Green Lantern: The Silver Age Omnibus Vol. 1 (Green Lantern: The Silver Age Omnibus, 1)

Amazing quality, price and fast shipping!

Super fast service with this seller!Book was packed with extra caution to protect it.I more than highly recommend this seller.

I wanted to read about Hal Jordan, and now, I'm so interested that I can't stop. What will happen between him and Carol Ferris, the woman he likes? Carol is so beautiful! Today, I finished the book, and I'm reading it again.

Love it! Like it’s take me back to basic to get know Hal Jordan history. Worth it.

Came in great condition

This book is beautiful, binding is great and I'm really hoping for volume #2 and #3

Five stars for some old DC superhero comics? Fair point. Anyone coming cold to this book (which collates the first 38 comics featuring Hal Jordan, the only Green Lantern who matters, and which ranges from Showcase #22 in 1959 to GL#35 in 1965) might be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about. The stories and art are not only sedate by contemporary standards, they're sedate by the standards of the Marvel comics which started to appear a little later, in 1961.That said, they are of considerable historical importance. Without the initial commercial success of these comics, and the contemporaneous Flash comics now appearing in matching Omnibii, there's no Justice League, without which there's no Fantastic Four, and thus no Marvel Comics as we know them. And without that, our modern cultural landscape would be very different, and not just in the obvious presence/absence of huge superhero movies. The comics in this book helped shape our world, in a small but significant way, and are due considerable respect for that alone.But does that make them worth reading? No, not in itself. But if and when you take the time and effort to adjust to the placid style of storytelling, they're actually very charming, if very much of their times, and offer a hugely engaging mix of pulp SF and standard superheroic adventure that gets better the more you persevere with it. The five stars are justified, but readers who aren't used to comics of this vintage might need to put a little work in to appreciate this.Writer John Broome, who is responsible for most of the stories here, deserves a lot of credit for the quality of these stories. For a start, he offers the best characterisation of any DC writer of the era. Now that's a bit like being the least racist member of the EDL, but there's rather more to it than that. His work is full of witty touches, such as the villains Sonar (whose main motivation for being a nogoodnik is to put his tiny, obscure Balkan homeland onto the front pages of the papers) and Black Hand, so fond of cliches even by supervillain standards that other characters mock him for it. Broome's plots are pacy and inventive, and not as reliant on silly gimmicks as most DC comics of this vintage. Even when openly daft stories appear, they have a certain wry knowingness about them. There's rather more continuity than you'd expect. No kid sidekicks. And, amazingly for the era, a major, ongoing supporting character has non-white ethnicity and is shown as intelligent, resourceful and generally - with the exception of a genuinely egregious nickname - treated with respect. Broome almost pioneers decompressed storytelling, as it takes a long time for the full details of exactly what it means to be a Green Lantern to emerge. And when the true scope of the Green Lantern Corps becomes apparent, we're clearly present at the birth of the first sustained and serious attempt at a cosmic superhero comic, a seam which (I'm coming on a bit Black Hand here) would be seriously mined for decades thereafter (note: some of the later stories are written by Gardner Fox. They're inventive, and fun, but don't have Broome's wit or sense of overall series direction).And then there's artist Gil Kane, responsible for virtually all the visuals here. Kane had been in the comics industry since his early teens, but unlike his contemporaries (Kubert, Toth and Infantino) didn't arrive at his mature style till around about the time he turned 40, in 1966. So much of what we associate Kane with - the dynamic action, the unusual perspectives, the heroic anatomy, and of course the legendary up-the-nose shots - is (Black Hand strikes again) conspicuous by its absence. However, it's apparent that even in these formative years Kane was a superb artist. His draftsmanship, anatomy and design skills are faultless and his visual storytelling is absolutely outstanding. Each panel is a model of narrative clarity and impact. The overall page design leads the eye from panel to panel with consummate skill. He uses negative space with great flair. Establishing shots are completely assured. And, the hallmark of truly great comics storytelling, you don't even notice any of this stuff until you make a point of looking for it, it just immerses you in the story. It's clean, modern, spacious and uncluttered and in emphatic contrast to the standard DC art of the era, when Batman's artists were forced to imitate the near-incompetence of Bob Kane and even fine craftsmen like Curt Swan, Jim Mooney and Kurt Schaffenberger, on the Superman titles, struggled to show their skill beneath the weight of rigid layouts and mountains of text. Reading these GL stories you realise that the later, more stylised Kane couldn't have become the truly great artist he was had he not mastered so many of the less obvious but vitally important aspects of his craft in the years captured here. It may have taken Kane years to find his mojo, but those years weren't wasted. Indeed, without the work put in during those years, said mojo might have remained resolutely unfound. He's starting to find it towards the end of the book, where the art becomes more dynamic and inventive, and starts to look more and more like his mature style: through the course of this volume, you can watch him transform from a brilliant Dan Barry imitator to a brilliant and totally individual Gil Kane.So, why should you be interested in this book? Take your pick from historical import, a chance to appreciate an unduly neglected writer, the brilliance of an artist who was brilliant even before he became Brilliant, and some just plain fun stories. That's quite enough to be getting on with.

Superb book and really first rate artwork and reproduction. I would totally recommend this book if you like DC Silver age stories. Gil Kane's art and the superb inking is a true pleasure to look at. The stories are pretty decent as well, though with the usual 60s daftness (that would be hard to match nowadays with the grim storylines). It is a 1000 pages and quite a few tales from Showcase and Green Lantern. Only issue as with all the Omnibus editions is the lack of articles and extras. Can't wait to get the volume 2

I bought this for my BF for his birthday as it was on his Amazon wish list. He's a collector so I'm not sure he's ever going to get around to removing the shrink wrap haha! He was very pleased to receive it and I'm sure it's a great quality volume.