Green Lantern: New Guardians Thoughts



Green Lantern: New Guardians


Writer: Tony Bedard
Artist: Tyler Kirkham

And so we come to the last of the Green Lantern titles. While Green Lantern focuses on Hal (still DC's flagship title), and Green Lantern Corps is the "special ops" team focused on Guy Gardner and John Stewart, Green Lantern: New Guardians focuses on Kyle Rayner, the old-school.

Written by former GLC writer Tony Bedard, New Guardians shows Kyle Rayner suddenly chosen by the rings of the other Lantern Corps for some currently unknown reason. The action ramps up fast, with the first issue showing what happened to the previous owners of the rings before they were drawn to Kyle, and members of those Corps coming to retrieve those rings (or take retribution for what happened to their former owners when they were suddenly left without rings).

More than any other title, Green Lantern: New Guardians carries the continuity of the previous Green Lantern titles. If you were a fan of Geoff Johns' multi-part epic space war and want to know where to read more of it, this is the place. All the characters from that era are involved in this new story. Unfortunately, if you've never heard of any of that, and just wanted to get all the Green Lantern books, this one can be pretty new reader unfriendly. We're given Kyle's revised origin, but even that origin goes against what people know about how someone becomes a Green Lantern. While there's so much more to Kyle becoming a Green Lantern, this simplified origin here could confuse even someone mildly familiar with comics.

Setting that aside, with so many characters all vying for attention, the story can feel somewhat scattered. Kyle's the main hero, but he feels like a supporting cast member in his own title alongside the Guardians and the people from the other Corps. Fortunately New Guardians 4 wil be getting to the secret behind why all these rings are after Kyle, which is good because hopefully it'll place him front and center in his comic again.

Overall, this is an interesting comic to me because Kyle was the first Lantern I read about as a child, and because I like what Johns, Pete Tomasi, and Tony Bedard have done with this universe. But it's difficult for me to recommend something so wrapped up in recent comic history to anyone but the most hardcore fan.

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