Green Lanterns #29 Review and *SPOILERS*

Training Day

Written By: Sam Humphries

Art By: Eduardo Pansica, Julio Ferreira, Alex Sollazzo, Tom Napolitano

Cover Price: $2.99

Release Date: August 16, 2017

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

Ten billion years in the past we find out Green Lanterns on the verge of leading the first seven...... well, six Green Lantern against Volthoom...... it would have been seven but unfortunately, the seventh Lantern went and got herself exploded all over Earth's terrain after she will powered the hell out and couldn't control her ring.  Hopefully, in this issue we'll see Simon and Jessica train these Lanterns to the point where they are able to go up against the First Lantern and give him a run for his money, but at this point I'm more concerned with Simon and Jessica actually making them a team that cares about their calling.  Let's jump into this issue and see how the Green Lanterns handle themselves, since they were just trained themselves, plus how Simon deals without having a ring of his own anymore.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

Our issue begins with our Lanterns all training and just beating the hell out of Simon because he's without a ring at this moment and even though it seems that training is going slow, eventually, one by one each of the Lanterns starts figuring their rings out and once they do........... none of them want anything to do with stopping a mad Lantern on Maltus.  

Strangely, since we don't have anything for Simon to really do, this is when we have the Martian Lantern make a statement about how he can use the ring to see within Simon and how he has great anger, but has the willpower to beat it down, which gives Simon the idea that he can still use his ring parts that are embedded in his arm, which gives him the Emerald Sight, which we haven't seen in a long ass time.  Yeah, I don't understand how any of this works or why we have the concept of willpower spiking and never hear about a ring charge throughout this series, but even though I don't understand, we use the Emerald Sight to show Simon that Volthoom is about to destroy a planet because the Guardians won't let him have his Travel Lantern back and even though up to this point it seemed that none of these six Lanterns wanted anything to do with taking on Volthoom, they follow Simon on his quest to prevent this planet's destruction, but they're too late.

In the end, with the idea that they're lives will never be the same with this monster out and about in the Universe, our new Lanterns finally come together and decide that they need to stop Volthoom and with that, Simon and Jessica teach them the Green Lantern oath to give everyone a big "Ra Ra" moment.

That's it for this issue of Green Lanterns and while I knew that we were going to have to train these Lanterns to use their rings, it was something that I feared as well because yet again we have an issue of this series that just seems like filler and because Sam Humphries doesn't have a good understanding of what a Green Lantern ring can do, he just says it can do anything at any given time just as long as the willpower is spiking, while we never have a concept about how or why these rings are working since there isn't a Central Power Battery anywhere in the Universe or even Jessica and Simon's power battery so that they have a charge for the battle to come.  There just doesn't seem to be a lot of forethought put into these stories and that bugs the hell out of me and while I'm starting to like these new Lantern characters, their motivations for doing anything in this book seem strange until they have their uniting moment at the end, but why they'd agree to go to this doomed planet in the first place is beyond me.  The art in this issue is fantastic and I loved looking at this issue from start to end, it's just that the story is weak as hell and after all these issues it feels weird that I'm still waiting for something to happen in this book.

Bits and Pieces:

Let the training begin and with it, a padded out issue that really does nothing until it has to throw a concept out at you that doesn't make sense in the first place.  Now with that being said, this isn't all bad.  We have an issue with interesting characters and the idea that things will start happening in this book by the end, not to mention that the art was kick ass the whole way through.  I just wish that there seemed to be rhyme or reason behind Sam Humphries decisions to do things here because he just throws anything he thinks is cool at the page, whether it makes sense or not....... usually not.

6/10