall of Volthoom and his creation of the first seven Green Lantern rings from Volthoom's Travel Lantern.  It's odd right away to me too because it seems that within a year after the Guardians got rid of their emotions within the Great Heart, which created Volthoom's power ring, they seem to be shrinking in size to what we know them to be now and I always took their shorter stature as being something that took billions of years........ not here though.  

So yeah, Rami and Volthoom become friends because they both want to test the limits of what Volthoom's ring can do and in order to do that, Rami implants the Great Heart into Volthoom's chest to give him a continued power source and they continue their tests.  It's after a couple of months that Rami starts to notice a change in Volthoom's behavior that makes him question whether or not his direct connection to the emotional spectrum is fucking up his mind, but it's this that leads Rami to use the Travel Lantern and travel to Earth-15, where he sees that Volthoom is actually the one who goes to his home world and destroys it.  It's this bit that actually makes this story just a little more than recap in my mind because it's the only real piece of new information that we get and we see that it's because of seeing this and reporting it back to the other Guardians that they decide to keep Volthoom's Travel Lantern from him, making him lash out.

In the end, Volthoom loses his goddamn mind and Rami uses the Travel Lantern to create the first seven Green Lantern rings in order to combat against the First Lantern.  Which we all know by now, but we also get to see another origin to one of the seven original Lanterns and this time it's a plant elemental.......... Yeah, it doesn't do much here, but I'm sure since we're seeing all of the seven members get their rings that it has to be important at some time in the story.

That's it for this issue of Green Lanterns....... and we didn't get any of our main heroes here at all..... Which just seems fucked up with how we left everything in the previous issue.  Instead, we get a big helping of recap, with the knowledge that Volthoom will one day go back to his home world and destroy it and that being the only piece of new information in an entire issue seems really lackluster to me and it seems even more fucked up that we had to have this interrupt the momentum we were on from the previous issue to get it.  The art in this issue was great, but that can't make up for so little happening and them just spoon feeding me information that we've already gotten from this series.  Hopefully, this doesn't happen again and we can get back to the story proper moving on, but Sam Humphries seems to love interludes so I won't expect much.

Bits and Pieces:

While this issue looked great, it only gave us one new piece of information for the story moving forward and to do that, it had to wrap it around an entire issue of recap that just totally threw on the brakes for what we had previously.  This series has been so rough in my mind and it's issues like this that make me wish I could drop it because it's just so much filler that anyone reading this series would have already known besides for that one piece of information.  

5.8/10