Mosaic Comics

In 2018, DC comics published a mini-series titled Heroes in Crisis, by writer Tom King.  It was a murder mystery that centered around a facility called Sanctuary, an unassuming house in the American heartland, set up by Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman so that the superhero community would have a safe place to go whenever the pressure of the job became too much to bear.  At Sanctuary, heroes could anonymously interact with a staff of robot attendants, and talk through whatever’s on their mind, in complete privacy, and in some cases offered fascinating insights into the way these characters see themselves. As you would imagine, some Green Lanterns pass through Sanctuary.  Guy Gardner talks about how nobody sees him as being good enough, which is the major driving force of his character.  Jessica Cruz talks about how going to outer space alone is comforting for her, the implication being that there’s nobody around to make her feel anxious.  Jessica suffers from ...

Supergirl’s origin has been adjusted, adapted, and reinterpreted a number of times since she first appeared in 1959, but many of the core concepts have remained the same, even up through “The New 52”, DC’s big relaunch in 2011.  Readers were reintroduced to Kara Zor-El, a survivor of the planet Krypton, sent to Earth just like her cousin Superman, where she would quickly take up the costumed identity of Supergirl.  The biggest difference in their origin stories is that, while Superman was only a baby when Krypton exploded, Kara was already a teenager, living a full life as part of Kryptonian society.  She remembers it like it was yesterday…and from her perspective, it literally was yesterday, since Kara’s ship kept her in suspended animation until waking her up on Earth, decades after her baby cousin Kal-El had already landed.  Even though it’s been a lifetime since the universe lost Krypton, from her perspective it was alive and thriving just a few hours ago, and sh...

Is there such a thing as a negative emotion?  It seems like a question with a simple enough answer.  Obviously emotions like rage, greed, and fear are negative while other emotions like hope, compassion, and love are positive, right?  After all, Green Lantern gives us characters who fully embody these individual emotions, so all we have to do to learn the truth is look at them.  We can see, for example, what rage does to the Red Lanterns.  Rage is so all-consuming that once a red ring lands on your finger, its power saturates your body, flowing through your veins.  The ring stops your heart and replaces it, meaning that if you ever took the ring off, you’d die moments later because your heart no longer works.  It forces intense rage to be at the core of your being forever, cursing you with power and fury, and an inability to ever be anything else.  And as the Red Lantern Corps grew, they were presented as a pack of vicious animals, tearing apart a...

Hey everybody, it’s time to take a look at the Dark Crisis Green Lantern one-shot.  While this is a Dark Crisis tie-in, it’s completely self-contained, and you can read this issue without having to worry about any spoilers for Dark Crisis.  In fact, you don’t actually have to know what Dark Crisis even is.  So let’s jump in. Dark Crisis: Worlds Without A Justice League: Green Lantern #1, written by Phillip Kennedy Johnson, with art by Fernando Blanco, colors by Jordie Bellaire, and letters by Troy Peteri. The basic premise is that when the Justice League supposedly died, each member was actually sealed inside of their own custom fantasy world, designed to give each of them their ideal happy lives, while unknowingly becoming a resource to be used by the main villain of Dark Crisis. In the case of John Stewart, we see him living a peaceful, quiet life on a farm with his mother and younger sister, while the planet is defended by a Green Lantern Corps consisting of a fe...

Jennifer Walters has a problem.  Her life hasn’t been the same since she got injured and needed an emergency blood transfusion from her cousin, Bruce Banner, the Incredible Hulk.  It saved her life, but it also changed her.  Jen can transform into her own Hulk form, affectionately called the She-Hulk.  But unlike her cousin, who constantly struggles against the beast within, Jennifer’s conscious mind remains in full control of her Hulk form.  And on the surface, this seems like a great setup.  She’s an amazonian superhero, exuding strength and confidence, in complete control…all the positives of being a Hulk, with none of the negatives. At least on the surface. Jennifer’s biggest struggle is still against herself.  No matter how she tries to dress it up or ignore it, there’s no getting away from the fact that she can turn into someone who she truly doesn’t want to be, someone who she hates identifying herself as and who’s face she never wants to see ...

So there’s a new direct-to-video animated Green Lantern movie that just came out, titled “Green Lantern: Beware My Power”, and most of the people I know seem really mad about it.  The movie had detractors from the moment it was first announced, with some people getting upset that John Stewart was the focus of the movie instead of their favorite character, while others were busy getting mad about perceived inaccuracies between the trailer and the comic book source material. Some people even tried to extrapolate the entire plot from the trailer and then rage against a story that they themselves made up.  And then the entire movie leaked about a week before the official release, and that opened up the floodgates of angry people who couldn’t wait to tell you why something they didn’t agree with was the worst thing in the world. Probably the worst part about being immersed in online communities is how keyed in I am to the most negative parts of Green Lantern fandom…people who wan...

Back in the middle of 2021, DC did their first Round Robin, a tournament where fans would vote to decide which characters would receive a six-issue mini-series.  One of the early matches was a pitch for a Zatanna book vs a Green Lantern book starring Kyle Rayner.  And while both of them ultimately lost the Round Robin, the thought has stuck with me…what if that match-up was an actual fight?  Who would win?  I thought it might be fun to find out, and I’ve been reading Kyle Rayner stories for decades, so I took a look at a big pile of Zatanna stories, and now I’m pretty confidant that I know how this will go. So let’s set the stage.  We’ll say that the fight takes place in a training room in the Hall of Justice, where it’s shielded so they can cut loose if they want to.  This is a friendly match between two colleagues, and the winner gets to decide what charity Batman donates a billion dollars to, so they each have a good incentive to try their best to win....