Tom Sawyer’s Funeral: Green Lantern #20 Review

If you’re anything like me, when you see Green Lantern #20, and its thickness, squared binding and eight dollar price tag, you will think of The Amazing Spider-Man #700 from just five months ago – an issue that was padded with secondary stories to pad out it’s length. So you might think that Green Lantern #20 would do the same to fill its 86 pages and get a little upset that you’re dropping eight clams on what would seem to inevitably be a big chunk of filler.

You would be wrong. Sure, there is filler here – I’m not sure I needed nine pages of messages of congratulations to writer Geoff Johns (although DC Entertainment President Diane Nelson’s message makes me believe she might be the brains behind the Horse_EBooks Twitter account) – but on the whole, this is a one-story comic book. So you’re damn sure getting your money’s worth with this comic book.

And it is a big story. This is Johns’s final issue driving the Green Lantern franchise, and he treats it like the series finale of a long-running television show, even though the Green Lantern books will continue, as the five full-page ads in this issue for those books attests. And as a series finale-feeling story, it brings back all the old favorite characters for a final bow, it throws all the old fan favorite moments at the wall, and as is befitting a sci-fi action story, it blows stuff up real good.

But this is a space opera, not hard science fiction. So while Johns puts all the pieces into place to make a slam-bang action-packed story, there are a bunch of elements required to push that story forward that are firmly based in the scientific principle, as defined within the Green Lantern universe,  of the Theorem of Shut Up That’s Why. So some of the points between A and Z require a lot of taking on faith to avoid nitpicking… but if you can, you’ll have yourself a damn fun read that brings all your favorites up to bat one last time, and even tells you where some of these characters would end up.

Volthoom, The First Lantern, has taken the Guardians of The Galaxy captive, and is forcing them to feel emotions for the first time, when… you know something? I would normally recap the plot of the book here, but there is so damn much of it that I’d be transcribing for the next six hours. The key event of this book is the fact that it’s Johns’s last issue, which means that he has included every damn person and plot development he’s introduced into the Green Lantern mythos in the past near decade for one last bow. Parallax, the Fear Entity that possessed Green Lantern and turned him evil back in the 90s? Yeah, he’s back. The entire spectrum of the various Lantern Corps? Yup, they’re all here, from Carol Ferris as Star Sapphire to Larfleeze to Dexstarr the cat. Black Lanterns? You betcha. Nekron? Uh-huh. The only thing missing is Ryan Reynolds, who was presumably too busy waiting by the phone for someone to call about the Deadpool movie before someone emails him a contract for the Justice League flick.

Look: there was never any question that Volthoom was gonna get taken out and that Hal Jordan was gonna get his own power ring back. But as someone who read Johns’s run on Green Lantern from the first issue of Green Lantern: Rebirth, it is damn fun getting one more moment with all of these characters again. It’s like watching Return of The Jedi: you want to see the Millennium Falcon and Darth Vader and to hear, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” and Johns knows this. And he makes it happen, no matter whether it makes any sense or not.

Like Hal getting the Black Lantern ring from Black Hand after Hal jumps off a cliff to his death: how’d you make that happen, Hal? “I willed it.” Oh. Okay. That’s some willpower from a fucking dead guy. Or Sinestro taking control of the Parallax entity when it possesses him, even though Hal – who has so much will power that Volthoom says he makes a better focus for will than even the Central Power Battery – was powerless before him? Yeah, that’s just something that happens. Nekron, who controlled the Black Lanterns, being controlled by Black Lantern Hal Jordan? That’s just how it is, man… but the thing is, those things don’t happen because Johns thinks Green Lantern fans are screaming for plot consistency. They happen because they are the most efficient way to make Nekron and Parallax and Black Lantern Green Lantern (yeah, that’s just as weird to write as it is to read) to happen. Because when they happen, it is fun. It’s cool to see these things again, and if you can let yourself get caught up in the spirit of the thing, it’s just a good time.

And Johns takes the opportunity of his conclusion on the series to show what he believes happens to all the key characters in the future. It’s a sequence straight out of the end of Animal House or Fast Times At Ridgemont High, where you’re told everyone’s fate, only played for happy endings instead of humor, which is nice to see… except we’re talking about space cops / soldiers here, for God’s sake. You’re telling me that everyone involved gets an idyllic ending? Someone would get their leg blown off in some faraway sector, or come home with PTSD, for Christ’s sake. Having the narrator say that everyone lived happily ever after felt like Tom Sawyer’s funeral: everyone saying nice things about these two savages because it’s nicer than the truth. So regardless of what the Keeper of The Book of Oa says, I like to believe that in reality, Guy Gardner came home from the Corps with a savage meth addiction, while Larfleeze started a SuperPAC for the Space Republican Party and Dexstarr got Internet Famous. Or at least more Internet Famous. None of which has anything to do with the quality of the sequence itself, but in my defense: I have been drinking.

Doug Mahnke’s art is strongly appropriate for a big, epic, final-issue space opera. This issue is packed with big, iconic splash pages in Mahnke’s normal fine-lined, detailed style. We get a big Hal Jordan with his lantern, Hal and Sinestro attacking each other from each page of a double-paged spread, and another double-pager of Black Lantern Green Lantern (yeah: still weird to write). With all that real estate devoted to big, slow, iconic images, it makes the remainder be shown in smaller panels. The overall effect is to keep the book really fast-paced, with things slowing down for the big effects shots. Mahnke paces this like a summer blockbuster, and it’s exactly the right thing to do for a book like this.

Look, this book is obviously not without its flaws – one of which I haven’t even addressed, being that Volthoom isn’t nearly as compelling a villain as Parallax, the Sinestro Corps, or the Black Lanterns were – but as a final issue for a generally excellent and long run of comics, it works, and works well. It is the final episode of a TV show, or final movie of a trilogy, that brings everyone back for one last implied bow, no matter how hard Johns has to stretch to make those cameos make sense, and it is loaded with action to boot. If you’ve been reading Green Lantern for any length of time since they brought Hal back, it’s worth checking out.