Mosaic Comics

2020 is the 80th anniversary of Green Lantern, but really it’s a milestone for Alan Scott, the original Green Lantern, created in 1940 by Martin Nodell in the pages of All-American Comics #16.  Alan has been through a lot of weird stuff over the last 80 years, and I plan to talk about all of it eventually…but right now, the anniversary has me wanting to read some Golden Age Green Lantern comics…or at least, comics that evoke the Golden Age. “Green Lantern: Brightest Day, Blackest Night” was published in 2002, and then later reprinted with a few other Alan Scott stories in a collection titled “JSA Presents: Green Lantern”.  It’s written by Steven T. Seagle, with art by John K. Snyder III, and is a reimagining of the first appearance of long-time Green Lantern villain Solomon Grundy in All-American Comics #61, published back in 1944.  The approach taken to this retelling is interesting, because while a lot of new elements were added, the choice was made to keep it as a...

Legion of Superheroes #6 has finally come out and given us some insight into the mysterious new Gold Lantern that writer Brian Michael Bendis has created for this incarnation of the Legion’s future…and going into this issue, we knew basically nothing at all.  The Gold Lantern first appeared at the end of Legion of Superheroes: Millennium #2, in late 2019.  Once the Legion ongoing series started, he would pop up a very small number of times over the first five issues, always in group shots, never having anything significant to say, and never using his powers.  It wasn’t until issue six that we started to get a little bit of insight into who this character is and what he can do…and I stress “little bit”, his presence in the issue amounts to about two pages during a chaotic fight scene, but we do get some dialogue that can be used to infer a few things. He introduces himself as “the Gold Lantern of this Galactic”, a Galactic being the term people in the Legion’s future ...

One of the absolute best things about Green Lantern is the concept of the Green Lantern Corps.  Thousands of beings, from planets all across the universe, each armed with a green power ring that lets them patrol their sector, protecting innocent people and going on amazing adventures that defy the limits of your imagination.  It’s the perfect concept to pair with the power set of a Green Lantern…the rings don’t have that many restrictions on what they can do, the biggest limiting factor is the user.  If you have the creativity to come up with something, and the willpower to back it up, then the ring can probably do it.  There’s a nearly infinite level of personalization and customization to the powers of a Green Lantern, and when you apply that to a Corps with 7200 members who all live on different worlds, experiencing different things, coming from different backgrounds…it gives Green Lantern a level of storytelling potential not present in any other superhero prope...