The Green Lantern #10 Is The Grooviest Comic You’ll Read This Week

While I am more than aware there is an overall connecting story arc at play in Grant Morrison and Liam Sharp’s The Green Lantern, I am also aware of Morrison’s playfulness and a narrative structure that has seen each issue take on very different themes, genres and hokey GL history, offering the reader a done-in-one story too. We’ve had the Green Lantern/Green Arrow homage issue, the Silver Age sci-fi issue, and now we have Morrison return to fertile DC territory; parallel universes and alternative realities of the Multiverse. A Multiverse he helped shape, document and categorise and now returns to for inspiration. Remember those uncategorised universes from the Mutiversity mini-series? Well, seems they may hold a clue to the current state of play in The Green Lantern. Curiouser and curiouser.

As a complete sucker for parallel universes stories (blame Wolfman and Perez and Crisis on Infinite Earths for this obsession) I lapped this issue up. And, judging from Sharp’s visuals, he’s something of a fan too. Who can’t gasp in jaw-dropping amazement at the worlds he is allowed to bring alive on the page, none better than Earth-47 a trippy-hippy LSD induced, fluid realm populated by all-seeing eyed individuals and Blue Meanies. I can almost hear John Lennon’s laid-back Scouse drawl when this dimension’s Green Lantern speaks, even if I’m seeing Shaggy from Scooby-Doo. Far out, man!

A few pages later, and we’re in the Bleed and another very different, intense backdrop. This whole issue is packed with diverse and disparate visions of the Multiverse and it’s a visual spectacle for the eyes. Add the usual artists influences – anything from Jim Starlin to Bernie Wrightson and all integrated, rather than simply aped – into Sharp’s recognisable style and once more we have a cosmic comic book that brings an awful lot more to the table than any, many other comic out there. I can see why Sharp is proud of this series. And, with apologies to both Sharpie and you, dear reader, I’ll repeat what’s worth saying more than once: this man is on fire and producing some of the best art of his whole career! But, when you’re working with a scribe such as Grant Morrison, I imagine that brings out the best in you, and then some. Turning it up to eleven? I think, at this point, Morrison and Sharp have broke the dial in ratcheting this series up and through the roof. Tune in, turn it up, and zone out!
The Green Lantern #10 is available now from DC Comics.