Green Lanterns #31 Review and *SPOILERS*

Back To The Future

Written By: Sam Humphries

Art By: Ronan Cliquet, Hi-Fi, Dave Sharpe

Cover Price: $2.99
Release Date: September 20, 2017

*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*

It's finally coming to an end after so much filler and waiting and I have to say that I have mixed feelings about it because while I couldn't wait to get to the showdown between Volthoom, our Lantern heroes and the original bearers of the green light of Will........ it seems to be over too soon.  Is that weird?  I don't know, I guess I just expected more of this story than simple training and then booming off to action, where our heroes fix things in two issues.  Anyway, let's get you in this good and proper by having me tell you about the previous issue.  Previously, our Lanterns went after Volthoom and got the shit beat out of them, where we saw a bunch of our Lanterns die, but in the end Simon stepped up and took on the First Lantern without any ring at all and because of his courage and his ability to overcome great fear, the dead Lanterns' rings came to Simon, giving him four rings to wield.  Alright, let's jump into this issue and see if Simon can turn the tables on Volthoom and find out what the fuck happened to the Manhunters in this timeline.  Let's check it out.

Explain It!:

Our issue begins in the present, where Rami is healing the now ancient Tyran'r, who is giving us the narration about how Volthoom's greatest downfall came about because he sent the original Lanterns their greatest weapon.......... Simon and Jessica.  With that, we go back in the past, where Simon is just beating on Volthoom with everything he has and eventually Jessica, Kaja, Z'kran and Tyran'r get in on the action.......... where unfortunately, Zkran goes down, but not before peering into Volthoom's emotions and seeing that the man is terribly damaged because of his connection to the emotional spectrum and before he dies, he pleads for Jessica to help Volthoom instead of just ending his life.  With that, Simon ensnares Volthoom in the construct that Brill had previously put him in and even though we saw previously that Volthoom can just phase through constructs, for some reason this one holds him and Jessica calms the First Lantern down by telling him the story of the Emerald Sun, which she's tried to recite a couple of times now since Kilowog taught it to her, but here she finally gets it right.  

Once Volthoom is calmed down and it seems that our Lanterns will actually change the future by helping him get home so that the Third Army, Wrath of the First Lantern and everything we've had up to this point really never happened, the Guardians come down and fuck everything up by betraying Volthoom again by taking his ring and setting into motion everything that we've had previously.  It's at this moment that Rami decides that Green Lantern rings are too powerful and need to be taken away, which brings up why they built the Manhunters after this, even though the Manhunters should have gone up against Volthoom, but what the hell, at least the Manhunters were mentioned.  Anyway, now that Volthoom is sane again, he wants Rami to know that he intends on killing him and grants Jessica and Simon salvation by making Jessica's ring go to its Travel Lantern commands, where Volthoom tells it to send them home......... Which is cool, but also makes me wonder why Volthoom didn't know Jessica and Simon and everything that transpired at the beginning of this series.

In the end, Jessica and Simon get home and Simon gets a ring again, when the now ancient Tyran'r resigns his Green Lantern membership and the ring flies to Simon........ again, it's weird that Tyran'r has been guarding the Vault of Shadows this whole time with a Green Lantern ring, when Rami said that they were too powerful for anyone to have.  To add to things just happening because, Rami then uses Jessica and Simon's rings to return health to Tyran'r so that the original Green Lantern can go on a quest with Rami to search out the other original rings before Volthoom can get his hands on them......... leaving me to wonder about Jessica and Simon both having one of the original rings, which we've seen have no safe guards and are different than the other rings out there in the Universe.

That's it for this issue of Green Lanterns and the conclusion of our heroes being trapped ten billion years in the past and while this was a decent conclusion to the story, it brought up a lot of unanswerable questions in my mind, like time travel and how Volthoom didn't know about Simon and Jessica even though they were the ones who originally beat him, how Tyran'r continued being a Green Lantern after Rami took all the rings away, why Jessica's ring didn't answer to Rami's commands in the past even though her ring is one of the original and how the hell can Simon and Jessica use their rings to restore life in a being............ Yeah, we saw Simon bring his brother-in-law out of a coma once, but that was thought to be impossible and really took it out of our hero at the time.  It's all just a bunch of things thrown together to get the story to its conclusion without it making sense in the long run.  So yeah, while there was enjoyable moments to this issue, it was wrapped around a bunch of over convenience to get the story told, but I'm happy to get our Lanterns back in the present and on Earth and I really enjoyed the art in this issue so at least that's something.

Bits and Pieces:

While this story concludes with this issue and there are some fun moments........ overall, there was just things happening in this issue to get to the conclusion whether they made sense or not and by the end I just had a lot of questions about how the hell half the things in this book could actually go down.  The art was great though and I look forward to what comes next, but this ending seemed really forced, which is a shame for all the filler we've had leading up to and throughout this arc.

5.5/10