It's been a good long time since I've really been interested in Green Lantern, thanks to a general antipathy toward the lead character and a "house style" for the book that seems to be all about the middle-of-the-road super-heroics. The first issue by Ben Raab and Rick Burchett seems to be very much in that style, with an intriguing tease about the return of the Green Lantern Corps but a failure of execution, as the characters and situations all seem so very bland and lifeless. Whether in space or on Earth, it seems that DC has yet to find a writer for Kyle Rayner who can make him terribly interesting to me.
These days, I look for either sparkling dialogue or strong plotting to make a book stand out, and so far, Green Lantern doesn't seem to have either. What passes for banter between Kyle, Ganthet and Kilowog is cliched and dull, lacking in any consistent characterization, and the first issue, when a creative team should really put their stamp on a character, comes across as just another issue, something that could have been a fill-in issue. The restart of the Corps has been teased before, but so far no one who has tackled the story really seems to get what made it such an interesting concept that fans are still demanding its return.
This is a story about a man who has the ultimate weapon, soaring through alien space and trying to reform a galaxy-wide police organization. So I have a hard time understanding why it is so boring. Part of the problem is that Raab plays up the familiar aspects of Kyle's job rather than the alien aspects. His rescue of a starship may as well be him guiding an airliner to safety, his help with the farmers is a generic monster story and preventing the assassination of a world leader is also kind of standard super-hero stuff. The trappings are alien, but the jobs are routine for a super-hero, and this winds up looking like any of a hundred super-hero books. Ditto for the cliched banter between hero and mentors, complete with an alien who doesn't understand colloquialisms and one that peppers his speech with alien expressions. Or, for that matter, the people who are still angry at the Green Lantern Corps because of the actions of Hal Jordan, an event that this book has been coasting on for way too long.
I wish I could say that the artwork makes up for the lackluster story, but Burchett and Ramos aren't even remotely at their best here. Granted, the material isn't really inspired, which can't have helped, but at least part of the blame for the dull nature of the story must fall on their shoulders. The grandeur of Kyle's job is utterly lost in their average designs for starships and aliens, and there's no sense of danger in the action scenes. There's also not a great deal of expressiveness to the characters, who often seem sort of flat and featureless.
Though I wasn't exactly excited about a change in creative teams on Green Lantern anyway, I was pretty underwhelmed by the first issue of this new creative team. It seems like the rule on this book, whether from an existing creative team or a new one, is "don't rock the boat," and while that may work great for some fans, it's not really what I'm looking for from this character or from super-heroes in general.
