Wow, this thread's been dormant for a while. I've read a number of collected editions this year. Thoughts on a few:

The Starman Compendium vol. 2 - 8/10 - finishes up the entire 1990s Starman series and associated mini-series. I think the series slowed down in the second half and dragged a bit, and the cutting from one plotline to another and back again can get tiresome, but by and large it's still enjoyable. I appreciate the chance to own and read the entire series in two volumes that are pretty affordable for all the content they contain. My only real gripe is the gutter loss that you sometimes get with a book this thick.

Green Lantern by Geoff Johns Omnibus vol. 1-3 - 9/10 - hard to give a single score for all three volumes because the quality does go up and down, but I do think this is easily one of the best eras of Green Lantern. I've read a lot of GL from the Silver Age on thanks to reprints, and Geoff Johns brought a lot of new ideas to the franchise, or put a new spin on old ones (Sinestro first tries to form his own Corps in the Silver Age for example). These volumes aren't perfect in terms of mapping (it feels like the GLC Recharge mini should be after the first story arc in the main Green Lantern book) but it is really convenient to pull a volume off the shelf whenever I want to re-read this era rather than digging out my mix of trade paperbacks and individual issues. It's particularly nice when the story went back and forth between Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps, or Blackest Night, which alternates between Green Lantern and the Blackest Night mini-series. It really is very good storytelling most of the way through, with Geoff Johns only running out of steam near the end with the Third Army and Rise of the First Lantern.

The Silver Age Batman Omnibus vol. 1 - this one is hard to grade. The material is fine for the era, if not as good as the decade of the 1940s that preceded it. It's more tame, both in terms of how establishment Batman is and in terms of comics code authority approved storytelling. But it is a step down from what came before and does not really innovate in the way that the earlier years of Batman did. The costumed rogues are mostly gone, with no Penguin, Catwoman, Two-Face, etc. I think the Joker may have been in a story or two. The series is not the same without those familiar villains dropping in regularly to liven things up. Sci-fi has started to creep in but still isn't all that common, no more so than during the 1940s. There are still a few time travel adventures with Dr. Carter Nichols. I enjoy finally being able to read the original Batwoman stories beyond her introduction. No, my big gripe with this era is that easily 90% of it features Sheldon Moldoff art, with only a few Dick Sprang-drawn issues to break it up. Everyone at this point had to ghost for Bob Kane, and Moldoff's art here is stiff and unengaging (such a contrast with his wonderful art on Golden Age Hawkman), and almost the entire book is composed of it. There's no way around it, for anyone who wants to read the early Silver Age Batman, you'd better get used to Sheldon Moldoff drawing a LOT of Batman. It's all readable and most of the stories are enjoyable enough, but there's a definite feeling of a series that's in a rut and constrained by the comics code rules at this point. I'm glad to have this material reprinted, and I'll keep buying these volumes, but it is definitely not as good as Batman was in the 40s and early 50s.

 

Justice Society of America: the Demise of Justice - 8/10



Collects the 8 part 1991 JSA mini-series as well as All-Star Comics #57 (the final Golden Age JSA adventure) and Adventure Comics #466, which adds to the earlier story. The mini-series is set in 1950, right before the House hearings that were used to explain why the JSA stopped operating. I still have my original issues of the mini-series, and what I didn't realize at the time was that it was written to imitate the structure of earlier All-Star Comics, where characters would get individual chapters and only come together as a team in the opening and closing chapters. This mini-series does that to some extent, with the characters getting solo issues before teaming up in groups of two, and then finally acting as a team in the final chapters. This has the effect of making several issues feel repetitive, as the same plot plays out featuring a different character. Most of the characters are likeable, though Black Canary is an annoying straw feminist here, whose every line of dialogue screams "I'm a strong woman character!" in the most ham-fisted way. Feels like old school Power Girl. We don't get the entire JSA either, we get Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, Black Canary and in the end, Starman. It's not a bad storyline, and may in fact be the first time I had ever read these characters in their own series. Nice to have it collected in hardcover.

