Green Lantern #51 Review

Green Lantern #51, or should I say Blackest Night #6.75, came out this week picking up with Parallax's return.  Just prior to jumping back into the fray with Parallax's confrontation with Black Lantern Spectre, Johns shows us a little bit of what Black Hand is up to, which isn't much really, other than walking around a smiling evilly.  We also get to see more of what I hope gets expanded on, and that's the Larfleeze / Lex Luthor avarice connection.

While certainly a relationship of comedic proportions, there so much more to it than that.  Lex's drive to defeat Superman is so strong that there's no way that he's going to relinquish his newly found power easily when his time is done as a deputy of the Orange Lantern Corps.  And if there's one being in the universe with the ability to take the power of avarice from Larfleeze, it's got to be Lex Luthor.  We know from the advance solicitations that Larfleeze is going to be on Earth for at least a couple of issues once Blackest Night ends, and given the conversation between he and Lex about how Earth is all about owning things, I am very encouraged that Larfleeze is going to love it here once the dust settles....although we have a hard time getting rid of him.

Their confrontation is interrupted by Doug Mahnke's beautiful two page splash of Parallax and Spectre's clash.  We're reminded that, unlike the last time, Hal Jordan chose to re-bond with Parallax in issue 50, a defining moment where Parallax thinks that he is re-claiming Hal but Hal is really saying that this time it's going to be him in charge of Parallax. 

And we see that this is true, that Hal is more in charge this time when we see Parallax through the Spectre's eyes - he is green at his core with only yellow fear in his cape and extremities.  Parallax and Black Lantern Spectre have some dialogue that Johns uses to explain that the Black Lantern ring claimed Crispus Allen and that it's their bonding that has allowed Nekron to claim the Spectre as one of his soldiers. 

Parallax is able to liberate the Spectre from Nekron's control and it's not really clear to me whether or not the Spectre is still bonded to Crispus Allen or not.  At any rate Parallax is bent on destroying the Spectre, while the Spectre is determined that Parallax will face God's wrath even if it's at the expense of Hal Jordan.

Parallax rips the face off of the Spectre in a delightfully ghoulish bit of art by Mahnke, and I'm not sure who it is looking out through the Spectre's right eye.  Sinestro re-enters the fray as he seeks to claim Parallax for  himself, and Atrocitus seeks to claim the Spectre as the entity for the red power of rage.  A geek-out moment arrives with Spectre does indeed go all Red Lantern on everyone, but only for a moment until the Spectre regains control.  There's a neat touch as both the Spectre's cape an cowl as well as his word balloons tranform mid-panel to reflect the Spectre's swift expulsion of the Red Lantern Corps power.

The Spectre reveals that there already is an entity for the pure power of rage and warns Atrocitus not to seek it out as he has already faced it.  In the one moment of the book that I was disappointed in, Hal is pulled free from Parallax not from his own conquering of the fear entity, but by his anchor to Carol through his love of her.  Now, don't get me wrong that I think that Carol and Hal shouldn't have a relationship - there's is an example of a love has a strength born from the inability for the two of them to reconcile.  There's is a love fated to never quite be fully realized and it's the romantic tension between the two that adds so much to their screen time together.

For me there are two Hal driven moments that I want to see from Blackest Night, one being Hal encountering one or both parents as Black Lanterns, and the other seeing Hal defeat Parallax completely on his own.  So for Carol to be his savior, while perhaps underscoring their love for each other, in my opinion lessens the dramatic purpose of Hal choosing to bond with Parallax.  Hal's the guy that jumps out of the plane without a parachute knowing he figure out a way out of it on his way down - but here he jumped out of the plane and someone else got him out of it.  I think Hal needed to defeat that demon on his own like John Stewart threw off the weight of his past in Green Lantern #49.  So I feel a little cheated by the scene, so I hope we see Martin Jordan some time soon.

What happens next is very, very intriguing.  Before Sinestro can claim the Parallax entity it is mysteriously pulled away by some as-yet-unknown force.  And then we flash to Belle Reve where Hector Hammond senses that "It has Parralax."  This is of huge significance since we know that the Predator entity of the Star Sapphires is on the loose, Ion is probably still trapped within Sodam Yat at the center of Daxam's sun, and there's a red entity out there somewhere.  Whether "it" is something we'll see in Blackest Night or dealt with later remains to be seen, but in my own fanboy speculation I'm thinking that this is linked to the "Guardian's Great Lie" that Black Hand has been going on about and we're about to see the true origin of life in our universe not the one that the Guardians have wanted us to believe.

The Spectre joins the New Guardian battle with Nekron, only we find that since Nekron has no soul the Spectre can do absolutely nothing to him.  The art here by Mahnke is again brilliant as he shows the Spectre lunging through Nekron and dissolving away, leaving the issue with Nekron's ominous claim that "The Universe will die now."

Other than Carol saving Hal I loved the issue.  It read really fast, that's for sure, although it could just be that I'm so into this story that I read it faster than normal because I am truly loving it so much.  Like the Sinestro Corps War, Blackest Night is an action filled epic filled with jaw dropping moments and great action.  The art by everyone involved has been stellar every step of the way, and this issue continues to relieve any doubts I had when it was announced that Doug Mahnke was taking over for Ivan Reis.  I couldn't be happier with the choice that DC made with the choice of Mahnke as this issue of Green Lantern continues to add to a run that's going to go down as one of the most outstanding runs of any series in comics history.

Four out of five lanterns.

Posted in: Blackest Night, Comics Reviews, Doug Mahnke, Ganthet, Green Lantern, Hector Hammond, Sinestro