The Little Comic That Could

These days, comics that make fanboys cream their jeans (or simply soil their Wonder Woman Underoos) are supposed to arrive with all manner of hype and hoopla, and with most of their twists and turns long since leaked. That's simply the Way of the World in this Information age of ours, after all.. isn't it?

And then along comes last week's Green Lantern: Sinestro Corps Special, which I'm guessing most fans didn't even bother to pick up. And yet it's turned out to be one of the most talked-about comics since... well, this one! Newsarama alone has had four full articles about it, just in the seven days since it hit the stores!
And that probably beats out the New Avengers # 31 Skrull revelation (or at least matches it) from a few weeks ago, and that one had been promoted and teased for months leading up to it!

So what's got everyone's tongues a-wagging and fingers a-typing about this (for once) aptly-named Special? It's a combination of factors that mostly only mean something to the experienced DC fan. But they add up to a Hell of a package, if you're in that demographic - as your Humble Blogger is!

First, the artwork by Ethan Van Scriver is jaw-droppingly gorgeous, at times reminding one of the effect Neal Adams used to have on us. I have no idea how long he worked on this, but I'm guessing it was many months. Almost every page is filled with amazing visuals, to the point where you wonder if Geoff Johns wrote some of the action simply to see Van Scriver draw it (including an early scene involving the JLA... drool)! This was one of the most impressive art jobs I've seen in awhile.

In terms of the story, several things happen that make the longtime fan's heart skip a beat (OK, my heart does that on its own anyway... but you get the idea!). As one of the reviewers mentioned, virtually every big DC 'event' of the past two decades is represented among the corps of villains that Sinestro forms around him. These include the Cyborg Superman (from Reign of the Supermen), Infinite Crisis' Superboy from Earth-Prime, though he's never called that in this comic due to the legal battle between DC and Jerry Siegel's heirs over the rights to that character, and most shockingly of all: the long-dead Anti-Monitor, from the original Crisis on Infinite Earths! The fact that all those extremely heavy-hitters are all banding together to spell trouble for the DCU poses one of the biggest threats we've ever seen in one storyline.

Lots of other bits stood out, like the scene where a small number of Sinestro's army attacks, inflicting so many deaths among the GL Corps that we got a panel in which a bunch of rings go shooting across the page, sounding off their primary objective of finding a new bearer! The death of a Green Lantern, while there are admittedly 3600 of them in existence at once, is still only supposed to happen once in a blue moon... not several in the span of a few minutes! And for fans who care much about one-time Green Lantern Kyle Raynor - I'm not one of them, but that's just me - then the scene where he's infected with the same Parallax entity that inhabited Hal Jordan during his Emerald Twilight event must've been quite the shocker! (I call it Poetic Justice, but I'm sure it won't last nearly as long as Hal's descent did!) Kyle's now one of the Bad Guys, adding yet another dimension to the scale of the horror.

As I think about this comic, it's somewhat ironic that there's now more excitement apparent in fandom, at least as represented by the Internet and my own reaction, for the rest of this story (which will play out in issues of Green Lantern and GL Corps) than there is in Countdown right now! I'm sure that was never the plan from DC Editorial's POV, but probably moreso due to how underwhelming Countdown has been so far, rather than lack of belief in this GL saga.