In "Reason to be Excited," I spotlight things from modern comics that I think are worth getting excited about. I mean stuff more specific than "this comic is good," ya know? More like a specific bit from a writer or artist that impressed me.

Today, we look at Mark Russell's recent clever solution to a seemingly unsolvable problem in the Sinestro: Year of the Villain one-shot from a couple of months ago (artwork by Yildiray Cinar, Julio Ferreira and HiFi!).

Russell, of course, should be well known to everyone as the guy who took the Hanna Barbera characters and did incredibly well-written, otu of the box approaches to them, while dealing with interesting political concepts.

Criticizing the way that faith-based initiatives judge people's personal behavior in a clever parody in the Flintstones where Fred and Wilma are shunned for being monogamists...

An insightful look at Vietnam War protesters in Green Lantern/Huckleberry Hound...

and perhaps his masterpiece, the secret origin of Snagglepuss...

So by this point, if you're picking up a Mark Russell comic book, you're hoping for some out of the box thinking and this comic book certainly had that.

The concept of the book is that these seemingly impossible to defeat beings known as the Paragons were cutting a path through the universe, headed towards Earth. Lex Luthor (now the leader of all supervillains, basically, through some interesting stuff going on in the general Year of the Villain storyline by Scott Snyder) assigns Sinestro to stop these beings and Sinestro, being a cocky jerk, figures he'll do so easily, but, well, he is surprised to find that he can't do it...

This is when Sinestro discovers the key to the Paragon's invulnerability. They have a whole race of beings living within them known as the Microns. The Microns dedicate their entire existence of 0.8 seconds to rebuilding any damage done to their masters...

Sinestro then uses his ring to create a duplicate of himself that can travel into the Paragons and (through some slowing down of time) communicate with the Microns. He tries to reason with them that their "god" is a terrible being...

But it is to no avail. How can you really convince someone that the only thing that they have ever done in their lives is wrong?

Eventually, Sinestro comes up with a solution and the Paragons know pain for the first time as Sinestro tears them apart, with the Microns no longer healing them.

But WHY? As it turned out, because Sinestro gave them an extra 0.2 seconds of life and once they expanded their timespans so dramatically, they had a cultural revolution....

In a dark twist, though, Sinestro reveals that he kept one Paragon alive as a prisoner/servant and he did so by simply using the cultural revolution to turn generations against each other...

That's twisted, but brilliant.

Okay, this feature is a bit less of a reader-interactive one, as I'm just spotlight stuff in modern comics that specifically impressed ME, but heck, if you'd like to send in some suggestions anyways, maybe you and I have the same taste! It's certainly not improbably that something you found cool would be something that I found cool, too, so feel free to send ideas to me at brianc@cbr.com!