I love this wacky new cover to the August issue of MAD Magazine (on sale 6\28\11) with Alfred E Newman in a Green Lantern uniform.
The MAD twist on the GL oath is classic:
In Dumbest Day,
In Dimmest Night,
We’re Looking for Readers,
Who Ain’t Too Bright!
Reminds me of the MAD About Superheroes trade paperback with a brilliant cover by Alex Ross, showing Newman alongside Superman and Batman. Nuff Said!
Link: DC Universe Source Blog
The Green Lantern marketing machine is firing on all cylinders in the city of San Francisco. Billboards can be seen on many Muni and AC Transit buses and in the BART station. Yesterday as I was walking on Howard street, I noticed this giant mural painted on the side of a building and took this shot with my phone. The entire GL corps staring down at the citizens of SF! Very colorful. I believe this was near the intersection of Howard and 1st street.
I was walking towards the Comic Art Museum of San Francisco, at 655 Mission street. They are having a special Green Lantern original comic art exhibit in conjunction with the movie and you can view artwork by Gil Kane, Joe Staton, Mike Grell, and many others. I really enjoyed viewing the original art to Green Lantern #61 by Gil Kane. This is one of the early silver age titles that drew me to the character, along with the mention of his name in Donavan’s song Sunshine Superman. There is one wall devoted to all the original art for this particular issue. The card to the right said the art was displayed with the permission of Mike Friedrich (a long time Bay Area resident), the writer on this issue.
The museum decorated one wall of the exhibit with a blown up recreation of Darwyn Cooke’s rendition of Green Lantern, taken from New Frontiers. It’s a small but cool exhibit, which costs $7 for admission. There is only 1 Neal Adams piece, but it is a doozy—the cover to Green Lantern #85, the Speedy heroin drug issue. What surprised me more than anything are 2 Mike Grell pages from the upcoming DC Retroactive special—stunning pages that show Grell has lost none of excellent technique. Nuff Said!
Here are some wallpapers that look great on Pearl E-Ink readers for DC Comics fans. They work fine for both the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle!
Two of my favorite Superman covers, by Neal Adams.
Batman covers, also by Neal Adams!
Flash covers by Brian Bolland. The first one is Bolland’s rendition of the Flash’s first appearance from Showcase #4.
Neal Adams again, on the first issue of Green Lantern / Green Arrow. The second cover is by Gil Kane, Justice League of America #78, not a classic issue by any means, but this cover has always stuck in my memory.
Swamp Thing covers by Berni Wrightson.
You can find my entire collection of wallpapers over on Flicker. You can also see my previous post, Marvel Comics Wallpapers for the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle. Nuff Said!
"THIS JUST GAVE ME THE BIGGEST FANGASM OF MY LIFE! "Couldn't have said it better myself, buddy. Nuff Said!
Jim Lee is a fun guy to follow on Twitter. He loves doing sketches for fans. Some pros have stopped doing them at cons, because some guys just turn around and auction the sketch on eBay for a quick profit. Last Sunday, he hid a bunch of great sketches of DC Comics characters (Green Lantern, Batman, Catwoman, Superman, etc) at various places around the convention. He's left them in all kinds of places, including the women's restroom at C2E2 earlier this year. Usually people find these sketches within minutes of Jim's tweet. What a fun idea!
Note: Some of these scavenger hunt sketches were from the C2E2 con, where Lee played the same game.
Batman. I am sure Jim Lee can draw Bats in his sleep. Classic.
Flash. This is the one I wish I could have found. Definitely if I ever meet Jim Lee in person, and he's willing to do a sketch, I will ask for the Flash!
Wonder Woman. Jim Lee's wife @Joke2Far hid this one in a women's restroom. They asked the guys not to go in there, probably hoping a female fan would pick it up.
Here are some of the lucky winners! The Wonder Woman winner is on the third pic, a cute couple who braved the restroom for the sketch. Nuff Said!
DC Comics has really reversed its creative slump during the last few months. Wednesday Comics, Batman and Robin, Flash Rebirth are quality comics. And of course, leading the way are Blackest Night and Green Lantern.
Green Lantern #45 veers away from Hal Jordan (while he is the spotlight in Blackest Night) to focus on Star Sapphire, Sinestro, and his fear-mongering corps on the Zamoran homeworld.
This story really struck me as to how far Carol's character has grown. In her early appearances as Star Sapphire, Carol was obsessed with Hal Jordan--to the point of battering down his resistance to becoming her mate! The purple ring pretty much brainwashed Carol, who only reverted to her normal persona after being defeated in battle. There's great subtext in all of this depending on which decade you read the stories. In the 60s, it was about women's liberation and having the power to get what they wanted--only to have a man take it away! Especially in the scene above (from Green Lantern 74, 1970) where Star Sapphire battles not only Green Lantern, but Sinestro as well.
