In "Reason to Get Excited," I spotlight things from modern comics that I think are worth getting excited about. I mean stuff more specific than "this comic is good," ya know? More like a specific bit from a writer or artist that impressed me.
Today, we look at the distinctively alien world at the heart of Far Sector, DC's new ongoing series for Young Animal by N.K. Jemisin and Jamal Campbell.
The concept for the series is that a Green Lantern has been requested to be assigned to Platform Ever Forward, a city on the faaaaaaaaaaaar edges of the known universe, home to 20 billion denizens who have been kept from having any emotion. However, something has changed and there was fear that there might be crime there for the first time in centuries and so they requested a Green Lantern be stationed there and a new member of the Corps, Sojourner "Jo" Mullein, was sent there and sure enough, within a few months of her arrival, there was the first murder at this City Endless in over 500 years!
I don't want to make it seem like I'm saying that the DC Universe hasn't had distinctive alien worlds before. Maltus, from L.E.G.I.O.N., was a distinctly alien world...
And Alan Moore famously made Rann very much an alien world, as well...
But for the most part, alien worlds are rarely all that distinctively alien. Even when they look different from humans, they still have a culture that is basically the same as humanity.
Jemisin and Campbell, though, go out of their way to make this world its own thing, with its own rules and culture and it really does work wonderfully...
It's bad enough to be thrown on to another world and suddenly expected to solve a murder mystery (and again, it's not like Green Lantern Corps members are trained homicide detectives. Can you imagine Hal Jordan doing detective work?), it is a whole other thing when the whole world doesn't make any real sense to you and that's what faces Jo in this series, but she is more than up to the task and I love that se's even a little bit cocky about how well she thinks that she can handle this new assignment.
I was saying earlier today that The Last God made everything easier for the narrative by spending so much time on the world being built and that's the same thing in this comic, as Jemisin and Campbell have put so much thought into this alien world that the story almost flows naturally from the distinctive set-ups that they have established.
This looks like it will be one heck of a maxiseries and I would not be surprised if this was what the upcoming HBOB Max Green Lantern series uses as an inspiration.
Okay, this feature is a bit less of a reader-interactive one, as I'm just spotlight stuff in modern comics that specifically impressed ME, but heck, if you'd like to send in some suggestions anyways, maybe you and I have the same taste! It's certainly not improbably that something you found cool would be something that I found cool, too, so feel free to send ideas to me at brianc@cbr.com!