Each Monday this year I'll be taking a look back at a random comic, prestige format issue, graphic novel or collection of reprints from amongst my 3,000 or so comics that date from 1962 to 2003 - I figured anything in the last ten years would be too recent to hark back to.
The comics are chosen completely at random and apart from a four week lead-in period, even I don't know what I'll be looking at in the weeks to come!
GREEN LANTERN: EMERALD DAWN II #4 - July 1991
Way back before Geoff Johns became the big Green hope, Gerard Jones was pretty much running the show having successfully relaunched Hal Jordan in his own series, spinning John Stewart off into Green Lantern: Mosaic and then penning the new origin for Hal which was successful enough to get a follow up detailing how Sinestro trained Jordan and turned him into the great Lantern he'd become.
Emerald Dawn II also detailed the downfall of Sinestro, showing how he'd basically enslaved his homeworld of Korugar, forcing the people to worship him until his time away with Jordan allowed them to get together and rebel against him. The rebels were led by a young Katma Tui and here, in issue #4, she coordinates an attack against Sinestro which catches both him and Jordan by surprise.
Sinestro loses it completely, striking back at his fellow Korugarans, forcing Jordan to attack him in an attempt to bring him to his senses which leads to this . . . odd . . . image:
Moving on . . .
Jordan calls for back-up and Sinestro realises the Corps will discover what he's done and blame him for it. He turns tail and runs, convincing Jordan to come with him, leaving the Guardians no choice:
You know, if they'd had a better name than the Fists of the Guardians (something like, ooooh, I don't know, maybe the Alpha Lanterns?) they might have had more than a couple of appearances.
And it's no coincidence that the uniform matches Guy Gardner's - in the next issue they try and track down Jordan and Gardner gets an eyeful of them; a nice little retcon to explain Gardner's unique approach to the GL uniform.
To this day, Gerard Jones's work on the Green Lantern titles mostly stands up and I'd still like to see his take on what became Emerald Twilight. There was a copy of the script on the net years ago but DC's lawyers had it pulled long before I could get a copy.
Still, it was nice to see M.D. Bright's art again as well - I really like his stuff.
There's a summarization of what Jones' plans were for his version of Emerald Twilight on blogofoa.com
ReplyDeleteIt'a huge GL fan site.
The basics are that GL fights a group of impostor guardians created by Sinestro I think, forcing Hal to destroy, weakening the corps or something like that. Anyhow it sounded really interesting, and something that would've been cool to see printed anyways, like Bryne's "Lost Phoenix" story.
Cheers Dale - I'd seen the summary before but would really like a look at the actual script, just from a nerdy point of view!
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