The Good
First and foremost, the Zero Hour era of Hal Jordan and Kyle Rayner is awesome, so going into this, lots of fans are going to be excited. We're getting to see Hal Jordan at his lowest point. When the dome went up in Metropolis, no one has powers, and that includes the Lantern rings.
Hal has put himself in jail for the crimes he committed as Parallax. If you're not familiar with that story, don't worry, there's a pretty quick recap of what happened with Mongul and Coast City. Out of everything I've read, thus far, from CONVERGENCE, this isn't just the most new reader friendly book, but it also sums up past events very quickly to get to the meat of the story. In a nutshell, writer Tony Bedard wants everyone on the same page, but doesn't want to spend 16 pages on catch up. Parallax has thing to blow up.
Bedard does a great job at delivering a fun, informative, and well-paced story that actually moves forward. Most of the CONVERGENCE tie-ins have suffered from stagnation in the first issue. There's way too much set-up and very little pay off. Bedard switches up the balance of those two items and gets right to Parallax blasting people from other worlds in the face.
That's the thing that's really cool about the issue is that we get to see one of the many, upcoming CONVERGENCE battles as Parallax takes on Princess Fern from Electropolis. It's a fun battle and great to see one of these stories get right into the action.
John Rauch does some awesome work with the colors on this issue. It feels like an art style, via Ron Wagner and inker Bill Reinhold, with some contemporary coloring. The page that sticks out as the best mixture of these two styles is the splash page with Hal in the holding cell. It's a fantastic page that really sets where Hal is at.
The Bad
The art isn't great, but it's not bad by any means. It is reminiscent of the early modern age of comics that the story originates from, with more contemporary covers, but overall, the art isn't up to par with the writing, which is a nuts amount of fun.
The Verdict
CONVERGENCE GREEN LANTERN/PARALLAX hits on a lot of characters and notes from DC's history that will get a lot of fans excited for this two-part tale. It's also a solid read for new readers, since Bedard does a great job summing up everything that's happened to Hal around the Zero Hour story line. This is one of the few CONVERGENCE stories that gets right into the fight, instead of spending a giant chunk of the story setting everything up, which was incredibly refreshing. It's not the best of the tie-ins, but it's certainly one of the better ones and worth checking out.