So for about two years now, the main Green Lantern book has been written by Grant Morrison with art by Liam Sharp, two super-talented people who do excellent work in general. In fact the best thing about this run is that it’s likely introduced a lot of people to Liam Sharp’s artwork for the first time. I mean just look at what’s on your screen right now, the guy’s work is amazing.
Grant Morrison is the polarizing one on this team. When people think of Grant Morrison’s DC work, they tend to think of one of two things: his more restrained work that a general audience can easily understand, like his run on JLA…and his psychedelic, high-concept work that leave most people confused about what they even read, like Final Crisis. And for the record, I like both of these. I think Morrison at his weirdest is super interesting to think about, and I also have a lot of fun with his more standard mainstream stuff. So when I found out he’d be writing Green Lantern, I was pretty excited, because it was bound to be a good time while also making Green Lantern popular among general comic readers again. But what we got was something completely different that I never would’ve expected.
Grant Morrison decided he was going to turn Green Lantern into a Silver Age comic book. The entire project is a love letter to 1960, an age before comics took themselves all that seriously, and creativity ran wild. And I say 1960 because while Morrison pulls from the entire Silver Age for references and characters throughout this series, he stays pretty focused on 1960s era DC as his historical touchstone. On some level, I really like this idea. Green Lantern’s been around for 80 years, and a lot of that history’s been forgotten, so the prospect of a writer bringing back obscure characters and storylines and reintroducing them to a new audience has a lot of potential. The problem is in Morrison’s approach, because it doesn’t take very long to realize that he doesn’t seem to care if the audience gets the references.
Morrison’s approach to integrating Silver Age stuff into his Green Lantern run reminds me a lot of the after-credits scene in the first Iron Man movie, when we saw Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury name-drop the Avengers. As comic fans, we understood this was huge. We knew who Nick Fury was, we knew what the Avengers was, and we understood that Samuel L. Jackson was cast as a reference to Ultimate Nick Fury who was drawn to look exactly like Samuel L. Jackson. But the average person didn’t know any of that, and to them this after-credits scene was totally meaningless. It was loaded with amazing references that you’d appreciate if you already knew what it was talking about, but the scene did absolutely nothing to explain itself if you didn’t already have that background. It happened again at the end of Infinity War, when Captain Marvel’s emblem came up. Once again, comic fans knew exactly what that was, but general audiences had no idea at all.
This is what it’s like reading the Morrison run, and it would be one thing if we were just talking about easter eggs, but more often than not the references are the driving force of the story. And maybe your encyclopedic knowledge of DC Comics circa 1961 allows you to know that those golden giants are a reference to The Flash #120, or that the Ornitho-Men first showed up in The Flash #125…but if not, you’re kind of out of luck, because nothing in Morrison’s writing is going to fill you in. You’re expected to get the reference, and the sheer fact that he’s calling back to villains who haven’t been seen since the 1960s is supposed to be enough to justify their presence, meaning that if you try to read this 2020 Green Lantern comic book without prior knowledge of obscure Flash issues from 1961, you’re not going to get information important to understanding the story. Remember, Morrison’s trying to make a modern Silver Age comic, showing off obscure Silver Age stuff is the entire point…but the way he chose to present it turned the whole thing into one big in-joke that the average comic reader won’t get.
Now, all that said, there’s one more problem with the way Grant Morrison approaches this book, and for me it’s actually a much bigger issue than what we’ve already talked about. The problem is the dialogue. Something Morrison decided to lean into is the idea that, if all of these aliens are talking to each other through a universal translator, then the translation wouldn’t always be perfect. And I kinda like that, it adds some flavor and a dash of realism to this bizarre scifi world. I’ve gone on record before as saying one of my favorite things about Green Lantern is the Corps, and the infinite variety of characters that can appear in Green Lantern stories. So if Morrison wants to explore something about the way alien races communicate with each other, fine, that sounds great. This idea manifested in the form of sentences so awkward and broken that I can barely get through a single page without having to re-read something because I’d finish a panel and realize that I have no idea what just happened. When most non-Human characters speak, it is borderline incomprehensible, and it’s a problem that only seems to get worse as the series goes on. Most of this series is Hal Jordan interacting with aliens, which means the only thing I have to lean on to get me through these impossible conversations is good ol’ Hal…only Morrison’s writing Hal as he would be in 1960, long before any of the character traits you probably think of as being inherent to Hal Jordan were firmly a part of his character. I have been reading Green Lantern for most of my life, and I do not recognize Grant Morrison’s Hal Jordan. He is nothing at all like the Hal Jordan character from the last 40 years…and that might be the biggest problem with the Morrison run. It completely and totally ignores everything that happened with Hal Jordan as a character, and Green Lantern in general, after the very early days of the Silver Age. I suppose it had to, just by the nature of what this project was intended to be, but they ended up sacrificing some of the best things about Green Lantern as a franchise in favor of giving us this stripped down version that’s really only going to cater to a small percentage of readers, probably older ones who have some nostalgia for reading Silver Age books when they were kids.
Now I don’t want you to think that I’m saying the series is all bad, because it’s not. There are issues and scenes scattered across this entire run that I think are genuinely great. Off the top of my head, the issue where Hal lost his powers and had to go on a deadly scavenger hunt across a vampire planet was pretty cool, and I actually really liked the Annual because it was almost entirely about Hal having to deal with his extended family. And I’m absolutely going to come back to that one issue where Hal arrested all of Humanity for believing in the wrong God, maybe as a Christmas special or something, we’ll see. Unfortunately, all the good stuff was too few and far between, and Liam Sharp’s artwork can only do so much to counterbalance everything I don’t like.
…and yet despite all that, the Morrison run isn’t over yet, and I still want to see what that project ultimately is and what it has to say once it exists as a complete work. Who knows, maybe once it’s all done and I can see the big picture, I’ll end up liking it. No promises though.
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