If this issue’s cover had a blurb it’d be ‘ALL-OUT EXPOSITION ISSUE’ because it’s flashback time for villain of the piece Red Lantern. He’s captured Green Lantern Alan Scott in our hero’s own apartment and is telling him that His Love Was a Lie.
Yes, Alan’s long lost love is the Red Lantern, he’s not Johnny Ladd, he’s commie Vlad. He was deep undercover in the US Army, having been recruited by the Red Army when his gifts were spotted.
His gifts being his looks, charm and willingness to tart himself around.
In the United States a few years later…
And so ‘Johnny’ is overpromoted, putting him by top engineer Alan’s side while he worked on Project Crimson and, eventually, in the tendrils of the mystical red flame, as seen in the first issue of this New Golden Age mini-series. Presumed lost beneath the waves, Vlad was taken home by his Russian masters, to become a guinea pig as they learned the secrets of the Green Flame of Death.
Now, in 1941, Alan is the Green Lantern, Vlad is the Red Lantern and it’s time to have a conversation.
Is telling your supposed enemy how much more he’s capable of a good idea? It seems Vlad is self sabotaging a little. It also seems he protests too much.
Sure he’s not homosexual. He just helps out when the numbers are short.
What came first, the gay chicken or the espionage egg? It seems to me Vlad has carved a career path that allows him to enjoy the company of men while being a good servant of the state. I bet he’s cheating on his wife even now for the greater glory of Russia.
(Mind, that horrific beard would surely put a lot of Forties guys off. Is 21st century Alan’s new growth a homage to his old frenemy?)
The issue ends with a terrific cliffhanger, as the balance of power slips in Alan’s direction.
Writer Tim Sheridan pulls off the surprise reveal that Johnny didn’t become Red Lantern because he was corrupted by the Crimson Flame, he was bad all along, a man who weaponised lust. His narration is well written enough to keep my attention, and tension comes from wondering how Alan will react to the truth bombs. While Green Lantern does react as you might expect, he shows more emotional smarts than Red Lantern expects when it comes to improving his position. It seems their relationship, built, as it was, on a lie, helped Alan grow. And the big lie now is the one Vlad is telling himself.
What doesn’t work for me is the business about the Lanterns travelling through walls via time travel – the daftest explanation for a simple bit of super-business since a Marvel Handbook decided Cyclops’ eyes were a portal to a dimension of unstoppable energy. These chaps have magic wishing rings – if they want to go through walls, they go through walls.
Talking of that particular trick, a sequence demonstrating hero and villain passing through the living room of an oblivious family is fun, pencil artist Cian Tormey obviously enjoys conjuring up the period detail. I mean, just look at these panels of Vlad entering America.
That granny’s hat!
And a million points for the lamp placement.
The pencils, inked by the trio of Jordi Tarragona, Raúl Fernandez and John Livesay, are lovely throughout, made more so by the skilfully chosen and applied colours of Matt Herms. Tones are muted except when we’re with hero and villain and the contrast works well.
Lucas Gattoni’s lettering is solid throughout, with Red Lantern’s narrative boxes – white out of red with dropped caps and the occasional flaming corner – particularly attractive.
David Talaski, with his cover art, shows you can use bright colours and achieve spookiness; a good trick.
This is my favourite chapter of Alan Scott: Green Lantern so far, I’m optimistic the final two issues will keep up the quality.
Too Dangerous For a Girl 2 
All the good things you find in this series are pointless if someone can’t accept its core premise. Alan Scott as completely homosexual from day one doesn’t work at all for me. Bisexual I could have accepted but not that. With this mini’s Alan also being shown as a six on the Kinsey Scale, it also makes it unfathomable he fathered Jenny and Todd unless Rose was a lesbian and had a turkey baster.
It is well written and very true to life. I read the last three issues (I’d been dreading it) in a sitting and was moved by this not-Alan’s experiences that happened to too many innocent men. I loved the Spectre not being spiritual and not needing faith to hear God telling him things. The wrongness of Alan’s being the star undercut all that and I honestly skipped pages that warped the character too much.
