Mosaic Comics

Like a lot of Green Lantern fans, I’ve been following the adventures of Kyle Rayner since 1994.  In all that time, despite never missing an issue, I still haven’t managed read every Kyle Rayner story.  There always seems to be another guest spot or crossover or team book that I just never got around to.  I figured, why bother?  They were side content at best.  Maybe they’d be fun, maybe they’d have cool art, but they weren’t really important, because they weren’t in a Lantern book, and the proper Lantern books are where everything important to the character would happen. That’s what I thought, until I read 2015’s “The Omega Men” by writer Tom King. The story takes place in Vega, a solar system out of the jurisdiction of the Lanterns.  The worlds of Vega are ruled over by the Citadel, a corporation willing to exploit entire global populations to a genocidal degree, if it means assuring its own standing in the galactic market. The Citadel is oppo...

It’s been about ten years since the pages of Blackest Night first introduced the world to the concept of the White Lantern, the most powerful of all Lanterns, wielding the power of life itself.  But what does it actually mean to weird the power of life itself?  How does that make them the most powerful Lanterns?  Every other variation of power ring has clearly defined traits that determine the abilities and limitations of the rings, and directly inform the goals of the Lanterns wielding them.  So what exactly does a White ring do that sets it apart from every other color? Figuring out the actual abilities of the White Lantern is harder than you’d think, because almost all of the most significant displays of power performed by a White Lantern are done with something else augmenting their power.  There are three things we have to untangle: the abilities of the White Lantern ring, powers inherent to the Life Entity, and actions made possible through use of the...

One of the most important and defining traits of a Green Lantern is their ability to recognize and deal with fear.  Usually that means something internal and personal, like Hal Jordan overcoming the experience of watching his father die, or Jessica Cruz learning to live a more functional life with her agoraphobia and anxiety.  But what happens when the fear you must overcome stems from the fact that everyone around you is irrationally afraid of you? Enter Simon Baz, a Lebanese American Muslim living in Dearborn Michigan.  From the moment he arrived on the scene, Simon and his family showed readers a sampling of the kind of discrimination aimed at anyone of Muslim descent, even a decade after the events of 9/11.  Fear and misplaced anger causing good people to have to live with both subtle and extremely overt racism, impeding their ability to do something as simple as go to work and live peacefully in the community they’ve spent their lives a part of.  S...