Review by Frank Plowright

Going back over the years, someone becoming a member of the Green Lantern Corps and receiving their power ring was a jolly occasion, something to be celebrated as a new superhero emerged. For Absolute Green Lantern Al Ewing shreds that idea. He reworks Hal Jordan’s late 1950s origin story of Abin Sur landing on Earth into something dark and terrifying, a horror story more than a comforting birth of a superhero.

Ewing’s starting point is almost all of Earth’s known Green Lanterns through the decades gathered as friends and acquaintances in a small town. Guy Gardner heads the local police department; John Stewart is an architect; Jo Mullein has just returned to her Nevada hometown and Todd Rice is also resident. As seen on the cover, the story may start with a tormented Jordan, but the centrepiece is Mullein. Abin Sur, meanwhile, resembles some combination of the Spectre and the Martian Manhunter, unknowable in meting out judgement. It’s a very convincing and very scary reworking of a basic premise, and we’ve not told you everything, by the way.

Jahnoy Linsdsay’s art switches between the familiar and the unknown, excelling whether visiting an ordinary smalltown coffee shop or supplying the horror of Abin Sur in full judgement mode. It’s important to believe strange and terrible things are happening to ordinary people, and Lindsay supplies that with style. He’s a full process artist, also handling the colour, and as this is a version of Green Lantern, green predominates, but in subtle variations, and it’s extremely effective. For a signature piece of art he brings Ewing’s idea about the Green Lantern emblem to solid and amazing life.

While Without Fear is a trainspotter’s delight in supplying so many names, artefacts and procedures associated with Green Lantern, it’s also a story that can understood by a reader who hasn’t a clue who the assorted characters are. In fact, that could even be beneficial as that reader won’t be jumping ahead attempting to second guess. At the heart Ewing supplies people who’ve no real idea of what’s happening to them or to their town, and it’s entirely convincing. Deeper explanations are forthcoming in the final chapter, when Ewing incorporates the more recent idea of ring-bearing characters channelling different colours of light.

DC’s alternate versions populating the Absolute line have all been creatively successful, and Green Lantern matches their compelling inspiration in remodelling the familiar. It continues in Sojourner.