In Space, They Can’t Hear You Uber — Reviewing ‘Green Lantern Corps’ #5

Space cops being space cops and their mind-trapped shenanigans reach a heavily messy conclusion. Well, a sort of ending.

Space cabbies, bad memories, ominous doors, and beyond-campy villains abound in Green Lantern Corps #5. The latest in this fledgling series from Morgan Hampton, Jeremy Adams, V Ken Marion, Serg Acuña, Arif Prianto, Rain Beredo, Hi-Fi, Lee Loughridge, and Dave Sharpe.

After a pretty solid few opening issues, I don’t know where I stand on this title.

While this wasn’t as coppy as the last issue, there was still a lot that just felt off. There is a hard line to really balance when it comes to the Green Lanterns as a whole. In the first three issues, Hampton and Adams balanced it just fine. With these last two, they wobbled and almost fell off.

That line being the fact that the Green Lanterns are cops but are supposed to be “heroic” to us, the audience. As we all know, relationships with cops have always been tense for many groups, even more so in recent years.

Beyond the cop angle though, I just wasn’t digging what was going down here, which was sad. Characters facing their dark fears and bad memories is a good spot for development and fun. It felt tacked on here, though, and very predictable. No character really came out of it developed because this series has such a large stable of cast members. They all mostly get surface level moments, outside of John Stewart in the first three issues.

Also, Guy Gardener is a jerk. But he’s usually that kind that you still love, because he’s still a good friend and will fight the good fight. The way he treats Narf in this two-part arc feels too prickly even for him.

This was another all-hands-on deck artistic issue.

Much like Marion and Amancay Nahuelpan in the previous issue, Marion and Acuña are a complimentary pairing of artists. Both are very animated with whimsical stylings, paired with great depth and details. It allows the overall story to have a more fun and lighter feeling to balance out the harder elements at play.

Matching the serious and the lighter works well. There is still a feeling that the lighter whimsy is a way to avoid the cop-shaped elephant in the room. But overall, the work feels right for the type of book this could be.

Had I not looked at the credits, I would have been hard pressed to guess there were four different colorists on this issue. They all blended their work together perfectly, giving most pages really heavy color palette tones — especially the mindscape pages. An overall toned-down color choice allowed the flashes of more vibrant and bright colors to stand out as they should.

Sharpe is having plenty of fun here too. Really going all out with the lettering, as words burst from balloons for laughter and shouts and more. It really taps into the various emotions and tones that befit the moment, giving these voices their balance and foundation as we hear them echo in our minds. I mean just look at that evil purple looking font for Evil Star campily shouting his name.

Some delicious comic book goodness right there.

Green Lantern Corps #5 is now available from DC Comics.