When Geoff Johns unveiled his new "seven different Lanterns" cosmology for the "Green Lantern" corner of the DC Universe, I remember several friends instantly piping up with, "How does the Predator fit into this?" One trip to Wikipedia later and I found out all about the strange male form connected to Carol Ferris. Well, we're now seeing how Johns is able to connect the Predator to the rest of the Star Sapphires and the end result? A little odd, but it almost works.

It helps that Johns doesn't devote the entire issue to just the Predator; "Green Lantern" #57 also has Hector Hammond, Larfleeze, Carol Ferris, and (of course) Hal Jordan running around. And what better place to have large glowing neon shapes and oversized heads than Las Vegas, right? It's a fitting setting for a story about obsession and love and the lack thereof.

As for the story itself, it's all right but slightly rough around the edges. There's a point where a character practically turns to the reader and says, "Aha! Everything we knew about this was wrong, and now I will give you the new origin!" It's not quite that blatant, but in order to make everything fit into place there's a bit of brute force being employed to cram that oval into the round hole. It gets there in the end, but you can see Johns sweat a little bit to do so, and it's something he normally handles effortlessly.

On the other hand, Doug Mahnke's pencils continue to knock this title out of the park. The true form of the Predator looks so amazingly creepy that I actually got a little shiver whenever it showed up, and Mahnke understands how to draw larger than life fight scenes, and that's exactly what an issue of "Green Lantern" should contain. The multiple inkers on the book provide a mostly consistent look too, no small feat.

The part of the new "Green Lantern" I liked the most? Some of the emotional beats between Carol and Hal. It's been an on-again, off-again relationship for ages, but Johns is fleshing out their past, present, and future here in a satisfying way. I'm definitely interested in that more than I am about the bad guy hunting down the emotional entities. At the end of the day, this is a fun issue, but I think the parts I'm going to remember are the quieter moments of storytelling.