Green Lantern: Blackstars #1: A New Elysium

Given the option to wish for the best form of space justice he could think of, Hal Jordan came up with this. Or rather, the dark and beautiful mind of Grant Morrison erupted with this conceptual model of total control leading to total peace, a model proven time and again to be utterly and fatally flawed. The alternate universe Blackstars experiment is slated to run for three issues so the inevitable fall will not be long in the waiting but in the meantime, the reader is treated to some of the best Morrisian prose in decades against a gorgeously frightening Xermanico illustrated backdrop.

The Green Lantern has been a difficult book to follow and this issue proves no different. Moments of strangeness, of Otherness become mundane as the mundane morphs into the strange. The final page features Hal looking down at the familiar view of North America from space, where the natural lights from the Eastern and Western seaboards indicate that Earth is largely unchanged despite wide-sweeping intergalactic shifts. This uncanny moment becomes more difficult to process than conversations between demons about torture in the landscape of Morrison’s ultimate “What if…?” project.

The transitions between sequences throughout this book add an additional sense of unsettling awareness of the brevity of this act of Morrison’s run. We begin the issue on “Day Four” and slowly work our way towards “Day Zero” although the narrative itself remains sequential, linear, and forward-moving. The Biblical is cast off in the invocation of four (vice three or seven) so the intent here is unclear but certainly of significance. In moving the heavens (stars are relocated, planets realigned at will) and with the silent Mu ascending to a central throne, there seems to be a celestial element at play but where that will fall in the ultimate scheme will have to wait for further analysis.