 

Green Lantern vol. 7: Renegade - 8/10

I had found all of Robert Venditti's New 52 era Green Lantern books at Ollie's a few years back, except for this one. Strictly speaking I didn't need any of them, since I had the monthly issues, but when they're as cheap as they are at Ollie's discount, I don't mind rebuying the same material. It's nice to have the collected edition to pull off the bookshelf when I get in the mood to re-read these stories. And today I found volume 7 at the used bookstore so I could complete the set. Renegade is set during the "DC You" phase when all of DC's main characters got a major status quo change across the board. In Hal's case, with the reputation of the Green Lantern Corps damaged, he decides to "go renegade" and take all the blame on himself, letting the Corps regain their lost reputation as a trustworthy law enforcement group. So he stole Krona's gauntlet and went on the run, with only Kilowog aware of what he was doing. He finds out pretty quick that the entire Corps has vanished. This is when we had the Lost Army and Edge of Oblivion mini-series with the Corps stuck in a previous universe, the one Relic came from. Relic was the villain of Venditti's opening arc, a scientist convinced that use of the emotional spectrum was killing this universe as it killed his.

So Hal is on the run around the universe, in a spacecraft with an AI that can't stand him, with his hair grown out long, wearing a longcoat and Krona's gauntlet, which is more powerful than a standard GL ring but also more difficult to control. He picks up a couple of fellow passengers, an alien prince whose world has died when it turned to stone, and one of the gang of crooks that kidnapped the prince, and the three have a fun if conflicted relationship. The main plotline of the issues collected in this book are the mystery of the planets turning to stone, with the disappearance of the Corps and the rise of other "law enforcement" groups as developing storylines. Relic plays a part in several issues, and so does Black Hand.

So it barely feels like a Green Lantern comic, or at least not the one that I had been reading prior to this. That said, it's a pretty good series of stories and Hal's new status quo and the regular characters make a pretty good read. It's a temporary return to where there was only one Green Lantern in the universe, even if Hal is technically not a Green Lantern in this book. Some of the other DCYou reinventions weren't so good, but I thought this one worked about as well as it could have. I preferred Venditti's Rebirth-era Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps to his New 52 Green Lantern, but there's some good material to be found here. It's not Geoff Johns, but then who would be? It's still a solid, very enjoyable take on Green Lantern, and I'm glad to have found a copy of this volume.

 

Green Lantern: Kyle Rayner Rising Compendium - 7.5/10

Written primarily by Ron Marz and drawn by Darryl Banks, with other artists on the crossover issues and fill in issues. This book collects Green Lantern #0, #48-65; R.E.B.E.L.S. ’94 #1; New Titans #116-117, #124-125; Guy Gardner: Warrior #27-28; Darkstars #34; and Damage #16.

