The best crossover of 2015 is here, but like all crossovers they can turn for the worse at any moment and become quagmires of awfulness. Is it good?
Star Trek/Green Lantern: The Spectrum War #3 (IDW Publishing)
Long story short: a bunch of lantern rings of all colors went across dimensions into the Star Trek universe. Now Federation employees, Klingons and Romulans alike are wielding the power of their respective rings. Of course those on the Enterprise are wielding the “good-guy” rings and their enemies the bad, but so far things have remained interesting and hard to predict. This issue opens with Hal aka Green Lantern being friendly with the Star Trek characters as they explain what exactly is going on.
Once again I’m simply amazed at how well paced and balanced this story is by Mike Johnson. It’s not going too fast or too slow and there’s always something interesting brewing in one scene or another. This issue is very much a building issue, getting us from point A to point B, but the developments on the bad guy side are compelling. Basically every time we see the bad guys the stakes are raised, but at the same time the heroes seem to be twiddling their thumbs. That’s because they’re interested in getting more information and figuring things out. As always the villains are reacting and doing bad things on impulse—assuredly things that’ll bite them in the tuckus in the end, but the tension is rising nicely.
Way to be presumptuous, Kirk!
Johnson has also weaved in some Green Lantern mythos with Nekron very much looming over the story. There are no half measures with this series. It’s going full-stop, pulling no punches with either property building what could be the event of the summer.
Being a bridge issue there’s a lot of time spent with characters sitting on their hands. This of course serves the story as we need more info to understand the stakes and what’s going on with characters, but it’s still slowing things down. Considering we have red, yellow, green, blue and other Lanterns flying around it’s understandable.
The only issue I take with this series right now is how Kirk and Hal haven’t put two and two together concerning Earth. They’ve established they are from different universes, but they’re from the same place! I’d love to see them discuss Earth and the differences at least a little bit.
I continue to be impressed with Angel Hernandez’s art, which is appropriately comic book event level good. It can get a little rigid sure, but the Star Trek characters are incredibly close to their actor counterparts. Layouts always look nice and there’s clearly some choices made to amp up or slow down the pace via art. I really dig what Angel is doing with the Lantern powers too, which are exciting and fluid.
That can’t be good.
Is It Good?
This is the most exciting summer event series out there. It beats Secret Wars because it pulls no punches. There are no half measures and it’s as exciting as they come.
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