Mosaic Comics

  Alright, Future State, one last time.   We’ve got six series to talk about today, but it won’t take all that long.   Some of these are pretty light on Lantern stuff, but I wanted to be thorough and mention them anyway.   And if I missed any, let me know.   A reminder that I already covered both issues of Future State Green Lantern, as well as the first issue of Future State Justice League, and I’ll link to both of those videos at the end of this one.   This time I’ll be spoiling Future State Justice League, Swamp Thing, Immortal Wonder Woman, Shazam, Suicide Squad, and Superman House of El…and I’m gonna save the best for last.   So let’s get started by picking up where we left off with Jo and the rest of the League. JUSTICE LEAGUE If you remember, issue one of this book was incredibly light on characterization and development because the League has chosen to operate under rules that keep things strictly professional.  And because of that, it...

  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...

  Star Sapphire has always been the one character in Green Lantern with the strongest link to the theme of love, even before the invention of the Emotional Spectrum made love into the Sapphire’s literal power source. Having a character that revolves almost entirely around one specific emotion should ideally allow for some pretty deep, thoughtful exploration of the nature of emotion, what it means to a person, and what wearing a ring made of pure concentrated emotion actually does to someone.   In the case of Star Sapphire, love tends to be more a source of anguish than anything else, starting with the soap opera that is the relationship between Carol Ferris and Hal Jordan. Just so we’re all on the same page:  Hal Jordan is a pilot working for Ferris Aircraft.  Carol Ferris is Hal’s boss, and the two of them have this “will they won’t they” sort of relationship.  Carol is also Star Sapphire…kind of.  Unlike Green Lantern, Star Sapphire isn’t just Carol usin...

  John Stewart is an incredibly complex and nuanced character, and it would take me an entire video series to explain why…which I will get around to doing at some point, but for now I want to focus on one of the most well known things about the character that comes up all the time, but is almost never treated with the weight and importance it deserves.   I’m talking about the fact that John Stewart is responsible for the destruction of the planet Xanshi. The fact of Xanshi’s destruction has followed John Stewart for more than three decades now.  A version of it even made made its way onto the Justice League cartoon, as their first ever Green Lantern spotlight episode.  Any writer who spends a significant amount of time with this character inevitably calls back to this one event, and every single one of them offers their own take on John coming to terms with it and learning to move forward.  But the odd thing about all of this is the fact that so much time is sp...

  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 lo...

  As I’m recording this, the final issue of Dark Nights Death Metal just came out, and I just wanted to take a few minutes to talk about the Lantern content in this event, because most of it is really cool, and a lot of people might not have even seen it since it mostly happens in tie-in issues.   But before we get to those, I want to address the answer to a question I had back in my video about all the different times Batman has worn a power ring, since Death Metal features Batman using a Black Lantern ring.   It seems the reason Bruce is able to wield this ring is because he’s dead, and has been for the entire story of Death Metal.   He died during the Justice League’s first battle against Perpetua, which I believe happened off-panel in the space between the end of the Justice/Doom War and the first issue of Death Metal…if I’m wrong about that and I just missed a one-shot somewhere, please tell me, because I’d love to see how that fight played out.   But yeah,...