Alan Scott: The Green Lantern #5 kicks the series into overdrive with an emotional battle between the titular character and his long lost love. Read Full Review

Given this context and the segment we see at the start of the issue, I'm guessing we're headed for a tragic final issuebut first we've got one epic Cold War battle brewing, complete with some long-awaited guest stars in the cliffhanger. Read Full Review

The pen-ultimate issue of the original Green Lantern burns bright with a chapter that cant be mixed. Sheridan balances heavy action and drama with his excellent script. Tormey, Herms, and Gattoni provide the vivid imagery to give readers an Alan Scott ready for the immense threat lying in his path. This series continues to be a must-have every time it drops. Read Full Review

Tim Sheridan's script delivers everything fans would expect at this point from the series' epic conclusion, but with enough heart and dramatic tension to still surprise. Read Full Review

Alan Scott: The Green Lantern is at its best when it focuses on the relationship between Alan and Vladimir. That's exactly what this issue does, and it's why it works so well. Even when Vladimir is trying to appear as a heartless monster, the heart in this book screams out and makes for a rewarding and touching experience. While there are some serious pacing issues, it's still hard not to love this series more with every passing issue. Read Full Review

Alan Scott: The Green Lantern #5 gives readers everything this miniseries has been missing - action, excitement, drama, and cool wow moments. There's even a retcon that serves to align Alan Scott with the rest of the Green Lantern Corps in an interesting way. That said, the retcon creates decades' worth of plot holes, so continuity kings may have a tough time with the change. Read Full Review

I think that this issue is trying to do too much, especially considering that it's a mini. I was really along for the ride when it was just a story about Alan coming to terms with his sexuality and the doomed love story, and I thought that Vlad's character was and continues to be fantastic. But in this issue, I found the lore hard to follow/understand (maybe it's just because I don't know Green Lantern things), and the cavalry showing up underwhelming because we've never seen these characters in this book before. It seems hard to imagine how this will all wrap-up in one more issue.

I really like the intense disconnect which continues between Vlad and Alan, with the latter imploring the former, who most likely is a firm atheist, to care about his immortal soul.

It is weird to me that the Soviet's superhero would be called the Countess, and I think that overall, what happens in the end doesn't make sense - or maybe I just didn't understand it. Also I don't think that they used the right word for die in russian. Also why would they not translate that one when they did the standard translated text thing right before?

I think that this would have been better had it just stuck to character dynamics and relationships, without the lore and without the cavalry / bad guys showing up. more

Should’ve just been a Red Lantern mini.

This mini has come to nothing except recons and poor characterizations. If you like this book because you like this iteration, that is one thing. However if you like this cause you, in delusion, think it is anything like Alan was designed to be... well that's a special kind of special.

This feels like character assassination at its finest. Wiping out everything dear to poor Alan. Retroactively reducing my enjoyment of the Alan I know and love from the Golden Age stories.

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• fatebuddy27

fatebuddy27 - Apr 1, 2024

Well said.

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"Confess your crimes-- save your immortal soul!" - Alan Scott: The Green Lantern #5, page 5, panel 4.

As far as I'm concerned, these words alone tell you the Alan Scott of AS: TGL is not any Green Lantern we've ever seen before -- certainly not the Golden Age Green Lantern, angry willful clever complicated hero that he was, who never once made a single allusion to religion, who always seemed to believe in nothing but his work and his own two hands and his determination to survive.

The inexplicable insertion of religion as the be-all, end-all of 1940s internalized homophobia is not just reductive but antithetic to the character. Worse still, it seems to have gone almost entirely unacknowledged by audiences at large, as if a sudden case of Catholicism is an acceptable addition to the creation of Jewish artists and writers, as if Alan Scott had not been again and again shown to be concerned with the palpable consequences of the society he lives in and the laws of the time rather than his "immortal soul".

Beyond bad characterisation, dubious art, lamentable pacing, treating random add-ons like the above as fundamental & basic to the character does nobody no favors and only serves to make longtime fans lean into the retcon allegations. Alan's sexuality might not be a retcon and the coding may have been there all along, but you certainly wouldn't know it looking at this book.

This issue, in particular, is also historically illiterate. Most readers might assume this takes place during the Cold War but title cards early on have reliably informed us this is the middle of WWII, and the full scale attack from the USSR at the end makes one question where exactly the writer thinks the Soviet Union stood in WWII and who were its allies (hint: The Big Three).

The degree to which this series is set on resurrecting Red Scare-era propaganda is almost remarkable, from Vladimir finding out the Red Army's betrayal via an American newspaper (the most reliable, trustworthy and objective source of news in the free world, don'tcha know?) to what I've dubbed The Red Scare Squadron being actively contrasted against the brightly-colored, handsome, well-muscled American superheroes... here to save the day for freedom and democracy everywhere at the behest of their good & righteous government.

Ahistorical, anachronistic, vaguely homophobic and deeply out of character is what this comic is and still remains. more