Green Lantern: Emerald Knights
To support The Dark Knight, Warner Premiere offered up Batman: Gotham Knight, a collection of stories from various animators that were dark and largely uninteresting. It’s gratifying to see that they have learned from this rare misfire and have offered up a companion to this month’s The Green Lantern feature film with Green Lantern: Emerald Knights, on sale Tuesday. There are five stories, largely culled from the comic books, with a sixth tale connecting everything together. Essentially, Krona, the fallen Guardian, has come back from banishment as an enormous, angry form, having coalesced within a star. Summoning Shadow Demons from the Anti-Matter Universe of Qward, Krona threatens the Guardians and their world of Oa.
The entire Green Lantern Corps has been summoned to deal with this cosmic danger but they pause to stand in line to take their turn recharging their rings. While waiting patiently to save all of reality, Hal Jordan (Nathan Fillion) spins tales for his latest recruit, the young, idealistic Arisia (Elisabeth Moss). On the one hand, Krona is a big menace and the climactic scenes are incredibly strong and powerful. There’s a scope to his rising from within the sun that is what animation and comics is all about. That sense of scope, though, is missing from the frame in that in the comics, the central Power Battery was large enough that scores of the Corps could float before it and recharge en masse. Watching them stand in a queue is absurd.
The frame and five stories along with the characterization and visualization of the Corps and Guardians are cherry-picked and modified from the fifty years comics featuring the second incarnation of the Green Lantern. It’s nice to see that several people with comic book roots, including GL editor Eddie Berganza, got a shot at penning some of these stories. About the oddest juxtaposition of realities is seeing Sinestro (Jason Isaacs) still a member of the corps in good standing. Why he’s here is clearly a nod to his role in the live-action film, done so as not to confuse viewers.
We’re told the story of “The First Lantern” (written by Michael Green & Marc Guggenheim) which tells us a variant version of how the Corps was formed. It’s still a solid story showing how anyone can become a hero and show others the way to act. There are mammoth space battles and lots of ring-slinging but why the planet is under attack and the motives of the attackers are never even questioned, let alone explored. (more…)
While at the C2E2 retailers summit a few weeks ago, a few details fans might be excited to find out about were accidentally leaked. At a DC Nation panel, the mid-western retailers were shown a few slides of “in-production” artwork, and DC’s Jim Lee and Dan DiDio were teleconferenced in with Marvel’s Axel Alonso to prime the pump for the 2011 summer event. While cameras and laptops were forced off before the event, a few local shop owners emerged from the panel with some juicy tidbits. Here’s the skinny:
