The cover shown is not the cover of the book.  And the ones on the cover don’t show up until the last page.  And you don’t find out who they are this issue.  I think if you going to show someone on your cover, you better explain inside the comic.  But I guess they represent the concept of the book.  Each of the 7 colors has rings and ring-type powers and a corp of soldiers that represent it.  I guess this book will be a member from each color banding together to fight some large threat.  But we never get that far.

The story, as short as it is, moves along okay, but the beginning is quite confusing.  At no time do they state that scene is in the past, and since this is a reboot, it could easily be in the present.  But after the scene you get shown a banner ‘Present Day’, so we can assume that the first scene was in the past?  The writer never tells us how far back.  Was it yesterday?  or 5 years ago?  Only long time green lantern readers will know.

At least they left out the whole ‘loss of ring’ and ‘get ring returned’ back story.  That isn’t necessary for the intro story.  Although a lot of time was spent showing us the colored lanterns loosing their rings.  That could have been done in one page, and not the 7 or so it took.  But I guess the whole story is set up for more to come.

The art is solid, but he needs to work on the human faces.  Although if he is going to be drawing mostly aliens in this book, he might not need that skill as much.  The coloring is outstanding, everything is clearly differentiated. With a book about 7 colored Lanterns, they better get the best in the business.

Needs more story —   Don

I was a bit thrown by the short retelling of Kyle Rayner’s origin as a Green Lantern at the beginning of the book. Only when it’s done and the next page says that we’re now looking at the “present day” does it become clear that it was a flashback. I’m not sure why they wanted that origin story to be surprise (there was nothing new in it that I could recall), but if they didn’t, they should have tagged it as happening in the past on the first page.

There aren’t many changes in the Green Lantern books for the “New 52″ and they don’t really need it. This looks like it’ll be the title to follow if you want to read about Kyle Rayner in particular. It probably has a lot to do with six other “Lantern” characters in the color spectrum, but we mostly see the rings that they’re chasing after and don’t find out much about them.

The quality of the book seems pretty interchangeable with other non-Geoff-Johns-helmed GL books, but since they were all good before the event, that’s not a problem. The story could use some more velocity, though.

B-  — Ed