Green Lantern # 23 (shown here), which I just finished reading, is roughly the halfway mark through "The Sinestro Corps War" event that's running between that title and Green Lantern Corps right now. It's been a Hell of a ride already, and there's still a long way to go!
Geoff Johns is really showcasing his ability to leverage DCU history to tell new and exciting tales here. Instead of re-treading storylines, as some current writers seem to be doing, he's crafting new epics that pay homage to what's gone before without relying any prior knowledge of them. As one of my favourite Blog @ Newsarama writers noted over a month ago, Johns is incorporating lots and lots of little bits of lore from Green Lantern issues past, but he's doing it in such a way as to reward those who recognize them without punishing those who don't. That's a very difficult trick to pull off, but I'm seeing it done again and again in this great 'little' event.
In fact, if I were an eight year old kid today, reading GL and GLC each month, I'm pretty sure that I'd be able to follow what's going on, while at the same time sensing that there's a larger backdrop that the story's being told against. That was exactly my reaction, after all, when I read Avengers # 93 in 1971, and thrilled to the Roy Thomas/Neal Adams masterpiece in which someone named Ant Man shrunk himself down so he could travel inside an android called the Vision, to determine what had caused the malfunction of that synthezoid (hey, that's one of the words they used!) Also to be found in that classic issue were the alien races, the Kree and the Skrull, who apparently were at war with each other, with Earth simply serving as a convenient beachhead in their battle. Somehow I just knew that both those races had appeared before, and I even had the audacity to dream I might someday read those adventures!
Those are the sorts of feelings and memories that this current cross-over stirs in me. I'm sure somewhere out there in the blogosphere readers are opining that "The Sinestro Corps War" isn't accessible enough, or that only the over-30 crowd would ever enjoy it. To them, I say: fah! Get comics like this into the hands of kids around the age I was when I started reading them, and you might just create some new fans for life.
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