Death Metal is over and Future State is here. For anyone who doesn’t know, Future State is the name of a two month long publishing initiative where all of DC’s books flash forward to some point in the future, show off a lot of stuff that may or may not happen, and then afterwards go back to the present to tell the story of weather or not those future events come to pass, often through relaunched series by the various Future State creative teams. Future State Green Lantern, for example, is a pair of oversized anthology issues following what happens to a hand full of Lanterns long after the Central Battery on Oa has gone out. Today we’re going to take a look at two issues: Future State Green Lantern #1, and Future State Justice League #1, since Sojourner Mullein of Far Sector is the Green Lantern of the future League, and the issue definitely has at least one big tease for where her character may go after Far Sector is over. So let’s start by taking a look at Future State Green Lantern #1.
This issue kicks off with “The Last Lanterns” by Geoffrey Thorn and Tom Raney. I won’t lie, whenever I read a Green Lantern comic where nobody has working power rings, part of me is always kind of disappointed. But I didn’t really have time to care about that this time, because this story drops us into the end of an action movie and introduces a giant pile of new characters and concepts.
John Stewart, Salaak, and G’nort are trying to evacuate the population of a planet that’s about to get cleansed in the name of someone or something called the God in Red. I don’t know if this has any relation to the Red King, the antagonist of Future State Superman: House of El, but I guess I’ll find out, since I was already planning to read that issue because one of the characters is a Kryptonian Blue Lantern.
But the identity of the villain doesn’t really matter, as the focus of this issue is the moment to moment struggle for survival against a superior force. There are several mentions of the rings being gone, but nobody has the time or a good reason to get into what happened to them, or even how long it’s been since they lost their powers. I guess the thing that strikes me the most is that this story is scifi, but not super hero scifi. It’s got the trappings of a Star Wars-esque rebellion, right down to John wearing a lightsaber on his belt, and leans into political commentary with the fact that all of the planet’s leaders made sure to save themselves and leave the public to struggle and die, which is why John and his team had to come help in the first place.
I also never expected to meet so many new characters in one issue. D’shek, ilo, Hood, Kenz and Digby, Bekka…I’m not used to a Lantern book having so many non-Lantern supporting characters, and I’m really happy to see it. Green Lantern is often criticized for presenting an insular view of DC’s cosmic side, that the only characters we experience things through are Lanterns, who in tern mostly interact with other Lanterns…what we get in this issue is a pretty dramatic expansion of what it means to tell a story about Green Lantern characters out in space, and bringing in all these new characters provides us with a level of variety that has the potential to be pretty refreshing if it’s handled well. Also, John’s new look grew on me fast. That beard is powerful, and it needs to stay.
This story is the part of the issue that carries the most weight, because this is the creative team that’s taking over Green Lantern once Grant Morrison and Liam Sharp’s run ends in just two more issues, and whatever they give us in Future State should be taken as an indication of what their run will be like. And based on this issue…so far, I think I’m into it. I’m still not sold on the concept of the Central Battery dying, I have a hard time envisioning how it’ll be different from the last two times the Green Lantern Corps fell when someone took out the battery, but everything else seems good. I’m genuinely interested in everything new that’s been introduced in this issue, and I even enjoyed seeing G’nort and his weird, scary space dog mouth.
The second story in this anthology is “The Taking of Sector 0123” by Ryan Cady and Sami Basri. When I saw that this story was named after The Taking of Pelham 123, the last thing I expected was a story that draws so heavily from Alien. You see it right away, with Jessica sneaking around the space station dressed like Ripley, even using the same motion tracker from the movie. The aliens she’s got to deal with are three members of the Sinestro Corps, lead by Lyssa Drak, coming to salvage a Green Lantern Sector House. If you don’t remember what these are, they’re space stations located near the center of each sector that’re basically an all-purpose home base for Green Lanterns to use however they need. There’s living quarters, holding cells, and all the resources a Green Lantern would need to do their job without having to constantly go back and forth to Oa or their homeworld all the time. They’re a pretty great idea. Simon Baz actually lived in one for a while. And now it’s Jessica’s turn. When the rings went out, she was in a Sector House, and that’s where she’s been stuck for over a year.