I don’t know if I’ll read any more of this. It’s set in the past and we’ve seen illogically still alive Alan’s status quo. We know Alan wins and Johnny/Vlad dies after fathering a child. Why put myself through reading it if it’s so fundamentally wrong to me, right?
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I agree, this isn’t a bisexual Alan, I’ve had to accept this is a completely new Earth 2 Alan Scott. Classic Earth 2 Green Lantern and Doiby are off to the side somewhere, waiting to be foregrounded again by some future multiversal shake-up. Hopefully by the end of this mini we’ll learn how Jade and Obsidian came to be.
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I’ve come to enjoy the series quite a bit. I like the tension between Red and Green Lantern and can’t help but root for them. 🙂
I don’t have any problems seeing Alan Scott in this role of closeted gay man. We’ve seen that he came out late in life. That hasn’t been retconned away, has it? It’s not unfathomable to me that he married and fathered children at some point in the past.
Cian’s artwork is wonderful – one of the high points of the series.
Sheridan’s scripting is pretty clear this issue. In the past, I’ve found his stories tend to leave stuff out or make weird jumps in logic. Maybe the info-dump stories are where his strengths lie. 😉
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The thing I have problems getting past is that we’ve been in the privileged position of peeping into characters heads for decades, and there’s never been an inkling of
Alan being anything other than a straight fella. But it is what it is, and I’m enjoying the series.
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Fair enough. That makes sense, for sure.
In my head, I figure that in the past, we were privy to Alan’s inner thoughts, but not his “inner” inner thoughts. But I get it.
I find that holding any character up to who they were in the forties is going to involve some mental gymnastics. And there are certainly some characters that I’m willing to be more gymnastics for than others.
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The thing with Alan, the Eighties gave us his affair with Rose/Thorn and thus his children. Later on, he was written as loving and supporting Todd coming out, but he had some problems with his son being gay because he was a straight man of a bygone era.
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@Steve. Yes. I get where you’re coming from. I haven’t read those particular stories, but in my head I think that Alan can be both supportive of his son coming out, *and* have problems with his son being gay, *and also* be a closeted gay man himself due to being a man who grew up in the thirties and forties.
But just because it works for me, doesn’t mean that it’s gonna work for everyone.
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I’m just dying to see how Mollie Maybe fits in… is the Hadlequin’s Son also the Lantern’s Son?
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That’s one of the frustrating elements of the series. The Earth 2 characters already have so many stories that could be told about them. There’s so many characters. It’s a veritable Legion. And here we have Johns introducing *more* characters, all of who could be spinning off into some interesting avenues to explore.
Except it’s two or three months between each issue. And… as good as a writer as Johns can be… I’ve never found that juggling lots of characters is one of his strengths. So there’s that, as well. I just wish we could fast forward to the end of this series and get to whatever is going to come next.
Give us an ongoing series. Give it to us now. If it doesn’t exactly line up with the current book… shrug… we’re comic fans. We’ve had “five year laters” and “one year laters” all over the place. We’ll figure it out.
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This was my favorite issue of the series so far, too. And I agree — the “time travel” explanation for passing through walls is ridiculous. (At the same time, Vlad might simply be wrong about how he’s doing it, or he’s doing it the hard way.)
I loved that even as Alan was thrown for a loop by this revelation, he still kept it together enough to use those emotions to get the jump on Vlad.
The Wes Dodds: Sandman series is still my favorite of these three JSA solo books, but this issue pulled this series up quite a bit in my estimation.
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Thank you for reminding me that I haven’t yet got to the most recent Sandman. Off there now!
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I posted a review of the entire miniseries on my own blog (link below) and I had the exact same thoughts about the “walking through walls via time travel” nonsense that you did.
Anyway, in general I liked this miniseries, although I had some quibbles with certain aspects of it.
I hope you’ll be posting a review of the final issue, because I’d like to get your thoughts on the conclusion.
Comic book reviews: Alan Scott: The Green Lantern – In My Not So Humble Opinion (wordpress.com)
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Thank you Ben, I’m way behind with the comments but have the link open and will enjoy reading your thoughts. Hope the final issue review was OK.
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