GOOD THINGS
1. This. Just... this.
2. John Stewart just barely outrunning the tidal wave of zombies approaching Earth.
3. Actually getting to see Saint Barry admit that he's unsure about something. This moment did a lot more to endear Barry to me than anything else Johns has done with the character since bringing him back.
4. We asked about it during Sinestro Corps Wars. We got a brief nod to it afterward. But now... now we finally get to see Scarecrow with a Yellow Fear ring.
BAD THINGS
1. As I noted in my review of Blackest Night: Wonder Woman #1, the idea of Wonder Woman as Love Incarnate just doesn't work at all for me. To my mind, Diana is much more complex than that.
2. While I love the reference to the old Green Lantern story where Hal was selling copies of his ring off on the street as a clever way of creating a small force of Lanterns on Earth to fight some crisis or another when The Corps couldn't get to him in time, I see nothing but missed opportunities in the idea that Ganthet triggers the color rings to seek out JUST ONE temporary deputy on Earth for 24 hours. Why just one deputy for each Corps when we know darn well the rings can duplicate more or less endlessly if the wielder has sufficient power? And that's assuming Ganthet can't - as A Guardian - override the programming to begin with.
3. For that matter, if the color rings are capable of latching on to a Black Lantern and shorting out the ring if that person normally conveys a particularly dominant emotion, why not try and take out some of the more powerful Black Lanterns? Assuming the rings zoom in on the greatest local source of emotion, why did the Blue Ring choose Barry Allen over Superman? You really think Barry is a better avatar of Hope than Clark? Bulltish!
4. Along those lines... I just would love to see hordes of common people get the rings rather than established heroes, ala Grant Morrison's World War III and some of the other heroes temporarily empowered. At the very least, I'd love to see Ollie Queen with an Indigo staff retrofitted into a bow. :) Cool as it is to see Ray Palmer in his Sword of the Atom tribal outfit again.
The Final Verdict: An awesome issue, though there's a lot of potential that went untapped if you think about it. The whole bit where Ganthet creates a cavalry to "double their efforts" is cool... until you realize that with Ganthet present, there's no reason why they couldn't start deputizing the whole planet.
Yeah, I can understand the 24 hour limit in this story, but I thought any Lantern could deputize as many people as he or she wanted with the catch being that they would have to charge using his or her battery.
ReplyDeleteI'd still say it'd have been interesting if they'd picked Dick Grayson for Love. Just get his disco-collar Nightwing uniform and play it up as Violet Lantern.
ReplyDeleteCourse, they probably didn't want '-BATMAN IS LOVE-.'
This is off-topic Matt, but are you going to have another Starry Awards for 2009?
ReplyDeleteWes A.
Short answer, no.
ReplyDeleteLong answer, see the most current posting.
Which I can understand. I can't understand why no 'SUPERMAN IS HOPE'.
ReplyDeleteSorta. I couldn't find any information on the original story where Hal was selling off copies of his ring in the street to double check, but I THINK there was a 24 hour limit on the mass-produced copies.
ReplyDeleteOf course given the "Must recharge the ring every 24 hours" limit the rings had back then, if the catch was that the temporary rings had to be recharged from Hal's battery, then effectively it would have been the same as what you said.
Six of one, Half A Dozen of the other.