Trapping Jessica in one place for a very long time is actually a really good way to start a story designed to change this character’s life, because it’s directly comparable to her origin. The first time we were ever introduced to Jessica, she hadn’t left her apartment for three years, terrified of the outside world because of the trauma she suffered. Compare that to now, when she’s been trapped alone inside of a Sector House for thirteen months, doing everything she can to connect to the outside world. Because in the intervening years, she’s gained experience as a Lantern, and she knows she can help people even though she’s afraid. She says it herself: “Maybe I do still feel fear…but I don’t feel powerless”.
And she’s right, she isn’t powerless. And we’re meant to think of that as a good thing, but it takes until the end for us to realize just what’s going on here. The homage to Alien is absolutely on purpose…only in this version of Alien, Ripley is the monster.
The Sinestro Corps are a reconnaissance team sent to inspect an abandoned station, only to be picked off one by one, by an unseen predator who knows the environment, and knows exactly how to take each of them out. Jessica is the monster lurking in the shadows, taking their team apart piece by piece. And just when it looks like Lyssa Drak has gained the upper hand, something unexpected happens. So much of Jessica’s life has been about developing her relationship to fear, never able to truly overcome it, instead learning to live with it. And in this moment, after thirteen months of being stranded when the light of willpower failed her, the light of the Sinestro Corps reaches out to her. In her origin story, fear is what kept Jessica locked away from the world. Now, in this moment, fear is the power that can give her freedom. It can allow her to finally leave the Sector House, and start helping people directly again. All she has to do is reach out and take it.
I’m glad they used actual Sinestro Corps members who’ve been around since the beginning, instead of making up some stock aliens, and I’m really glad they remembered the detail of the writing on Lyssa Drak’s skin. She’s the keeper of the written history of the Sinestro Corps, and has a record of it inscribed on her body. I really didn’t expect to come out of this story so excited to see what happens with the Sinestro Corps. They’re going to fill the power vacuum left by the Green Lantern Corps and become the universe’s police force, and if Jessica joins them it could be a way to bring Soranik Natu back into the spotlight, since they’re both former Green Lanterns trying to make it work as members of Sinestro’s army.
The third and final story in this issue is “The Book of Guy” by Ernie Altbacker and Clayton Henry, and it’s the only story so far to show us the exact moment the Central Battery went out. Guy is off on a remote planet half-heartedly trying to resolve a conflict, when suddenly his ring just dies. There’s no warning, it just completely stops working in an instant, which is terrible news for any Lantern who happened to be in space or some other harsh environment when this happened, let alone those in combat. But we’re not going to explore any of that right now, because Guy Gardner’s story is largely a comedy. He accidentally becomes a religious leader that unites two warring factions, basically killing time until his ring reboots. Only it never reboots, and suddenly it’s twenty-five years later, and we see the difference Guy made as a leader of this society. That’s actually been a theme running through all three of these stories…that once their powers are gone, the qualities that made them heroes remain, and each of the Lanterns continue to make a difference, make the universe slightly better than it was before, when their only resource is who they are as people.
Like the John Stewart story, this one also has heavy political commentary, but since it’s a light hearted Guy Gardner comedy they could be way more blunt about it. These two groups are willing to kill each other over ownership of what both sides regard as a holy relic, and Guy instantly recognizes it as a piece of space junk that fell out of orbit. This story looks at a conflict where people are willing to kill each other because they have different beliefs and calls their reasoning literal garbage.
I should note that the final panel shows us that Guy still wears his ring. That means that by this point in Guy’s story, the Central Battery has been gone for twenty-five years. I suppose it’s possible that the rings wouldn’t automatically spring back to life just because the Central Battery came back online, like maybe they need to be jump-started with a fresh charge or something, but if the Battery had come back at some point during those twenty-five years, a Lantern would’ve come looking for Guy. There’s communication logs and ring data tracking his last known location, hell the story starts with Guy having a conversation with B’dg right before landing on the planet. So the fact that Guy’s still stranded there tells me that the Central Battery, and the Green Lantern Corps, never came back…even two and a half decades later. For all its humor and funny business, Book of Guy is probably the most ominous and foreboding story in this whole anthology.
