The Green Lantern: Season Two vol. 1

I don’t know who at DC decided to put the “Green Lantern:  Blackstars” miniseries that wraps up the first season of Grant Morrison and Liam Sharp’s run on the title, but I owe them a drink if I ever meet them.  “Blackstars” tells us what happened after Hal Jordan wished for a universe without the Green Lantern Corps and under Controller Mu’s domination.  Which is how we get Belzebeth working with “Blackstar Parallax” as they bring order to the universe, regardless of whether its inhabitants want it or not.  It results in a pretty fun yet dark story as things go from bad to worse for everyone involved, especially when the war comes to Earth and the Super-family gets involved.  Sharp may not have drawn this storyline, but Xermanico proves that he’s more than capable of keeping up with Morrison, who delivers a fitting climax to “Season One.”  Maybe it’s because he’s telling a longer story here, but the writer does a better job of giving us reason to care about what’s happening, as opposed to throwing all of his big sci-fi concepts at the wall to see what sticks.

Which is what happens when we get into “Season Two” proper.  After a brief celebration, Hal is quickly thrown into his next case:  Finding replacements for the Guardians of the Universe.  For this he’s teamed up with sentient salt-man Ryk and sent to the planet Malus where the evolverator has run wild and created an army of space-apes for the two to deal with.  The stories only get crazier from there as Hal has to deal with an alien race of human-faced vultures living under the city of tomorrow, taking a test flight into a lower-dimension liquid continuum, teaming up with the Flash to take on a giant golden kid who wants to play with them like toys, and recuperating at an interstellar hospital when his antimatter double and his crew come looking for him.  It can be hard to keep up with these stories as Morrison is putting his ideas ahead of plot coherence.  I can’t fault him for his ambition, however, and not only does he give Sharp plenty of interesting things to draw, the artist positively thrives on getting the chance to draw every crazy thing the writer throws at him.  That makes “Season Two” arguably the best-looking DC title I’ve seen recently, even if it’s not the easiest or most enjoyable read.