Review: Green Lantern: New Guardians Vol. 4- Gods and Monsters

Quick Summary

Pros: The volume’s final few chapters are very positive and give hope that this series is heading in a good direction.

Cons: The Lights Out event is flawed in a number of ways that damage this reading experience. This volume’s new romance is bizarre and feels awkward every time it is brought up.

Overall: This collection is not bad but does collect a downright bad event. The event has a number of problems and introduces negative elements in the series that bring it down even further. However, the portions of this collection that are not a part of this event are almost all positive and give hope that this series might get better in the future. This mix of quality makes a book that may appeal to some fans but will be mostly disappointing for many longtime readers.

Story

Green Lantern: New Guardians Vol. 4: Gods and Monsters, by Justin Jordan, has some positive elements but is centered around a real mess of a crossover event. This event, Green Lantern: Lights Out, takes up the majority of the volume and details a high-stakes and flashy, but otherwise disappointing, adventure. The adventure feels illogical, is contradictory to past adventures, starts an awful romance, and is collected poorly within this volume, creating unnecessary confusion. The volume closes with two short but highly entertaining story arcs but these are not enough to save the volume as a whole. Overall, this might have been a solid collection but the crossover event weighs it down so significantly that it is hard to enjoy.

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Gods and Monsters starts out optimistically. It tasks Kyle Rayner with an exciting new job, one that could lead to a wonderful and interesting exploration of the outer reaches of the DC universe.

However, this narrative gets derailed as the Lights Out event begins. This event is a real mess that starts with a seemingly unbeatable evil but ends with a couple of Green Lanterns defeating him with a few well-timed punches. It also undoes a lot of the progress made in recent events from this series, by ravaging the already ravaged Green Lantern and Blue Lantern Corps. Even the heroes seem off, as they make out of character decisions that make them all seem stupider than they should be. The entire event’s concept, which involves an ancient evil rising up to save the universe from itself, also is almost identical to the concept from the last event, making the entire read worse for anyone who has been keeping up with the series.

In addition, the way the Lights Out event is collected within Gods and Monsters is frustrating. It leaves out significant pieces of the story that only make the narrative more confusing and more fragmented. The Green Lantern Vol. 4: Dark Days (Review) portion of the event includes a page summarizing what happened in between collected chapters in order to make up for not including them, why this volume does not do something similar is entirely unclear.

Luckily, Gods and Monsters does manage to recover after the Lights Out event closes. It begins to capitalize on the volume’s starting premise: the promise of exploring the outer reaches of the DC universe. This puts the spotlight on a unique civilization where the people have perfected their planet, at the expense of alternate timelines. This story brings up unique moral problems while maintaining a solid level of excitement. Then, the narrative shifts to a short story about a civilization under siege by a villain. Though not as thought-provoking, the unique nature of this world and the excitement of the resulting conflict make it a worthwhile continuation of the story. I really enjoyed these closing adventures and really hope that the rest of this series focuses more on tales like these.

Unfortunately, the one negative element running through both the good and bad pieces of this volume is the bizarre romance blossoming between Kyle and Carol Ferris. Just last volume, Carol was incredibly excited to learn that Hal had plans to propose to her and Kyle was happy for her. Now, the Carol/Hal dynamic has been unceremoniously cast aside and this entire volume is trying to make a Carol/Kyle dynamic work. It feels incredibly awkward and every time it is brought up it just feels bizarre, rather than cute.

(spoilers end here)

Art

The artwork in Gods and Monsters is solid and is one of the more positive elements of this collection. Brad Walker’s pencils, Andrew Hennessy’s inks, and Wil Quintana’s colors all do a great job of bringing the wondrous world of the cosmos to life. In space, their work looks great and does well in depicting complex otherworldly structures or crazy bursts of energy. This makes the unique locations of this comic feel as unique and different as they should, which is an asset to the narrative. Unfortunately, these visuals do not look quite as nice when depicting more mundane scenes, like those set on Earth, but these mundane scenes only make up a tiny portion of the total collection. In addition, Andrei Bressan’s work on the book’s final chapter looks nice and makes the setting of that chapter feel unique as well.

Continuity

Green Lantern: New Guardians Vol. 4: Gods and Monsters continues the story from Green Lantern: New Guardians Vol. 3: Love and Death (Review) and the Green Lantern: Wrath of the First Lantern (Review) (Reading Order) event. Issues from this volume also form part of the Green Lantern: Lights Out event, which will be explained in our upcoming “Green Lantern: Lights Out Reading Order”.

The story here continues in Green Lantern: New Guardians Vol. 5: Godkillers.

This volume also references other comic books, detailed below:

• The opening chapter of this volume references changes in Hal and Carol’s relationship and in Hal’s position among the Green Lanterns. These changes are mostly shown in Green Lantern #21, collected in Green Lantern Vol. 4: Dark Days (Review).
• Guy went undercover with the Red Lanterns in Red Lanterns #21, collected in Red Lanterns Vol. 4: Blood Brothers.
• Green Lantern: New Guardians #25 mentions Hal Jordan’s talk about “policing the rings”. This talk occurred in Green Lantern #25, collected in Green Lantern Vol. 4: Dark Days (Review).