The second half of Future State is here, and today I’m going to be talking about Future State Green Lantern #2. This issue picks up with the conclusion to “Last Lanterns” by Geoffrey Thorne and Tom Raney. If part one of this story was all about introducing new characters, part two is all about hitting us with surprising concepts. We’ve got claims that the God in Red killed the Guardians, we’ve got microscopic scientists from a world called imsk building their own Mother Box from scratch, we’ve got the enemy general’s armor being made from the body of a robot Green Lantern named RRU-9-2, and then we’ve got the revelation that the God in Red that the Khunds worship is actually Orion of the New Gods. Orion says his transmission to this plane is flawed, so I assume the reason he looks this way is because John’s team built their own Mother Box and it just didn’t work quite right. But once he shows up, and lays out why the Khund got it all wrong, it makes me wonder a lot of things. How much of what the Khund believe in actually happened? Did the New Gods wipe out the Guardians, like their general claims? How did the Khund even get involved in any of this?
Also, we get our first clear shots of John’s gloveless hand, and he is in fact wearing a physical ring. For the last few years, John’s ring had been replaced with a ring tattoo, and it’s a detail that I really don’t want to believe has been forgotten. This story takes place in the near future, there’s still plenty of time to reconcile it, so I’m holding out hope.
In the middle of fighting for his life, John takes a moment to look directly at the reader and address something that a lot of people probably thought about after reading last issue, saying that you don’t need rings to tell a good story with Green Lantern characters. Rings are just tools, and what matters is who uses them. And that’s a point that I absolutely agree with, because think about it…every single member of the Green Lantern Corps has exactly the same powers, what keeps them from all feeling the same is who they are as individuals. The powers just add an extra layer of personal expression, they help magnify each character’s personality. It’s why people can feel so strongly about their favorite Green Lantern protagonist, because they’re not interchangeable, and the thing that sets them apart from each other is who they are as people. I just wish that message was delivered inside of a better story.
I think if I had to boil it down, the strength of the John Stewart story in these two issues is the large number of new characters and ideas that get introduced. The problem with this story is that all of those interesting ideas are delivered through an incredibly generic action scene that every scifi thing has done to death, and it’s getting in the way of everything good this story does, by making all of the new stuff seem uninteresting because the events around them are uninteresting. And part of that may be due to the nature of what Future State is…it was never meant to tell a complete story, just part of one, totally devoid of context, and this generic evacuation battle was the easiest way to show off all the new toys in a kinetic way. And while it did get its point across, I do wish Geoffrey Thorne came up with a better way to present it.
That said, I can’t really be too hard on this story, since it did give me a lot of things that I enjoy. I got to spend time with John and Salaak and G’nort for the first time in a long time, I got a glimpse of a ton of new characters that I can’t wait to get to know, I got a preview of a lot of cool new ideas, and I got just enough answers about the big lingering questions surrounding the immediate future of Green Lantern to make the new series that’s about to start even more enticing. We still don’t have all the pieces, and I’m looking forward to finding out how they fit together, and spending time with all these characters (new and old) while we find it.
Next up is “Dead Space” by Josie Campbell and Andie Tong. Keli Quintella, the Teen Lantern of Young Justice, finally made it to Oa in hopes of starting her career as an officially recognized super hero. The Guardians are more concerned with finding out what the deal is with Keli’s gauntlet, because not only does it tap directly into the Central Battery, the Guardians have never seen it before. What’s more concerning is that it looks a lot like the prototype that the renegade Guardian Krona made before the invention of power rings, something that fans noticed right away, but this is the first time someone has acknowledged a possible connection in the comics.
The Guardians, by the way, are in their Morrison era redesigns, and it’s really weird. They look like a room full of Doctor Manhattans, and the one bad thing I’ll say about the art in this section is that the Guardians lose any distinctive features that make them recognizable or memorable. Thankfully they’re only here long enough to send Keli on her first real mission: go to these exact coordinates and meet up with Sojourner Mullein so they can trace the gauntlet back to its point of origin and finally get some answers. And since Keli has no idea what she’s doing, they send Mogo to make sure she gets there alright.
To get where they want to go, Mogo has to fly them through a truly empty section of space that has no planets or stars for millions of lightyears…and that’s right where they are when the Central Battery goes out. Severing Mogo’s connection to the Central Battery is painful, and it deprives them of Mogo’s ability to communicate and move freely through space. Keli spends twelve days searching for some way to wake Mogo up and get them both moving again, but is ultimately left alone with nothing but her own fears to keep her company…and this is where we get the one panel that makes this entire story worth it. We find out that the reason Keli wants to be a hero so badly is because not only will it give her life purpose, but because it helps her accept the hardship she’s had to live through up to this point. It’s ok that she lost her loved ones, it’s ok that she grew up in the slums, because if she could make this work, all of that just becomes her origin story. All of it has a purpose, all of it happened for a reason. And if it happened for a reason, if it happened because she was meant to wear that gauntlet and become something great, then it wasn’t just that her life was crumbling around her, it was always part of a larger plan. Keli needs to believe in destiny, because if she doesn’t, she’s left just being a scared kid with no idea what to do.