Now in the current Green Lantern series, Geoff Johns has done a lot to explain why Carol has acted so crazy over the years. The sapphire ring is so dominating to the bearer that they do become brainwashed. Only Carol is able to resist the power, as she has had the most experience with it: "Stop trying to put me on autopilot."
As the cover promises, Carol throws down against Sinestro after he breaks free of the Zamoran purple prison. I take some disagreement with Sinestro's statement ("I have never sought revenge against my former pupil through, you Carol...") because obviously he has done so. But you have to think that Carol is terribly overmatched in this confrontation. I had Bullseye/Elektra jitters all over again.
Fortunately, Carol's ring has a power more potent than creating purple constructs. She traps Sinestro and causes him to remember his own lost love, who turns about to be the sister of Abin Sur! Perhaps this has been established elsewhere, but it was the first time I knew who exactly he had married in the past. With the recent revelation that Sinestro is the father of Soranik Natu in the Green Lantern Corps--Sinestro's story just keeps getting more wondrously complex. We still don't know exactly how Arin Sur died...or at least I do not. Was it from Sinestro's own hand, a la Darth Vader?
John Siuntres just speculated in a recent Word Balloon podcast that Sinestro might actually be "the greatest Green Lantern of them all" if somehow he turns around during the Blackest Night conflict. It's possible, but I hope that Geoff Johns doesn't try to totally change Sinestro...he's just too much fun being evil. Nuff said.
I'm really hot on Blackest Night. It's revived my enthusiasm for DC Comics...it's even spurred me to collect all the single issues for that title, as well as Green Lantern, GLC, Flash Rebirth, etc.
I can see why Barry Allen had to be revived. In scenes like the following, where a Flash needs to interact with Hal Jordan, it just feels better if it's Hal's peer, Barry. As they say in this splash page from Green Lantern #43, they are both cops, after all!
But here's something even greater: the new speed effect for The Flash. It's a ghost effect showing the after images the Flash leaves in his wake.
Ethan Van Sciver talked about this in one of his recent interviews, that he was charged with designing a new speed effect. During the Golden Age, the Flash's speed effect was portrayed with multiple images of him doing something. In the Silver Age, Carmine Infantino drew the character with trailing speed lines that looked great in the 1960s. For the modern era, Wally West had those effects, plus a blurring of what was going on around him.
Now with digital computer art, this new ghosting trick, combined with the traditional methods, really makes the Flash's power new and exciting. This panel by Ivan Reis shows you all of them. The colors also blur to give you that notion of speed.
Even when the Flash isn't fighting, just turning his head, it still looks fantastic.
The art in both Green Lantern books is really top notch. Now I am wondering who the artist will be for the regular Flash title, once Flash Rebirth is done. I'm thinking that DC Comics should tap Ivan Reis when Blackest Night is over. What do you think? Nuff said.
Green Lantern Volume Two--the one starring Hal Jordan--had a terrific run during the 1980s. Len Wein, Dave Gibbons, and Steve Englehart worked on the series during this period. John Stewart even became the lead character for a period of time. But it started winding down and losing sales despite the array of talent.
Green Lantern #167 has Jordan with his finger raised as he stands among the Guardians of the Universe. This cover epitomizes the greatest thing about Jordan's character. He's a Galactic cop reporting to the ultimate authority, but Jordan's always been rebellious, never afraid to the Guardians when they've made a bonehead decision.
In this run of stories, the writers had discovered the mythology surrounding the GL Corps was a goldmine of material. The series changed its title to "The Green Lantern Corps" with issue 201 in an effort to boost sales.
The GL Corps only lasted 24 issues. It was fitting that Gil Kane, the man who worked on the first issue back in the 1960s, drew the final cover to GL Corps #224. After an epic battle with Sinestro, the great power battery of the Corps was left "diminished but not extinguished" in the words of the lone surviving Guardian. There was enough power left to equip Jordan with a ring. The rest of the Corps were powerless and dispersed to live normal lives.
This cover is a fitting tribute to the end of the series, with Jordan saluting the battery and his friends in a state of shock. Nuff said.
This cover was for the special "Silver Age" mini-event in 2000. I saved this image of the cover, sans the logo and captions, from one of the DC solicitations. Kevin Nowlan inked this cover and many other jobs that Kane worked on during this period. I really like the color scheme in this version--Sinestro in a blue haze raining down trouble on Hal Jordan, which the green circles focus your attention on.
Apparently someone at DC Comics did not like that color scheme. Here's the actual published cover. Perhaps the editorial change was to restore Sinestro's purplish skin color as it appears in the interiors. However, they made a mistake with this new color scheme--Sinestro's ring is emitting green energy, not yellow! Nuff said.
