In his final issue, Johns all but acknowledges that fact. Green Lantern 20 is a real-time act of revisionist history, with Johns celebrating the defining features of his run by literally bringing almost all of them back for an encore. The first thing we see is a future keeper of the Book of Oa using five pages to recap Rebirth, The Sinestro Corps War, the War of Light, and Blackest Night as more or less the complete story of Hal Jordan's time as a Green Lantern. There is no mention of War of the Green Lanterns or The Rise of the Third Army, which is appropriate, since those things never existed and I never wasted real currency on them.
The rest of the issue proceeds around a flimsy, insignificant plot device--there's an all-powerful threat! he's really bad!--to get the band back together. The Green Lanterns attack. The Red Lanterns spit fire. Kyle Rayner shows up with the rest of the Care Bear Crew, because God forbid Kyle Rayner ever get to do anything that isn't incredibly stupid and pointless. Our old friend Parallax shows up. Hal Jordan brings back the Black Lanterns and Nekron (no, really), saves the day, and gets rebirthed again. It's best you don't ask about that last thing.
But let's go back to those first five pages. Those who accuse Geoff Johns of being obsessed with the past are laughing their asses off and/or breaking things right now, but, like, I'm not sure that summary is entirely incorrect. My impression is that with the exception of a couple amazing Alan Moore one offs and Emerald Twilight, there weren't any classic Green Lantern stories prior to Johns's run. Whatever its faults, Johns's run did expand the GL universe and expand the possibilities open to future writers.
Especially with Sinestro. When I read old GL comics, Sinestro is a fairly generic creepy, slimy villain type with no identity. If Johns' run has one unequivocal triumph, it's that he gave Sinestro depth. Johns took a simple concept--if green rings require overcoming fear, yellow rings require its mastery--and used it to inform every aspect of Sinestro's character and history. In Johns's world, Sinestro's evil came from a desire to use fear to provide the universe order and stability (Sinestro as neocon?). Johns let this motivation make Sinestro seem alternately nobly misguided and insane. He took the old notion of Sinestro as tragic hero undone by his need to preserve order to heights never before imagined. Johns got Sinestro and used him to drive his entire run. When future writers approach Green Lantern, they'll have a villain worthy of a Justice Leaguer to play with.
Finally, Green Lantern 20 reminds us that most of Johns's run was big, dumb fun, but it was fun. Parts of Johns's multicolored Lantern saga (Sinestro Corps War) were better written than others (Blackest Night), but the stakes were always high and the action was always beautifully drawn. All comics writers rely on their artists, but one wonders how we'd look at Johns's GL run if he had had to work with average artists instead of geniuses like Ethan Van Sciver, Ivan Reis, and Doug Mahnke. To Johns's credit, he put those guys in situations where they could draw huge space action scenes in primary colors, and they knocked it out of the park. If a reader could buy into the story just enough to care, Green Lantern delivered the best action on the shelves.
I'll always owe Geoff Johns a debt, because his Green Lantern was the first book that got me going to the comics shop weekly. Since then, I've encountered scores of better books and better sagas, but Johns's GL was the gateway drug. Judging by the sales numbers, other people felt the same way I did. No one should mistake Johns's run with art, but he delivered the cheap, pulpy, grade B thrills comics used to be known for by the truckload.
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