Only one issue this past week, and it’s an Absolute one!
Absolute Green Lantern #1 (“Episode One: The Black Hand”) by Al Ewing, Jahnoy Lindsay, and Lucas Gattoni. $4.99, 30 pgs.
“Episode One”? Really?
Anyway, I think this is the final “Absolute” relaunch for a while, right? I mean, I would have green-lit Absolute Looker right away, but it doesn’t appear that’s going to happen, so we take what we can get. That’s fine, especially if DC can’t find better artists for the books. There’s nothing terrible about Lindsay’s art, but it does look like it should be in a mid-level Boom! comic rather than one of DC’s supposed “flagship” titles. He has a rough, not particularly detailed line which can work in some situations but looks sloppy here. The big reveal in the issue, which comes in a double-page spread, is supposed to convey a feeling of both grandeur and dread, but Lindsay’s sketchy rendering of the town of Evergreen, Nevada robs it of that. His Abin Sur is weirdly neat, and the page where the wall comes down – with violent consequences – is both pretty good and annoying, because it’s laid out in a confusing manner. The best part of the book is when Hal Jordan is threatened, but even then, we get another double-page spread that doesn’t really do a good job showing how bad it is. (I’m trying not to give too much away, so bear with me.) And, of course, I like before Abin Sur arrives, Jo Mullein wears a regular shirt and jacket, but after, she has to show off the midriff! It’s Superhero 101!!!
Ewing’s story is better than the art, which I guess is a good thing. The story relies a bit too much on people getting really, really angry really, really quickly, but I guess that’s the way of the world these days. Like AbsMars, Ewing is trying to tell a bit of a different kind of story – in this case, a horror story – using DC superheroes, and he doesn’t do the worst job. Hal Jordan is walking along in the desert, looking not well at all, when a cop pulls up and demands to know what’s going on. That doesn’t go well. Later, he’s in a diner when the news comes on that a gigantic green lantern symbol – the one we all know and love – has crashed on the town. We flash back a few days and find Hal chatting with Jo and John Stewart (Guy Gardner is mentioned as well) when a green translucent wall comes down, cutting them off from the outside world, and they see Abin Sur, hovering above it all and looking not at all benign. Back in the present, a customer decides to get angry with Hal, which does not go well. Then Jo shows up all green-tinted. I mean, we could already guess that from the cover, except I can’t show you the damned cover, can I? Anyway, before we get to that already-spoiled point, Ewing does a nice job subverting the “Hal Jordan, Man Without Fear” thing that DC has always built up (hey, isn’t Matt Murdock the Man Without …?). There’s nothing too revolutionary about it – it’s not surprising DC is going “woke” right from the get-go with this book – but there’s something to be said for tweaking things just enough so that long-time fans will think, “Hey, wait a minute …” while new readers won’t have to deal with a lot of foreknowledge. If you know nothing about Hal and his douchiness and his bomber jacket going into this, you don’t have to worry about it. It’s good for everyone!
So that’s another Absolute book in the books. What will DC come up with next? Absolute Harley Quinn? Absolute Cornelius Stirk? Absolute Dorothy Spinner? The mind reels!!!! But, of course, the real question is: Are you ready to go ALL IN with Absolute Green Lantern?
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆
Ok, so the lack of images continues to be a thing, and I apologize and can only tell you that I continue to be very grumpy about it and I also don’t know what to do about it. I, personally, haven’t been able to upload images for over a week, which is why I didn’t post anything last week – I kept hoping the problem would be resolved, but it hasn’t, and so there are no images. I have no idea what’s going on with WordPress, and I don’t know if this is happening to anyone else – and by “anyone else,” I mean Fraser, who usually uploads a bunch of images when he can so that he doesn’t get stuck like I do (he tends to know what images he’s going to use, while I don’t, so if it’s not working right when I am, I’m SOL), but he hasn’t over the past week, so I assume it’s not working for him, either. It’s very frustrating, and while I know that it’s not the end of the world, having a big wall of text without pretty pictures to break it up can be annoying, I know. I have no idea how to fix it, as I mentioned, so I just have to keep hoping it will get fixed. It doesn’t matter too, too much with something like this, but I do like to post Greg’s images with his posts, so that’s a pickle. I also would have posted this with the other two I reviewed yesterday, but for some reason, when I hit about 2000 words, it wouldn’t let me save it anymore. If I can’t do posts longer than 2000 words, we are truly in trouble! I’ll have to see if that’s a thing going forward, because that would suck. Sigh. We’re trying, I promise!
Anyway, I hope you’re all having a nice day. Go read some comics! That’s always fun to do!
Less than 2000 from Burgas is a crime against entertainment I say.
Sucks about the images, but it would suck more if you all stopped posting stuff. This is basically the only site where I comment because well, I really enjoy what you all post. Anyway, I will keep reading if you keep posting stuff.
And I will go read that Suicide Squad volume I got, because you said so(and because so far it has been really good)
I know – I can do 2000 words in my sleep! 🙂
I imagine once (or if, I suppose) we figure out the WordPress problems, it won’t be an issue, but yeah, for now, it’s a pain. Oh well.
I hope you dig the rest of Suicide Squad!
Sorry if these are all dumb questions, but– Have you contacted WordPress? Is behavior the same on all browsers? Is there some kind of storage limit or file size limitation with your images? Can you host the images somewhere else for a bit and HTML them in?
We’ve tried switching browsers. Doesn’t help. “failed to write to disk” is what we get when we upload photos. Usually if I try every day or so, the block breaks briefly, at which point I upload photos for two or three articles.
No, we’re not hosted by WP directly so they can’t help. I’ve contacted the hosting company a couple of times without response. The person who handled our admin has been out of touch for a while so a lot of the tools I might use if my own site were having problems aren’t available (in hindsight, that’s the kind of situation my IT-professional wife would have warned against).