Mosaic Comics

Whenever people talk about Star Sapphire, they’re usually referring to Carol Ferris, the most iconic version of the character who debuted in the early Silver Age and has since spread across all forms of media.  Carol first appeared in Showcase #22 in 1959, the same issue that introduced the world to Hal Jordan and the concept of a science fiction version of Green Lantern.  Carol would become Star Sapphire for the first time three years later, in 1962’s Green Lantern #16.  The alien Zamarons chose Carol to become their queen, so they gave her the Star Sapphire gem, an object that made her incredibly powerful, while also overwriting her personality.  This allowed writers to add in a few new layers of complexity to the standard superhero love triangle…Hal loved Carol, but Carol loved Green Lantern, and didn’t know Green Lantern was Hal.  Now on top of that, Carol was Star Sapphire, enemy of Green Lantern, but Carol didn’t know she was Star Sapphire, but Hal knows s...

  Today I want to talk about a short Green Lantern story that I’m pretty sure most people haven’t read.   It was published under the title “From Beyond the Unknown #1”, and was a seventeen page digital-only comic that released in June of 2020, as part of a pretty extensive line of digital-first and digital-exclusive comics.   The reason I’m bringing it up is because it’s actually a pretty good story that directly addresses a concept that comes up every now and then, but rarely gets talked about in a serious way…that concept being how hard it actually is for a Green Lantern to patrol their entire sector, and what happens to a sector when its Green Lantern stops showing up. This is something the Guardians are trying to lecture Hal about, in the middle of a fight with Doctor Polaris.  They’re concerned that Hal’s been neglecting the rest of his sector while giving so much attention to Earth.  There’s a good push and pull here, where Hal says that Earth by itself h...

  Ok everybody, it’s time for Green Lantern #5, written by Geoffrey Thorne, with art by Tom Raney, Marco Santucci, and Andy McDonald, colors by Michael Atiyeh, and letters by Rob Leigh.   And if the last few issues have left you missing classic Green Lantern action, this issue’s got you covered, because Keli Quintella the Teen Lantern is storming New Korugar to take all her frustration out on Sinestro, who she thinks caused the disaster on Oa.   And it’s all out war between Keli and the planetary defenses…drones, Yellow Lanterns, they’re throwing everything they’ve got at her and the constructs keep flying! As soon as Keli reaches the planet’s surface, she’s put to sleep by a Yellow Lantern, and I guess the identity of this character is supposed to be a surprise since they put her in that hooded cloak and never say her name, but…I mean, it’s very clearly Jessica Cruz.  Even if we didn’t read her Future State story that showed her getting the yellow ring, or the soli...

  Here we are with issue four of Green Lantern written by Geoffrey Thorne and art by Tom Raney and Marco Santucci, and…everybody, page one made this entire issue worth it for me. Something I have wanted for decades was for someone at DC to follow up on the series Green Lantern Mosaic, acknowledge its importance to who John Stewart is as a character, and just tell us what happened to all of it after that series ended…and after almost thirty years, Geoffrey Thorne is finally doing it.   This page takes place right around the end of Emerald Twilight, just after Hal Jordan destroyed the Central Battery and became Parallax.   By this point, John had ascended and become a being on the level of a Guardian, but now having lost two worlds, John rejects what he’s become, and Ganthet agrees to seal it all away, explaining why John was his regular old self after Emerald Twilight, and why he’s never talked about any of it.   John references losing two worlds, the first obviously ...

In all my years of reading comics, I’ve never grown tired of Green Lantern, and the reason is the nearly infinite potential inherent to that franchise.  There’s no such thing as a story you can’t tell using Green Lantern, and that comes from the fact that the Green Lantern Corps is made up of a massively diverse cast of thousands of different members from every background you can imagine.  And if you can think of a culture or perspective that isn’t represented already, it’s easy enough to create another character…because when you have a Corps of 7200 members, what’s one more?  This allows a great deal of creative freedom, since a writer with very specific, personal story to tell doesn’t have to figure out a way to make it fit into the life of one standard protagonist.  A new character can be introduced, a Green Lantern who’s specifically built to tell that particular story like no other could. That’s where writer Minh Le comes in.  He comes from a family of im...

  Ok so I have been thinking a lot about the current run of Green Lantern, written by Geoffrey Thorne, and I’m having a lot of fun trying to figure out where this story might be going.   So what I want to do today is share my thought process with you, and just have fun talking through my theory of what’s really going on in Green Lantern right now.   As of this recording, issue four still hasn’t come out, so maybe everything I’m about to say will end up being wrong, I don’t know, but right now it makes sense to me, so let’s have fun and start at the beginning. One of the first things everyone learned about the Geoffrey Thorne run was that the Central Battery was going to be destroyed, and that concept didn’t sit right with a lot of people…some because they’re not as interested in super heroes who don’t have their powers anymore, and some because it feels like a retread of a story we’ve seen several times before.  It wasn’t all that long ago that we lost the Central B...

  Ok, it’s time to start digging in to DC’s summer event Infinite Frontier, written by Joshua Williamson with art by Xermanico.   I’m going to be focusing mainly on the Lantern stuff, and anything that clearly feeds into the themes of the story.   There are plot lines and characters introduced in issue one that I won’t be talking about yet because they literally didn’t do anything but just show up, so I’ll address them as the story progresses and there’s actually something to say about them.   So if you’re watching this video and you haven’t read the issue yet, there will be spoilers, but there’ll still be plenty of moments and plot lines for you to discover for yourself. So first, how’d we get here?  The short version is that the end of Dark Nights: Death Metal brought back everything that was ever taken away by a Crisis event.  Every alternate universe, every piece of history…everything that ever was cannon counts again, and the characters remember all o...