You're right, Hal. I shouldn't have bothered. I had high hopes for this series, since I liked Geoff John's writing on Green Lantern:Rebirth. He seemed to have a pretty good handle on Hal Jordan; and I really liked Ivan Reis' work on Rann-Thanagar War (until the farmed-out jumble of the last few issues).
So I was very dissapointed to find Green Lantern #10 a confusing, artistically dreadful bore.
This is the only of the 'One Year Later' series of books I've bothered to read so far. In effort to maintain fan excitement in their universe's struggles, DC is wearing itself way too thin. First we had several months of a 'countdown' to Infinite Crisis, then we've had the Crisis itself, now the whole of the DC Universe is jumping forward a whole year which will play out in book form after Crisis is over (still another few months away!) in a weekly series, 52.
The Countdown books were, overall, entertaining, and Crisis itself (see below) has been good. The idea of jumping straight into a whole new world, and slowly revealing what happened during that missing year is a good one (but didn't Marvel do that 20 years ago with Secret Wars?).
This is just a bad book.
It seems like Reis, who was working on his own style, has back pedaled into a bad Neal Adams impersonation.His composition is clunky; it's an ugly book.
Where does the fault lie? Is his work rushed? Or is he poorly inked?
Marc Campos worked with Reis on Rann-Thanagar, and did a solid job. For reference, here's a few panels from Rann-Thanagar:
Love that. But they're shit here.
And Johns' story doesn't capture us in a way that could make up for the lousy art.
We see a womanizing, somewhat brooding Hal; a whiny Ollie; and cookie cutter Top-Gun reject pilots.
Oh, and we end with this:
Ugh. You can stick around for the cliff-hanger. I'm outta here...Green Lantern #10: F
EX MACHINA #18
This issue seemed too much like a place holder. It's not bad, but it proceeds the storyline ahead in a way that's a bit too predictable. Typical war room scene, typical bedside hospital scene, typical roving gangs of new york lynching arabs scene.
The dialogue was way too cute. Yet another 'Journal was my intern but I swear I never fucked her' joke (one is ok, but we should be past that). Mayor Hundred, in the same scene, quotes the first Superman movie and it plays ridiculous, not heartbreaking. And the exchange between the aforementioned Punks and Arabs:
Nitpicking, maybe, but all of these moments threw me out of the story (which is a good one).
I liked a few things, especially Commissioner Angliotti's harangue of the the FBI:
I still like where the story arc is going, but overall, there just wasn't enough here. Ex Machina #18: B-
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