Grant Morrison writing Green Lantern is, on paper, a perfect match. His enormously inventive storytelling coupled with an unlimited array of alien characters and a protagonist with a magic ring that can do anything? It should be a home run. Except it’s not, unfortunately.
Green Lanterns are basically space cops and Morrison plumps for a cliched cop story for his opening arc: there’s a rat in the Corps and it’s up to Hal Jordan to find out who it is. All that means is he arrests some punkass aliens, does the good cop/bad cop interrogation thing, and gets accepted into a gang of criminals – none of which is interesting.
Hal fighting a giant hamster and spider, Earth being auctioned off by aliens and an Old Testament God-like evil alien are all surprisingly boring and irritatingly stupid. The story moves sluggishly thanks to a lot of overwriting and an unnecessarily complicated structure (an Anti-Matter Lantern?).
Morrison does include some amusingly wacky Lanterns like the Lantern with a constantly exploding volcano head and a cyclops with a forest for hair! I also liked the microscopic virus Lantern and the indescribable Lanterns who police the farthest reaches of the universe – there’s the imagination I expected Morrison to bring. The Adam Strange episode where Hal has to kill Adam to gain acceptance into the cosmic vampire gang was kinda fun though it plays out in a predictably cop-out way.
The only really great aspect of the book is Liam Sharp’s artwork. Oa looked amazing, as did the Church of Blood – really that whole vampire sequence was fantastic - and I loved the creative character designs for the ridonkulously varied cast.
It’s a shame that the book is such a bore to read, not least as it’s by such an experienced and talented writer as Grant Morrison. It’s pretty but I doubt that’ll sway many to check out The Green Lantern, Volume 1: Intergalactic Lawman – I wouldn’t.
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