The Green Lantern Archives Vol. 4

Books
The Green Lantern Archives Vol. 4
By Leroy Douresseaux
August 24, 2005 - 19:11

DC Comics
Writer(s): Gardner Fox (#22-23, 25-29), John Broome (#22, 24, 27, and 29)
Penciller(s): Gil Kane
Inker(s): Joe Giella (#22-28) and Sid Greene (#29)
Cover Artist(s): Gil Kane and Murphy Anderson; Gil Kane (#29)
ISBN: 1-56389-811-X
216 pp., Color, $49.95

THE GREEN LANTERN ARCHIVES VOL. 4

:This fourth collection of the seminal Silver Age Green Lantern comic books is actually sterile compared to the earlier volumes. The stories remain fairly imaginative, and the art by the legendary Gil Kane with inks by Joe Giella is solid and occasionally spectacular. The weakness in these stories (as is often the case with DC’s Silver Age comics) is weak; no amount of clever and novel ideas can completely cover up faulty execution, and that’s what the script is – the final execution of the written version of a comic book story.

Two examples of this are “The House that Fought Green Lantern” from issue 28 and #29’s cover story, “Half a Green Lantern is Better than None.” Both are exemplary of the craziness that DC writers could come up with at the time, but often so much of the story is told through caption exposition rather than shown. When one has Gil Kane on art, don’t tell; show. However, I realize that both the writer and artists were constrained by the page count; still, the writing in these comic books is why comic books had such a bad reputation for so long.

In the final analysis, I can only recommend this Archives edition to those who want complete sets. As is usual for Archives, the production values on this one are impeccable. There is an introduction by former Green Lantern editor, Jack C. Harris (1978-81) that recalls the era in which these particular issues of GL were published, and there is also a biography page.