I’ve been looking forward to these Orange Lanterns for a while now. My favorites right now are Blue Lanterns; but only because they came out of no where and kicked major ass in the last arc. But using greed as a device for these lanterns is interesting on the same vein as the Red ones. Are they going to be one-dimensional?

Well yes and no is what I can say so far. The opening of this issue was really really good. Larfleeze (I believe that’s his name) is an interesting character. He is greedy, but Johns sort of writes him him a paranoid/schizophrenia type of state. The narration by Larfleeze was creepy but entertaining at the same time. But once we get into the heart of this issue, Hal trying to get the blue ring off, it went a bit slow from here. Now I dont want to state this was a bad issue by any means….After such a strong start to the issue though; my interest sorta whined down. The parts where Hal needed to learn to use ‘hope’ felt a bit hokey and was repeated ad nauseum. Plus I dont know if it’s just me, but the Guardians just dont seem all that interesting. The guardians for the Blue Lanterns are, but I dont usually care for the politics or personal side for the Green Guardians. In the end I was also confused as a whole by the Orange Lanterns. Is it just one man, or are there several members in this Corps? Does he ‘recruit’ members by just astral projecting them?

Philip Tan takes over for pencils in this issue and I really liked them. It doesnt have the ‘holy shit’ type of feel when Ivan Reis is doing this comic….But they are gorgeous none the less. Some of the moments like Larfleeze attacking the controllers, or Hal on Odym looked great. What didnt look great though was towards the end of the issue. When Larfleeze attacked the Guardians it was a clusterfuck to say the lease. Couldnt understand what was going on at all. Plus there seemed to have been some coloring problems with Hal being both a Blue and Green Lantern. It seemed like Glapion (inker) or Mayor/Eltaeb (colorists) had no idea what to do for this situation. Either made him half and half, or tried to experiement with the designs. It’s fine to do either one, but it got confused sometimes cause it looked like Hal didnt have the Blue ring at all on some points.

I am still intrigued on where this Orange corps is gonna go. If the narration of Larfleeze is like this threw the arc then it will be entertaining for me. But Johns just trying to advance Hal’s overall purpose for ‘Blackest Night’ just seemed a bit forced. Also, I just dont care about the politics all that much for the Guardians. Again I dont think this was a bad issue, I just got bored of it by the end.