They eventually realize that her gauntlet’s power supply is enough to restore Mogo, though it isn’t nearly enough to get them out of the void. So now they’re both awake and powerless, stuck in a region of space with nothing around for lightyears…but at least neither of them is alone.
I like that we finally got hard confirmation that, while Keli’s backpack does in fact tap into the Central Battery for power, it isn’t dependent on a constant feed of energy. That backpack is a battery that stores power for later, and can function independently of the Central Battery once it’s gone. It’s also significant that the gauntlet has bonded to Keli, to the point that while she can take it off at will, even the Guardians couldn’t remove it when they tried. And the fact that the Guardians were already able to discover where the gauntlet came from by tracing its energy signature means that we are on the verge of finding out some long overdue answers to questions that fans of Young Justice have been asking for two years. Seriously, two years with Young Justice and we were still no closer to learning anything about the secrets of Keli’s gauntlet, and then she joins the Green Lantern comic for ONE PAGE and the Guardians are already sending her to the planet the gauntlet came from. I think the new Green Lantern book is going to give Young Justice fans what we’ve wanted to see from Teen Lantern all along, and while I wish it came sooner and in the pages of Young Justice, I’m still glad to have it. And I’m glad to see Keli cement her place in the Lantern family, I hope she has a big role to play going forward.
The final story is “Recon” by Robert Venditti and Dexter Soy, and follows Hal Jordan as he flies this cool space ship from Earth to Oa so he can figure out what happened out there, and why nobody’s been able to find any of the other Green Lanterns from Earth for months. Earth is apparently in pretty rough shape, too…the first two pages make a few references to there being very few heroes left. But whatever’s going on, Hal decides he has to be the one to look beyond Earth and see how bad things are out in space. That ship of his is powered by Hal’s ring, which is still functioning because Cyborg built a machine to amplify whatever little power it still had left.
On the way to Oa, Hal is able to confirm that a lot of factions are moving in to take advantage of the Green Lantern Corps’ absence. The Sinestro Corps is expanding their territory, Manhunters are roaming free, Warworld has been rebuilt and is on the move…Hal flies by Ysmault, homeworld of the Red Lanterns, and finds it overrun with Khund warriors. Hal knows they’re worshipers of the God in Red, and notices that they’re more bloodthirsty than usual, they seem mindless, even going so far as to call them feral…all of which describes a Red Lantern right when they first get their ring. A Red Lantern regains their mind after performing a specific ritual, so I wonder if the God in Red has something to do with the Red Lanterns, or maybe something found on Ysmault…or maybe it could even relate to the Inversions, the group imprisoned on Ysmault that Atrocitus betrayed to create his Red Lantern Corps.
Regardless, the only Lanterns left out there at this point seem to be the Sinestro Corps and Larfleeze. And as Hal arrives on Oa, we finally understand what it means for the Central Battery to have gone out. The Battery, the citadel, the city surrounding it…all gone. Leveled, nothing but broken pieces scattered across flat land. But Hal doesn’t have any time to process what he’s seeing, because he’s immediately found by Sojourner Mullein. We already had it confirmed by Future State Justice League that Jo’s ring’s ability to self-charge means it can function independently of the Central Battery, meaning that she and Keli are both the only Green Lanterns who still have their powers.
And that’s where Green Lantern Future State leaves us. If I’m being completely honest, part of me wishes the new ongoing would just pick up where these stories left off instead of going back to show us how we got here. I want to see where this meeting between Jo and Hal goes, and I still really want to see what happens with Jessica and that yellow ring. But I know we’ll get there eventually, since that’s kind of the entire point of Future State…and it has me wondering how necessary this whole gimmick really was. I mean, it got a lot of people to pay attention to a lot of books, so in that regard it was successful. But from a narrative perspective, there was nothing all that special about Future State that it warranted taking a break from the present day stories for two months. Because at the end of the day, it was just a long teaser for things that might happen in the new Green Lantern book. It would’ve made more sense if the stories told in these issues were compelling enough to draw in new readers, but Future State Green Lantern counts on you already liking these characters, and the only thing it sells you on is the promise that if you read the new series, you’ll see them again soon.
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