Green Lanterns Annual #1 Review

The Lost Lantern

Written By: Andy Diggle

Art By: Mike Perkins, Andy Troy, Dave Sharpe

Cover Price: $4.99

Release Date: May 30, 2018

Well, we're almost fifty issues into the regular Green Lanterns run and now we finally get an Annual.  Not that I'm complaining because with Annuals you can pretty much take them or leave them, but I'm curious to see what we'll get out of this for all the character development we've had with Simon and Jessica over the past two years.  Hopefully, we won't get a retread of the most basic concepts of the character (hint hint).  Let's jump into this issue and check it out.

For our first Annual to our Green Lanterns series we're dealing with the myth of the Lost Lantern, who time before time went and saved his people when his planet's sun went super nova and because of that, the Green Lanterns get together to remember the sacrifice of this mythical figure.  Really though, this issue while dealing with a cool concept just reruns the classics of Simon and Jessica.  We need to talk about Jessica's anxiety and see that Simon is a car guy and while that is a bit of a disappointment, the issue goes and falls into territory where the book stops making sense because things go down here with the Green Lanterns and their rings that just makes it seems that Willpower is the key and that the Green Lanterns as a whole don't need to charge their rings.  

We've seen this before in the early days of the Green Lanterns book....... and even the middle days of the book, but I thought we got away from that finally and it also seems that the insight we got previously about how Jessica's ring is one of the original rings ever made doesn't seem to fit into this story........ or it can.  It was never really explored what that meant in today's time with the restrictions in place, but we do explore the idea of operating systems within the rings and how they get updated.......... or don't........... because you should need to charge your ring for that to happen.

All in all, the art in this issue was interesting and in the background of this book there was an interesting story, but with everything added in, it kind of falls flat in conveying its message.  The characters feel like odd versions of themselves and while the rest of the Green Lantern Corps being included was cool, this was an overwritten story that didn't feel like it knew the source material going in.

Bits and Pieces:

We're back to rings not needing to be charged with this issue and that's disappointing, but it's also disappointing that we're dealing with just the basic concepts of our main characters and little else to just convey a message of what the difference between willpower and willfulness is.  The art is interesting in this issue, but little else really is in the long run.

5.1/10