Emerald Fights
Let's head off to the year 2035...... for at least maybe one of the stories. Yeah, we're heading back into a time where the Green Lantern Power Battery has gone offline, leaving our heroes without the power to defend themselves and in some instances, even get themselves back home. In the previous issue, I found the main story featuring John Stewart, Salaak and G'Nort to be lacking because it was just them going up against a cult of Khund warriors invading a planet but when we got to the more personal backups featuring Jessica Cruz and then Guy Gardner... Well, that's when the book really made me happy I read it. Let's jump into this issue and see if the John Stewart story picks up and if the backups here, featuring Teen Lantern and Hal Jordan can top what we got previously. Let's check it out.
For our initial story, picking up from where we left off previously, G'Nort died defending alien civilians from a Khund invasion and now we see John Stewart doing his damnedest to not only stay alive but give his team enough time to evacuate the remaining populace... and that's about it. Yeah, you see John fight his way through an army of Khunds and it's pretty cool, but we focus so much on the leader of this group, Beelu Kenz, and other characters you know nothing about..... not to mention trying to create this world through slang and character pasts you don't know and really don't care about that this became a tedious read and by the end, it tries to mix things up and give you something familiar, but it's done in such a convoluted way that nothing really saves this story by the end and I just hope that we get more interesting things from Geoffrey Thorne when the main Green Lantern book comes back after Future State.
As for the backups...... Well, they're a bit of a mess too. We feature Teen Lantern for our first one and this story could take place tomorrow from where we left the character and for some reason, the Guardians in this book look nothing like you've ever pictured the Guardians before, and ultimately we don't really do anything new with the character but hopefully, this is just a prelude of her doing Green Lantern things in our future, not necessarily theirs. For our final story, we see Hal Jordan trying to find out where the Corps are after the Power Battery goes out but throughout this story, we see that Hal seems to have power the whole time and it's just a collage of different aspects to Future State that you've seen previously until he comes face to face with another Lantern. Like the Teen Lantern backup this too just seems like a prelude to what we could expect from the Green Lantern title going forward but offers up nothing really new and makes things more confusing than they should be.
All in all, the art is really strong throughout all of the stories, it's just the stories that aren't doing much for this oversized issue, and from what you get, it doesn't really feel like it deserves the cover price because for the exception of John Stewart killing Khunds with an ax and learning about Beelu Kenz and the people of her world..... which I didn't care to learn about, there's nothing really new or exciting to this issue and it feels like this was thrown together last minute. Hopefully what we get here doesn't reflect what the Green Lantern title will be like when we come back from Future State because as much as I was looking forward to seeing the future of our Emerald Knights, this and the previous issue didn't do much for me....... I still love those Jessica Cruz and Guy Gardner stories from the previous issue though.
Bits and Pieces:
While the art is strong throughout all three stories, I found it hard to care about the main chapter of this book and the backups just came off as something tacked on without a lot of thought behind it because the timelines between them feel weird and how our heroes are maintaining their power feels off. Just a lot of this book didn't seem to mesh and didn't seem to do a lot with the page space they were given.
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