COMIC: Top of the Stack - Green Lantern #61 (Review)

Written by Geoff Johns
Pencils by Doug Mahnke
Cover by Gary Frank

Publisher: DC Comics
Price: $2.99

Sometimes the best is saved for last and for the final week of 2010, Geoff Johns made it seem that way. Following last week's Top of the Stack winner, Green Lantern: Larfleeze Christmas Special #1, another GL book - the flagship title: Green Lantern, also penned by Johns - came out and ran away from the competition that included the premiere issue of David Finch's Batman: The Dark Knight and another issue of a previous Stack winner, Detective Comics.

The issue continues the hunt for the power entities, except that the focus of the story shifts specifically around Atrocitus and where his search for the rage entity, Butcher, leads him. Where the fun happens centers around the execution of a criminal and the full of rage victim's father that attracted the rage entity to him. In the entity's way is The Spectre who objects to having the entity on Earth. Atrocitus arrives on the scene and the three face off.

Art interiors are drawn by Doug Mahnke, the series regular artist since the Blackest Night Green Lantern event in 2009. His Atrocitus is great, the Spectre was fantastic, but I think the best designed character in the book was the Butcher once he found his human host. Gary Frank's style on the cover was such a great complement to the book that I had not even realized it was a different artist from the interior until writing this review. I definitely think he is an artist that I would like to see draw an arc filled with Green Lantern characters.

I had been tiring of the Green Lantern universe of late, but the last two issues have moved the focus to non-GL corps characters and helped improve my view of those characters. The universe has expanded over the Geoff Johns revitalization, and if this is any sign that Johns knows it is time to round out all of these new characters it might be just what the Green Lantern book needs to keep going strong.

Check out Geek Plate's Tumblr for today's Green Lantern themed picspam.