- We get Emerald Twilight to open the book, since that's necessary context for why Kyle gets the ring and is the only Green Lantern. The reader is introduced to Kyle Rayner, struggling graphic designer, and his girlfriend Alex, a photographer. Kyle is a bit of an adolescent still, as far as his behavior goes, which led Alex to break up with him, but getting the power ring spurs him to aim higher and attempt to be a genuine hero. The early issues throw a no-name starter villain at him, then in a follow up from Reign of the Supermen, he has to fight Mongul.
- Some of the dialogue works, some of it is pretty bad, and of course there are some digs at Hal, or at least the stereotype of Hal they were pushing at the time that he was old school and unimaginative (Kyle: "Think I should make a giant green boxing glove?" Alex: "No, definitely not.").
-I think killing her off to give Kyle some angst is rightly remembered as a poor decision. She's strangled to death by Major Force in full view, right on panel. It's surprisingly disturbing to see, and could have been handled better. I don't know that I really object to killing the character off to send Kyle off in a different direction, but the way it was done was bad. If nothing else, it does prove that secret identities exist for a reason: the group that sent Major Force after Green Lantern was only able to do so because while they didn't know who he was, they knew he was constantly seen with Alex, so that's who was targeted.
- The book skips the last two pages of issue 55, where Superman and Metron recruit Kyle for Zero Hour, which was going on at this point. I'm not sure why.
- Alan Scott makes his first appearance in the series, back when he had been made young again, and there's a great four page spread by a different artist showing the history of the corps and a summary of Emerald Twilight as Alan fills Kyle in on some of the ring's history.
- None of the Zero Hour issues are included, which is fine, but the book jumps from Kyle resolving to do well in memory of Alex to fighting Hal/Parallax in the zero issue as they arrive on Oa. It's the first time the two of them meet, and since this is before the Parallax fear entity retcon that Geoff Johns introduced, Parallax is just Hal having lost his mind and determined to use his power to make everything right again. There are some more digs at readers who want Hal to be GL, and Kyle does one of the stupidest things he could: he destroys Oa to prevent Hal from being able to recharge his power again, without ever considering that there might be people living there. He even thinks to himself later on in a Legion 94 crossover issue that he'd better not let them know he blew up the planet. I think they later retconned it in that the Mosaic world had been evacuated before this issue, but Kyle didn't know that. This is easily the stupidest thing Kyle has ever done, at least in this volume.
- So Kyle's lost in space and has some adventures with a former GL who ends up committing suicide because she no longer has a working power ring, after she steals Kyle's but finds that it doesn't work for her. Crossovers with other books are included here, so Kyle meets Legion 94 and then returns to Earth, where he leaves LA and moves to New York and gets involved in an adventure with the Titans when he's mentally controlled by Psimon.
- After his adventures out in space, Kyle gets back to Earth and moves to New York, where he moves into his new apartment. He gets attacked and mind-controlled by Psimon, a telepathic villain, out for revenge on the Titans. While I'm glad the crossover issues with other books are included since the story continues there, the art isn't as good as Darryl Banks, and the characters making up the Titans aren't that interesting at this point. Definitely the second or third stringers, apart from Roy Harper and Donna Troy. Terra, Impulse, Damage, and a couple of characters I'm not familiar with at all make up the team. Kyle ends up joining them at the end of the story.
- One thing I appreciate about this book is that it's definitely not written for the trade. We don't have six issue decompressed storytelling. It's a bunch of done in one or two issue adventures, which is how I prefer comic book storytelling most of the time. There are a lot of crossovers (read cross promotion) with other books though, which had to have been a pain for readers at the time trying to keep up with everything.
- Kyle and Donna start a romance. Feels like she's on the rebound though, she's going through a divorce (and I vaguely remember that she was married and had a young son from reading the New Titans in the late 80s), so Kyle is a nice guy with a listening ear and her teammate on the Titans, so things happen in a way that should surprise no one. I seem to remember that one of the complaints about this series at the time was that though Kyle was supposed to be a Peter Parker-like hard luck hero, he kept ending up with these beautiful women in a way that was not in keeping with his usual status. Of course, that happened to Peter as well!
- There's a three part crossover with Guy Gardner: Warrior, "Capital Punishment" where Kyle encounters Major Force again and helps Guy survive an encounter with his brother Mace. This is during Guy's "Vuldarian" shape shifting phase, which was just a strange direction to take the character. That's what happens when editorial decrees only one Green Lantern, and all the peripheral GL characters have to have a reason to exist. I remember for a while there, Guy was wearing Sinestro's yellow ring, but Parallax destroyed that right before Zero Hour.
- Kyle though Hal Jordan was dead, but of course he isn't, and he turns up right after Ganthet, who had come to take the ring back from Kyle. I had quit buying the book at the time, but I picked up the two issues of Parallax View, which is two issues of Hal ranting about how he's supposed to be Green Lantern, and how he wants his ring and his life as Green Lantern back, and he has to fight all his friends again. In the end he realizes he can't go back and gives up the ring to Kyle. Ganthet merges with Hal, and I don't think that plot point was ever resolved as to why he did that. The other characters shill for the new guy as Hal sits alone on an alien planet and indulges in a fantasy where he's still Green Lantern. I can see why the writers of Final Night wanted to perform a mercy killing on Hal, just to stop the abuse of the character.
- The compendium ends with a five part crossover between the New Titans, Green Lantern, and Damage where they travel to an alien planet and participate in a war against an alien race that consumes everything in it's path. It ought to be a big, epic, space opera, but it's hobbled by inconsistent art and probably too many characters to adequately give all of them something to do. But I had never read any of it, so it was at least something new.

So, good hefty collection of early Kyle Rayner. I had read about half the issues collected in this book from browsing the back issue bins, but I appreciate a collection that's easy to read and which includes all the crossover issues from other series. Some of the art in those other books just lacks any appeal, at least for me. I can see why most of them didn't last very long. Kyle's not a bad character though, and he definitely grows into the role, though you can tell that all the writers were pushing him by the way the other superheroes talk him up. They never seem all that eager to track down and help their old friend Hal either, they just fight him when he turns up and then forget about him.

 

Ollie's is where I've been able to find some New 52 Justice League TPBs for cheap. For GL, I've been buying Kindle versions and I'm currently on Vol. 4 so I didn't read all your posts to avoid spoilers. Aside from general knowledge, a lot of DC stuff is new to me. Thus, as old as these stories are now, I am only reading up on New 52 recently. I was always more a Marvel guy but comics buying was uncommon for me growing up because there was no way I was consistent with picking up monthly issues at that age.

 

I quit reading just about all DC series during the New 52, but I stuck with Green Lantern. I still found it enjoyable, so hopefully you will too. I picked up a lot of my collected editions cheap at Ollie's even though I had the monthlies. It's hard to turn down a hardcover for $4 or $5.