Momentum is everything in a comic. You want to keep the ball rolling and let the fans still be excited for whats to come. Apparently Geoff Johns doesn’t know a thing about momentum considering how this issue panned out. I mean you get a huge reveal last issue involving the guy rounding up all the entities to screw around with the Guardians. What do we get with this issue though? Nothing of the sort.

Look, if Johns wanted to go further with Atrocious and him finding ‘The Butcher’ then that’s fine. But why, oh why, did he focus the entire issue on this? I got bored with this issue about halfway through and Johns laying on the point about rage and why Atrocious isn’t all bad really got tiring. He does have a good handle on The Spectre, and if anything I guess I am happy to see this storyline get resolved from Blackest Night. But again, I really think Johns stretched this out to make an entire issue because he could’ve easily finished this in half the time. Also, the fact that Hal is a no show keeps the trend of not having a Green Lantern of any sorts in a Green Lantern title continuing.

The book also reverts back to the original look with Alamy seemingly the main inker again. That’s not a slight on him or anything, I mean his inks really make Mahnke’s incredible pencils look even better. But now it’s a bit easier to tell what inker does what page, so the characters do look a bit different from page to page. But even still, Doug Mahnke still makes this a visual treat every issue. So even if the writing isn’t where it should be, you can expect this to be great looking book.

I really wish Geoff Johns could make up his mind with this series. Is this about Hal Jordan? Is it about the New Guardians? Or is it going to be about neither and going into the original Guardians and the recently revealed ‘lost’ Guardian? It’s frustrating to no end that Johns seems to have no real focus on the book. Which is weird since the last two issues really did a great job focusing on Hal and no one else. Oh well, hopefully we get more of Hal and the ‘Lost’ Guardian next issue. Although I really doubt it…