Green Lantern Corps #20: From One Big Story to Another

Green Lantern Corps #20 is deceptive in its opening pages. Following the big Manhunter story that played out over the last few issues, writer Morgan Hampton creates the expectation that the stories here will be low key, character-oriented affairs. It doesn’t take long for that expectation to be proved wrong, though, as Hampton sets up two new conflicts for the series’ main characters. Once again, Hampton shows off his skill at juggling a lot of major and minor ideas featuring a variety of characters.

Jo Mullein and John Stewart get some nice character moments in Green Lantern Corps #20 before they are whisked away into a new storyline involving Spacecorp, an organization that took up the defense of various space sectors while the Green Lantern Corps was distracted by recent events. Jo spends time musing on how people don’t understand that she is much more at home in space than on Earth. Meanwhile, John has taken advantage of the relative quiet on Oa to take Katma to Earth where the pair continue to further their relationship. Despite them not lasting long, these quiet moments are welcome in a series that tends to jump quickly from big idea to big idea.

The Spacecorp storyline that spins out of Jo and John’s downtime follows the series’ trend of dealing with big threats that affect the entire Green Lantern Corps. Not a lot happens with it in Green Lantern Corps #20 besides establishing the new threat, but there is definitely enough to drive interest for future issues.

Receiving roughly equal time to this new plot is the continuation of the emotional entities storyline. Hampton sends Guy on a new entity-centric mission and takes time to follow-up on the previous issue where she introduced a major change to all of the Corps’ power sets. Hampton has consistently been successful at following up on major developments with both new storylines and small slice-of-life events (such the oft seen training sequences), and the result is always a sense of true story advancement.

Art teams share duties in this issue, something that is not at all unusual for this series. This proves more successful in Green Lantern Corps #20 than it has in many other issues. There are no jarring changes between styles in the issue. Coloring is surprisingly consistent considering there are three colorists at work here and on their own they have very distinct styles. The color style here is bright, but at the same time there is a softness to it. The color artists ensure there is good contrast between the different character and environmental elements, and characters often jump off the page as a result.

The highlight of the art in this issue is how expressive the characters are. This is especially the case with John and Katma who radiate positive energy in the early sequence on Earth. More than Hampton’s dialogue, the art on these pages helps build up the characters’ relationship in this character oriented sequence.

Jo, John, and Guy all have internal monologues in their sequences. Sharpe does a good job using a differently designed icon for the first caption boxes of each as well as a different shade of green for each character. The three characters never appear together, so there is no danger of confusion in repeating the identical color scheme, but the character specific choices here are appreciated.