It's A Wonderful Lantern
This review is going to be a bit biased, I have to admit. I should be more professional in stating that this series should be more about the CORPS and not just about Guy Gardner. At some point I stated that this series has lately felt more like a continuation of Emerald Warriors than Green Lantern Corps. Peter J. Tomasi was on Green Lantern Corps until Brightest Day, when he jumped onto the new Emerald Warriors, and Fernando Pasarin was his artist, and Guy Gardner was THE main character of Emerald Warriors. And thus, this is spiritually a continuation of that. But at the same time, there are New 52 standards I need to hold it to as Green Lantern CORPS. But Guy Gardner is my absolute favorite Green Lantern, and it's damn near impossible for me to feel disappointed when the series has focused so much on him.
The cover is awesome, but I liked the original cover a lot better. The black background with Volthoom as a purely white silhouette piercing Guy Gardner's chest was more intense and deep, the white background still kind of works, but Volthoom just as Volthoom makes this cover feel a bit more generic. Still pretty good, but since the solicits had the other version I can't help but feel let down. Plus it feels too much like this week's New Guardians cover, both of them with which backgrounds, when a yin-yang worked better.
Pasarin's artwork is excellent as usual, as Volthoom digs deep into Guy Gardner's life. The extremely trippy scenes with him trapped in Volthoom's clutches are amazing, Guy superimposed along the line of his past selves (Including Guy Gardner: Warrior!) floating in an electric ocean of all his major memories looks brilliant. And the retelling of his big Blackest Night battle on Oa looks phenomenal. Though, in terms of the seas of memories, I'm really disappointed that one of his most iconic moments, the 'One Punch' from JLI isn't included.
I'm a little baffled at how Volthoom just kind of suddenly arrived to trap Guy Gardner here. It makes him seem a little oddly overpowered, if he can just be wherever he wants whenever, and it's quite a bit of a random jump from the previous Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps Annual; but after that, things are amazing as they unfold. Volthoom is a sadistic genius is he distorts and corrupts Guy Gardner's life around him. He picks some truly tough moments in Guys life and makes them all the more traumatizing in frighteningly possible ways. This seems to subtly place more limits on his powers, as it appears he can't just change things as he pleases, but needs to recreate things along already present potential pathways. It begs the question of whether or not he's TRULY changing Guy's past, or if he's just toying with him to feed of his emotional powers since he said he was too weak to change time, but in the end everything culminates into a karmically beautiful climax of all the tough changes Volthoom made. What's especially great about all the moments he chose, is that they're previous unexplored key moments that shaped the man Guy Garnder is today, giving us more insight into the man behind the ring.
In Conclusion: 5/5
Like I said, if you're a Guy Gardner fan like me, you'll LOVE this issue. It's an intense and emotional journey deep into the core of this core member of the corps, and it looks like the next two issues will explore other key members, so it's not such a letdown that this doesn't go all out with the Corps. But what it does for Guy Gardner is perfect.
