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 few Earthlings like Kyle Rayner, Natasha Irons, and Jason Todd, plus a large handful of classic alien Green Lanterns. John only has to come out of retirement and get involved when the situation becomes really dire, like when an army of demonic Thanagarians show up pulling some kind of large evil space baby, and it wipes out half of the Corps. But as soon as John shows up, he defeats the bad guys effortlessly…and that says a lot about what his version of a perfect world is. There was a scene in Green Lantern Mosaic issue 12 where John was reading some Silver Age Green Lantern comics starring Hal Jordan, and he loved it, because it presented a more carefree version of what it means to be a superhero. A Green Lantern who didn’t have to worry about any tough issues, who could just swoop in and save the day, and then go home where everything is happy and simple. So if what we see in this one-shot is supposed to represent John’s idea of a perfect life, then I’d say they pretty much got it right, although there were some big flaws that jumped out at me. There was no mention of either Fatality or Katma in this world, which is strange because he's been in love with both of them, and they've had a incredible impact on who he is as a person. And while they did bring back his little sister, they got her name wrong, calling her Elanore, when her name was actually Rose. On top of that, the enemies they fight in this issue felt like wasted potential. If this world is supposed to represent John’s fantasy of a perfect life, then the evil force coming to take it away shouldn’t be some generic, vaguely Human-shaped creatures, they should be representative of John’s fears or failures. They could even be representative of reality, of the real DC Universe encroaching on this pretend world, making the entire battle into an introspective look at John fighting to remain happy.
Part of me wishes this issue could have existed completely separate from Dark Crisis, because most of my dissatisfaction is the result of it being part of a larger event. What we have here is a totally stand-alone Elseworlds story, focused on the mythology and world-building of this alternate reality. And on that level, it’s perfectly fine, but the timing of its release gave me different expectations, which affected my ability to enjoy the issue. In Dark Crisis #3, Hal Jordan fell into this world, and was confronted by some of these characters. This one-shot came out the very next week, so I was expecting a continuation of that story. And when I saw demonic Thanagarians pulling the big evil space baby, it made me think that the story might have something to do with the Hawkgirl backup that’s also in this issue. So when neither of those ended up being true, and all I was left with was a perfectly fine self-contained Elseworlds one-shot, I felt disappointed. And I realize that isn’t fair, I think I’m just growing impatient waiting for the story of Dark Crisis to really get going, and taking time out to explore a world that we’ll probably never see again feels like a bad idea when not much has actually happened in this event yet.
And just to finish us off, there’s a Hawkgirl story written by Jeremy Adams, with art by Jack Herbert, colors by Alex Guimaraes, and letters by Troy Petri.
Kendra Saunders is raiding a tomb in order to find an ancient elixir that would take away her ability to reincarnate. Living through hundreds of different lives, and retaining full memory of all of them, has left Kendra feeling stagnant…no matter what she does, it’s something she’s done before, in another life. Her eternal existence has come to be defined by dull repetition, and no matter what she tries, she can’t come up with something that’s truly a new experience. She was just going through the motions, life after life, hoping for variety that would never come.
So she finds the elixir, drinks it, and suddenly all the memories of her past lives are gone, and presumably her cycle of reincarnation has been broken. For the first time in forever, Kendra doesn’t have an eternal past or an endless future…all she has is the present, one last life that could end at any time, a handful of years that she could spend doing anything she wants…and she’s never felt more alive.
If it wasn’t clear, I liked this Hawkgirl backup way more than the Green Lantern story. I wish this backup story was a mini-series. This version of Kendra looks great, and her existential crisis is super interesting, and I hate the fact that this version of the character and the world likely won’t continue on once Dark Crisis is over.
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