Green Lantern #34: Fun and Serious

Green Lantern #34 splits its time between Kyle Rayner and Hal Jordan with each character getting half of the issue to advance their story. Adams is able to balance multiple tones as a result, with Hal’s storyline leaning more serious versus Kyle’s lighter one.

The Lantern oriented plot in Kyle’s storyline is his attempts to recapture sciencell escapees who have fled to Earth. Green Lantern #34 opens with an action sequence that is dedicated to this very plot. Adams infuses the fight with a measure of humor as Kyle at first doesn’t take his opponent as seriously as he should.

This humorous tone, largely irreverent, forms the backbone of Kyle’s sequences. His action sequence that opens the issue is fun, but the more amusing part of Kyle’s storyline in Green Lantern #34 is his and Odyssey’s continued effort to settle down in Los Angeles. Odyssey provides a nice fish out of water quality, pushing back against Kyle’s more rational expectations about how life works on Earth and in this city specifically. These scenes are nice extensions of ideas established in the previous issue.

Hal’s storyline is of much greater cosmic significance as he makes a startling discovery in his continued search to understand his connection to the Book of Oa. Unsurprisingly, this storyline is more serious than Kyle’s. Adams supplies a few instances of clever dialogue or internal monologue, but largely he plays Hal’s scenes straight.

Guara and Montos’s art emphasizes characters’ emotions in a very broad sense. Younger character heads and faces are uniformly rectangular with older characters’ being more square. In the case of Kyle and Hal, this lack of facial variation is largely solved by their hair color (black versus brown). Other characters are less generalized but even then there are some uniform qualities between them.

Character emotions are overly broad throughout, especially with Hal and Kyle. Other characters suffer from this as well, but the near identical quality of Hal and Kyle make the two characters’ expressions feel uniform despite their different circumstances. Odyssey is the major exception to this more broad emotional quality. There is slightly more subtlety to her expressions than anyone else and it works especially well for her place in the story.

Fajardo Jr.’s coloring in Green Lantern #34 is less subtle and restrained than much of his work. The usual softened qualities are replaced with a more vivid palette that results in greater contrast. These brighter colors work well with some of the broader qualities of the art as exemplified by the depiction of the characters. This alteration of style to fit his collaborators’ work is a good reflection of Fajardo Jr.’s overall skill.

Sharpe does his usual good job keeping dialogue bubbles organized in more text heavy panels. He also does a good job color coordinating sound effect text to the characters or objects that are causing them.