Finally, let’s talk about “Future State Justice League” #1, by Joshua Williamson and Robson Rocha. Out of the hand full of Future State comics I’ve read, this is the one most concerned with teasing new characters and possible storylines. There’s a two page spread alluding to big events in the lives of each individual League member, as well as an entire new Legion of Doom made up of legacy characters, including an Ultra Violet Lantern.
By the way, if you’re interested in learning all about the Ultra Violet Lanterns, check back here next Friday, there’s a John Stewart video coming where I talk about them in detail and explain why they make a fantastic storytelling tool.
The weird thing about this issue is that we don’t learn very much about any of the characters in it, and the fact that we don’t is kind of the whole point of the story. Apparently something happened to the modern day version of the League that was so awful, the next generation was made to operate under strict new rules that forbid forming personal bonds with team mates, operating out of one centralized headquarters, or even telling each other their real names. It’s a setup that’s designed to maximize mystery and potential storylines, while not having to tell us very much about the characters, except for the few moments when members of the team do sneak around and break the rules. It’s clever, but I wouldn’t call it satisfying, especially since the whole point of these issues is to see what these characters are like in the future.
Which brings me to Jo. I like that they remind us that she’s probably the oldest member of this team. And she does seem to have seniority, as she takes charge of an investigation personally and sends everyone else home.
At this point you might be wondering why Jo still has a working Green Lantern ring. DC actually released a timeline showing when most Future State stories happen in relation to each other, and this Justice League story takes place five years after the John Stewart story. So even though we don’t know exactly when the Central Battery fell, the Guy Gardner story tells us that it’s still gone twenty-five years later, thus there should still be no Green Lanterns anywhere in the universe during this Justice League comic. But Jo’s ring is different. We learn in Far Sector that it’s a prototype that runs on a different kind of willpower, making it overall weaker than an average Green Lantern ring, but it makes up for that by having the ability to automatically recharge itself slowly over time. She wasn’t effected by the Central Battery dying because she never drew power from it in the first place. So, just like Kyle Rayner in the 1990s, Jo is very likely the only Green Lantern left in the universe at this point in the future.
But as far as teasing future storylines goes, Jo gets a big one. There are short blurbs describing great things each Leaguer has done, and for Jo it says “She united all the Corps just in time to solve Oa’s greatest mystery”. That is how you say nothing while also saying everything. Not only are we going to see Jo interact with the larger Green Lantern universe of characters, but we can expect the return of the Emotional Spectrum after not seeing it used much at all in over two years, with the only exception being the Ultra Violet Lanterns in Justice League and the Gold Lantern in Legion of Super-Heroes. It’s way too vague to get excited over, but it still makes me happy, because it means we’re going to be bringing back elements that Geoff Johns introduced to expand on the mythology of Green Lantern. There’s a lot of debate over whether or not the Emotional Spectrum is a good thing that opens up the potential of Green Lantern as a concept, or a bad thing that takes focus away from all the other great things about the series. I obviously like it, but I think it’s a tremendous mistake to treat the Emotional Spectrum as an all or nothing proposition. It should be sprinkled throughout Green Lantern, not the focus all the time, and not totally ignored for two years like it has been. Moderation is the answer, it’s the best shot at making everyone happy, or at least happier.
But like I said, this tease is vague, and it could lead to anything, and that’s what I like about it. The best parts in all of these issues are the ones that leave you hanging on the potential of a single moment that could go in so many different directions. What mystery brings Jo to the other Lantern Corps? What happens if Jessica reaches out and takes that ring? The Lantern stuff in Future State hasn’t been perfect by any means, but so far I’m enjoying it, and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens in the second half next month. Remember, we’ve got a Blue Lantern coming in House of El…maybe that Corps will finally have a fighting chance with a Kryptonian on their team.
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