by Michael DeLaney

This article contains SPOILERS. If you haven’t read the issue yet, proceed at your own risk!

It’s not unusual to see a comic creator return to a character or story that they have covered in the past to revise or augment it. Having an artist return to a character or story in a resonating way, though, is more of a rarity. In my humble opinion, Ethan Van Sciver is at his best when he’s drawing Green Lantern comics. In Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps 24, Van Sciver gets to revisit a powerful moment from one of his first GL stories, Green Lantern: Rebirth.

Robert Venditti writes a tightly-wound plot that splits the time between the revelation that Green Lantern Tomar-Tu killed a Sinestro Corps member and that Kyle Rayner didn’t tell Soranik Natu that he discovered that the now-deceased time traveler Sarko was their son. Green vs. Yellow is a common theme in the Green Lantern mythos, but here the GLs are trying to avoid a confrontation with the Sinestros by covering up the truth.

The confrontation between Soranik and Kyle is easily one of the most powerful of the book. Soranik reveals that her curiosity at Kyle’s secrecy about Sarko lead her to perform an autopsy on the man she would discover is her son. Because of Kyle’s lies she unknowingly committed this act of irreverent mutilation against her own child.

Soranik’s righteous anger culminates in a powerful act that lets Kyle and long-time Green Lantern readers know where she stands.

As she invokes her father Sinestro’s favorite pet name for Kyle, “alley rat,” she brands him with a Sinestro Corps insignia on his chest — much like the way Kyle branded Sinestro with the Green Lantern insignia back in Green Lantern Rebirth. I have to think that Van Sciver had some input in that wickedly ironic callback.

The conversation doesn’t stop there. What do you wanna talk about from this issue?