The Green Lantern No. 3 review: Hal tries to arrest God

Earth has been stolen and gone up for sale on the intergalactic black market. Green Lantern and his team go to arrest those selling and buying, but there’s a small problem. The Old Testament God has bought Earth.

The Green Lantern has started off strong with the first couple of issues. Grant Morrison and Liam Sharp have scaled back the stakes so far and made the book more like a police procedural than it really ever has been previously. That kind of changes with this issue with the Earth having been stolen, which is creates some massive, and personal, stakes for Hal Jordan. The best thing about this issue though is Morrison’s return to form with his commentary on a variety of subjects like religion, crime, police brutality, and even climate change.

Morrison is a writer who has consistently written about complex issues in ways that are often mind-bendingly weird and nonsensical for a good portion of the time (Is Final Crisis a masterpiece or insane garbage? The world may never know.). Regardless, whether you like his writing or not, Morrison has always been one to stimulate thought in his readership and he does just that in this issue.

Image by DC Comics/Art by Liam Sharp

By using a shrunken Earth, Morrison is able to bring in a commentary on religion that one may not think would be feasible in a Green Lantern comic. For the most part though, it really works, and presents the question, “Are the god(s) that people believe in truly what they think they are?” This is obviously a question that in life, people have to answer for themselves and every person would have a very distinct, different answer. For Morrison though, he has a very clear answer to his beliefs on the matter.

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By bringing this question about God(s) into play though, he’s able to toy around with plenty of other thematic elements without ever coming off too preachy, which Morrison can sometimes tend to do. He paints humanity as selfish, but questions whether if this is from an external force or internal. He presents an intergalactic slave trade, which feels very topical because here, it’s hidden, much like modern-day slavery in the real world. And to cap it all off, police brutality, but in a surprisingly nuanced way that could interpreted so many different ways. Not everything comes together perfectly, and the issue seems a bit incoherent at times, but so much of it works that it was easy to ignore the issues.

Liam Sharp is also a start on the art side of this issue as well. Every issue so far, he’s really nailed the other-worldly, weirdness that encapsulates the idea behind the Green Lantern Corps, as well as aliens in general, and that is no exception here. His action scenes are always great and his figures move so perfectly too. There are also a couple just gruesome horror elements that he absolutely nails, with one being the kind of “ew” style that it needs to be, while the other is spine-chilling from how it’s lit to how it’s structured on the page.

9.5/10 

The Green Lantern has published its best issue so far. Morrison and Sharp have been swinging for the fences so far with this series and they really hit a long home run with this issue.